Avatar of Victory
by James Golen
Summary: The Cycle of the Avatar has held for thousands of years. Other Cycles can stretch far, far longer. An A:tLA/Mass Effect Cross-Over
1. The Beacon

**Apparently I'm some sort of literary masochist, since I'm now working on two massive fic-projects at once. **

**Why am I doing this? Because like peanut butter and chocolate, I want to see what happens when instead of our world, Mass Effect happens in the future of the Earth of Avatar: the Last Airbender. Hilarious. Now, I don't have much to say but what will be said in the fic itself at this point. Any questions are better answered in the Spacebattles thread. One caveat: You should probably know if you've read my previous Avatar works, I'm using the world I've expanded for Three Families instead of just the canon Avatar'verse, however I don't use its history. If I had the creator's intense knowledge of the setting, I wouldn't need to. Ah, but if I could...**

**Now enjoy the insane ramblings of my deranged cross-over psyche!**

* * *

It was a darkness as pristine as the edge of the galaxy, and as littered with stars.

It was many, and the many were one. Even as it watched the trillion stars which made up its mind moving steadily and slowly through the abyss which made up its mind, it was those stars, every single one of them. A trillion points of light. The many, ascended to oneness, to wholeness. It remembered the Nazara, the proud, bellicose conquerors of the galaxy. It was the Nazara, all of them. But the very center of that galaxy sat the center of its soul. And that soul was troubled.

The Resplendent Sovereign of Nazara turned its attention inward, to the tiny thing which moved through its veins. It was a god, turning attention to a bacterium upon its perfect form. But it was an important bacterium. The process continued apace. Soon, the tool would be perfected.

It turned its attention outward once more, to the center, as far from its ilk as one could be. He could hear their quiet drone, songs like oily shadows. They spoke now with one voice, but were not whole. They had not ascended. They could not. A part was missing. So they continued to use the one who remained. And Nazara turned its attention back to the stars which was its soul.

There came a song, stronger than any Nazara had ever sang. With it, it felt the trillion lights being pushed away, as something stronger entered its mind, speaking the way only the ascended, only the perfected could speak. It was great. It was powerful and ancient beyond all reckoning, even to something as intelligent as Nazara. But unlike any whom Nazara had ever encountered, in the great and innumerable host which even now slept in the blackness at the galaxy's edge, this one was not a single composed of the many. It was not a peoples turned into one Avatar.

The Divine Harbinger of Ascension was _one_. It had always _been_ one. It would always _be_ one.

NAZARA.

It turned its attention to the sole being in the cosmos which was its greater.

"It has been long since you contacted us, Harbinger. Very long."

WHAT NEWS FROM THE THRALLS?

It looked upon the Core once again, to that den of exploding stars and black holes. "They labor still. The Avatar of Vengeance has not appeared. Our work cannot end. Breeding continues."

THE CYCLE MUST CONTINUE. EITHER THE AVATAR OF VENGEANCE WILL BE DISCOVERED, OR HIS DEATH WILL COME, AND ANOTHER WILL BE BORN. THE FAILURE OF LEVIATHAN MUST BE RECTIFIED. FIND THE AVATAR, AND END THE CYCLE, SO WE CAN FULFILL OUR DESTINY.

"There has been a complication," Nazara pointed out. The unthinkable greatness of Harbinger turned upon it, its eight eyes burning gold as it glared down at the cuttle-fish like form of Nazara, to a layman identical, but of a whole other form of life. "The cycle continues without our input."

IMPOSSIBLE.

"They have created synthetic life. The Cycle has ripened. My attempts to curtail biologically them have not been successful. Leviathan only has a token force, but he is undependable. Synthetic life will destroy organic life. The time has come."

There was a long silence.

YOU ARE TO ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL OF THIS PROCESS. THE ACTIVATION SIGNAL HAS NOT FIRED. OUR BRETHREN YET SLEEP.

"The organics have sabotaged the signal. I have taken steps to rectify this. I will awaken our brothers and sisters."

Another silence, as Nazara felt the impressive weight of Harbinger staring down upon it.

YOU ASSUME MUCH. IF THE CYCLE CONTINUES, THEN ANOTHER AVATAR HAS ARISEN. WE MUST FIND ANOTHER WAY. DO NOT FAIL, RESPLENDANT SOVEREIGN. OR I WILL BE FORCED TO ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL.

And with that, the greatness and power of Harbinger ascended away, returning the heavens to Nazara's mind. And Nazara turned its gaze inward, and listened to that bacterium inside its body.

And it listened to [DESIGNATION TURIAN] say: "...then it can only be on Eden Prime. Sovereign will be quite pleased, if it does truly lead us to the Conduit."

And it was.

* * *

The communication flickered for a moment, as the dark complected man stared down through the gaps in the deck which overlooked the hold. The hold was, at the moment, the training ground for one human in particular.

"Well, what about Shepard?" Udina asked on the other end of the line. Hundreds of light years of distance vanished into a communications delay of roughly a twentieth of a second, as a man on a ship speeding away from the Earth spoke to two others, at each of Arcturus Station and the Citadel. "She grew up in the colonies."

The only one physically present nodded. "She knows how tough things can be out there. Her family was killed when the Batarians attacked Mindoir."

The other who was not present gave a grunt. "She got most of her unit slaughtered on Torfan," he pointed out. "Only she and Nilsdottir got out alive."

He turned to their shadowy, transluscent projections and shook his head. "She gets the job done, no matter what the cost," he answered the charge. Udina, though, crossed his arms a quarter of a galaxy away.

"Is that the kind of person we want protecting the galaxy, Anderson?" Udina asked.

Anderson sighed. "That's the only kind of person who _can_ protect the galaxy."

"And you're both forgetting the most important part of this," Hackett, the third member of this trans-galactic multi-call pointed out. And as he spoke, the woman below started to move.

First, one of the marines rushed at her, swinging an electrified prod at her. Anderson winced at that. He'd told her time and time again to stop with that sort of 'live-fire' training, but Shepard put her foot down, and despite the vertical difference in rank between them, there were more people willing to listen to her than to him. The marine swung with precision and verve, but Shepard flowed around the blows like a leaf on the wind, before heaving out and twisting the air in the hold into a knot, which she used to blast the marine away.

"Air," Hackett said stoically. Then, two more approached, and she tore water from the juice-bottle hanging from the N7 Sentinel's belt and hurled it behind her, snap-freezing it into a block of ice which caused the marine to stumble and claw at her face. The other was put onto the floor after a dodge and a boot to the center of the chest. "Water," Hackett continued. The next was Jenkins, a burly recruit fresh out of the burroughs of Omashu. He heaved mightily, training disks of concrete flashing forward to his command. But the woman rooted her feet, and thrust her fists forward. The concrete exploded away from her fists. She then slammed her hands together, compacting the dust into a smaller disk, and with a flick of her hands sent that to knock Jenkins against the far wall. "...Earth," Hackett narrated.

"And fire," Anderson finished, as the woman in question swept her foot around behind her, creating an arc of flame which caused all of the advancing marines to back off from her. "It's the worst kept secret in the galaxy that we've got the Avatar on board. I just wish there were a better way to do this."

"There is no other way," Nihlus said coldly from near the door, where he'd remained silently since the call had begun. Anderson grit his teeth at the turian's dismissal of what was without a doubt the most important human being alive today. "And I don't like what I see. She's reckless and destructive. I'm taking a risk vouching for her if this is the kind of behavior she'll be showing as a candidate for the Spectres."

"I've made my call," Anderson stressed. "If anybody is going to represent the human race to the galaxy, then it _must be_ the Avatar. Too much is at stake for anybody less."

Nihlus shrugged. "You're historical fascination with your 'Avatars' borders on the sensational. You can't breed heroes. You can only craft them, one battle at a time. Until I see something I like, I'm going to assume that this human is just like any other. You won't get any of your nepotism here. Is that clear, Captain Anderson?"

"Crystal," Anderson said.

"I have duties that need my attention," Udina said sourly, but then again, there was much sour about that man. His image blipped off, leaving only Hackett remaining.

"Push her as hard as you dare," Hackett advised. "There's a lot more riding on this than Udina knows. Hackett, out."

"Acknowledged," Anderson said, and Hackett too vanished from sight, leaving only the captain, the turian, and a clear line-of-sight to the Avatar. Anderson shook his head and thumbed the intercom. "Shepard, report to the upper deck."

Shepard glanced toward the speaker which overlooked the hold, then gave what was likely a chuckle, before turning and leaving behind a pile of singed, groaning marines in her wake. Nihlus followed Anderson as they moved out of Anderson's quarters, and past the mess. "She's a loose cannon. We have enough problems with her like in the Spectres already."

"She knows how to do her job," Anderson stressed.

"She's a human. I don't know if you're aware of your reputation, Captain Anderson, but humans aren't exactly viewed well. I'm not at liberty to discuss in detail, but the salarians are about a twitch away from declaring war on your kind, and you've already been at war with both the batarians and the turians in the fraction of a century you've been out here. That's a bad track record; even the krogan weren't that... bellicose."

"This is about the krogan below decks, isn't it?" Anderson asked as they started up the stairs.

Nihlus shrugged. "Most Council races see you as too close to them. Which frankly boggles my mind how you even managed to become friendly with them at all. They're the krogan, after all."

"He is a valued member of this crew and a guest of my homeworld," Anderson said. "Remember that."

Nihlus shook his head, mandibles twitching. "I'm not picking at wounds, Captain, just pointing them out. I'm going see to the relay jump, Captain. You should prepare for the briefing."

"Then perhaps we should be talking about the wounds which bear noticing," Anderson finished, ignoring the slight he'd received. Officially, Spectres had no clout over him, as an Alliance captain. He had no place ordering Anderson to do anything. But then again, this was politics, and as far from Anderson's preferred battleground as one could be. He opened the door, made an immediate turn, and passed into the FTL comms room. To noone, he finished: "Wounds like Torfan."

* * *

In the year P.M. 3548, human explorers on the planet Big Demon discovered the remains of an ancient space-faring civilization. In the decades that followed, these mysterious artifacts revealed startling new technologies, enabling travel to the farthest stars. The technology represented the greatest leap in human advancement since the beginning of the Avatar Cycle.

It was heralded as one of the turning points of human history.

To the denizens of the galaxy, it was the Mass Effect.

* * *

**Book One: Sovereign**

**Chapter 1: The Beacon**

* * *

It was amazing how quickly cultural divides broke down, once people stopped trying for a century to kill each other. It was once considered a wholly Water Tribe trait to have blue eyes, doubly so since nobody else on Earth seemed to get them. Dark skin was the realm of Tribesmen and the Si Wongi desert dwellers. Pale skin, on the other hand, belonged to those descended from the Fire Nations of the West. There was a time, only a few centuries ago, that at first glance, you could tell where somebody was from, what language they probably spoke, what element they bent, and most importantly, whether they were going to try to kill you or not.

Those cultural divides were a long time dying. But it reached the point where racial traits could mix and match to startling degrees. Take, for example, the woman standing at the fore of the sweeping, avian ship which shot through the void of space at the outskirts of the solar system. Her hair was a rich, coppery red, a trait once confined to Great Whales, a minor nation remarkable for one of the more self-destructive religions and little else. Her skin was a Fire Nation pale, her eyes the bright green of any age-old citizen of Ba Sing Se. She was hardly the only human with such a melange of characteristics. She was just the only one standing in the cockpit at the moment. The other two humans were both Fire Nationals, dark haired and bright eyed. And there was one other, but nobody felt like talking about him at the moment.

"The board is green, beginning approach run," the pilot said plainly, his hands flashing along holographic controls with a precision few could match. As those assembled watched, the great, impressive bulk of the Mass Relay loomed closer. Its gate spun with that unpredictable rhythm – itself a contradiction in terms mostly because the person thinking it didn't know the insanely complicated math the Mass Relays ran on – its pace picking up just a touch as the ship moved parallel to the device. "Hitting the Relay in four, three, two..."

Blue light reached out from the Relay, bathing the hull of the ship, an negative electric current flowing through so much Element Zero that the ship's mass didn't simply reduce, but vanished entirely into some hypothetical negative value, and the relatively small amount of thrust already propelling the ship now catapulted it to many times the speed of light in a vacuum. And right about there, her knowledge of how the Mass Relay ended, so she looked at the 'pretty colors' that filled the cockpit as they bolted across the galaxy in a matter of seconds.

Shepard was tense, rolling her shoulders in her armor. Well, strictly speaking, this wasn't _her_ armor. _Her_ armor was in a box somewhere on Earth, locked away since Torfan. This was just training armor, the likes of which was rightly considered sub-standard by anybody with a working brain inside the Alliance Military. Finally, the colors came to a halt, and with a lurch almost under her ability to feel it, the ship dropped from hyper-FTL to what was still super-luminal speeds, if much, much slower.

"All green, no significant sheering," the pilot glanced aside. "Drift under fifteen hundred K'."

The turian in the room, his plates and mandibles darkly contrasted by the white paint applied over them, clucked his tongue. With a dismissive tone, he shrugged, and said "Fifteen hundred is good. Your captain would be pleased."

She gave a glance at him as he turned and returned down the body of the ship. The pilot shook his head, scratching at his beard for a moment. "I hate that guy," he said. Alenko, sitting in the co-pilot's seat, turned and gave his counterpart a querulous look.

"Nihlus gave you a compliment, and you hate him?" he asked.

The pilot rolled his eyes, though. "You remember to zip up your jumpsuit after taking a leak? That's good. I just jumped this ship halfway across the galaxy and landed on a target the size of a pin-head. That's _incredible_. 'Sides, having a Spectre on board is just asking for trouble. Call me paranoid."

"You're paranoid, Joker," Alenko said. "The Council helped fund the creation of this ship. They've got every right to have oversight."

"But a Council Spectre?" Shepard asked. "That isn't oversight; that's overkill."

"My thoughts exactly," Joker, as the pilot of the ship tended to be known, agreed. "It's never a good idea to believe the 'official story', especially when aliens are involved."

"And what about Adeks?" Alenko pressed.

"He's krogan. He doesn't count."

The intercom chirped to life again, causing all to look up to the speaker, which was more a matter that they were all trained from childhood to do something similar; since they all had subaudible transmitters installed for communication as part of Alliance Marine orientation, they would hear clear as day no matter where they were on the ship. "Joker, status report!" Anderson's voice came through clear and authoritative. Joker sighed, and flicked a few more controls, causing the light to become what most would consider 'normal'.

"We've cleared the Relay and transited in-system. Stealth systems are engaged and operational. Everything's green as the Earth King's pyjamas."

"Good. Hook us into the communications buoy and get a status report from Eden Prime. And send Shepard into the comms room; she's due a proper briefing."

"Aye aye, Captain," Joker said. He turned back to her. "You heard the man in charge. Best get walking."

"I'll go when I'm ready," Shepard said.

"'Ready' better come quickly, Commander," Alenko suggested. "Much as the Captain is known for his... sunny disposition... I'm pretty sure Nihlus wasn't named that by accident."

"Yeah, somebody with his people skills should have a name like Nihlus. Or Doommouth, the Insulter!" Joker offered. He shook his head. "We go out into space and they all have weird names. And they don't even want our women. I feel mildly insulted by that."

"Speak for yourself," Shepard said, turning back and walking down the long path which connected the helm to the CIC of the SSV Normandy. She hadn't made it far before that turian was at her side again. She shot him a glance. "Hiding in the airlock? Trying to ambush me before my briefing?"

"Do you always speak so brashly to honored guests of your military, or is it because I'm an alien?" Nihlus asked, and she did not appreciate his tone.

"I've got no problem with aliens. Just the ones who try to kill us all."

"Holding a grudge for a war which happened the year you were born? How human of you," Nihlus said.

"That war was the _reason_ I was born," Shepard said bitingly. "What do you want?"

"I wanted to hear about this world we're going to. Eden Prime, right?"

She paused, standing near the great map which displayed the Milky Way, and the Relay Network which made traversing it feasible. "I hear it's something of a paradise," Shepard said. "I wouldn't know. I've never been there."

"I hear it's quite beautiful. Serene. Safe," Nihlus said, staring with those black-rimmed eyes at her. Say what you would about the krogan, but at least you could pretend that they were human when they looked at you the right way. No such luck with the turians. "It's become something of a symbol for your people. Proof that you can not only expand into the galaxy, but protect yourself as well. But how safe is it, Really?"

"Is that a threat?" Shepard asked.

"The war between our people is over, and our guns are cold. You're the one holding the grudge," Nihlus said with an almost condescending ease. "The galaxy is far older than you are, and it's more dangerous than you can imagine. Do you really think that your kind is ready to exist on this kind of playing field? To contend with these kinds of stakes?"

"We don't have much of a choice in the matter, now do we?" Shepard pointed out, before moving around him. She heard from all the vids that turians were physiologically different from just about every sapient species in the galaxy; what that meant for incidental physical contact was not something she wanted to deal with.

"So you say. There were more than a few in the Hierarchy who thought it might be a good idea to find some way to break the Arcturus Relay, leave you bottled up in your own little pressure cooker," Nihlus said. Almost taunted. "It would have been interesting to see what humanity confined would have done."

"Break free," she answered, pounding the control to the door with perhaps a bit more force than was necessary. "We always do."

"The batarians said that about themselves, too," Nilhus chuckled.

"We are _nothing_ like them," Shepard said.

"Shepard, that's enough!" Anderson's voice cut off Shepard's tirade before it could get started. "You have no right and no place to argue with the Spectre. He is here on Council authority."

"I wasn't aware this was a Council ship, Captain," Shepard said, crossing her arms before her.

Anderson just gave her a warning look. The look which told her that he was running out of patience, and would soon move to more direct action. Avatar or no, Anderson was in command, and she'd best remember that. She grit her teeth, and remained silent. "I think it's time that the Avatar was made aware of this mission's true objective."

"This is not simply a shake-down run," Nihlus said, flicking on the screen, projecting an archeological site somewhere out in the lush hills of Eden Prime.

"We're making a stealth pick-up from the surface. That's why we needed the Normandy. It's the only ship which can move through systems undetected," Anderson said, standing beside the turian. Shepard scowled.

"That's a lot of tech and manpower for a milk-run," Shepard said.

"Perhaps the most important milk-run humanity has had in a century," Anderson corrected. "Five days ago, we received communications at the Citadel of a possible active Prothean artifact. It was quickly decided to bring that device in for study by experts in that technology."

Shepard frowned. "Why not just study it ourselves? It's on _our_ planet, after all."

"Not good enough," Nihlus said. "Withholding Prothean technology is a High Crime in Council Space, even the backwater that you've staked out for yourself."

"Besides, the ruins on Big Demon are so different from Prothean ruins found elsewhere that people are beginning to doubt that they're even Prothean. Our experts can't make heads nor tails of their tech, and their experts can't make heads nor tails of ours. This is big, Shepard. The last time humanity found ruins not just intact, but active, it set us forward two hundred years. If we want to be a part of the next advance, we have to do it together with the Council, or else not at all."

"You're starting to sound like a politician," Nihlus took the words right out of Shepard's mouth. "Frankly, it's not the only reason I'm here. I'm also here to observe you."

"Say again?" Shepard asked.

"I've put forth your name as a prospective Spectre," Nihlus said, causing Shepard to lean away in confusion. "Much as you like to nurse a bruise, not all turians despise humanity. Many of them see the potential of your species. You are rash, arrogant, too independent and unpredictable to a fault, but the same was said about us, once. Besides, you have this 'bending' which you are so proud of. That alone makes you a valuable part of the galactic community."

"But if we want any say in galactic policy we have to earn it," Anderson stressed. "The first way to do that, is to have a human amongst the Spectres."

"Indeed," Nihlus agreed. "I believe that you, the soldier, not the Avatar, have a lot to offer the Spectres. We don't care that you're human. Some of our better agents are krogan, drell, and hanar. All that matters is whether you can get the job done. And I will be the final arbiter of that decision."

"So I'm getting a bone-head for a babysitter?" Shepard asked. Anderson looked increasingly annoyed.

"This will be the first of several missions together," Nihlus said, brushing off her barb. "You'll be part of the team which secures the Prothean Beacon and gets it onto the ship. I will be keeping an eye on you, on your skills and your tactics. From a safe distance, so as not to interfere."

"As long as you don't get in my–" Shepard began, but was cut off as the intercom snapped to life.

"Captain! We've got a problem," Joker's voice was tense and even, which was, as Shepard heard it described, the surest sign that 'shit had gotten real'. "We're picking up a transmission from Eden Prime. You're gonna want to see this."

"Patch it through," Anderson ordered, and the scenic vista of Eden Prime was replaced by... a marine shooting into the sky. The sounds of explosions and screaming assaulted the room, as the camera swung about without purpose or goal. Finally, a dark-skinned woman shoved the bearer of that camera to the dirt.

"Get down you great idiot!" the woman shouted, before turning and firing into the distance. To Shepard's ears, the sound of those impacts wasn't quite right. Like they were shooting squishy metal. Finally, the camera was turned to one in particular, a man wearing the same sort of second-rate armor which Shepard was, for the moment, saddled with.

"We're under heavy fire down here! We need Evac! They're coming from everywhere! We... Agni's blood..."

The man stared at something out of frame, and the camera turned. Something was descending from the clouds.

And it made a noise.

…

"There are too many of them! Their thralls have circumvented the north bulwark! Zha'Til Wraiths are advancing!"

"What shall we do, Avatar?"

"The only thing we can do. Kill them all. Ensure that _someone_ survives until tomorrow."

…

"Shepard, are you alright?" Anderson asked. Shepard noted that she was now leaning against a wall, a hand pressed to her forehead. That was... strange. She shook it off, though. She looked at the screen again.

"Reverse and hold at thirty eight point five," Nihlus said. The feed backed away from the static it had dissolved into, showing something in the sky. Red lightning arcing from finger-like growths. Almost like an unspeakably vast hand was reaching down from the sky.

"What is that, Captain?" Shepard asked.

"We're about to find out, Avatar," Nihlus said. "Get your squad together. I'll head in on my own."

Anderson nodded. Good. Shepard hated when she was stuck riding the bench. At least this way, she could be out there fighting. In that, she and Nilsdottir were two peas in the same pod.

* * *

The squad, as it turned out, was Shepard, the earthbender Jenkins, the biotic Alenko, and of course Nilsdottir. Much as she'd preferred to keep her quota at one biotic, the Captain put his foot down, and thus, Alenko was on the squad. The ship barely slowed down to let them out, dropping to the hillside and rolling down before coming to a halt in a bog. She could see the reasoning; the less time they spent hovering about, the less likely something would shoot at them. Or the hand of an angry god would flick them to death.

"That wasn't my favorite kind of landing," Alenko said, as he flicked off the mud from where it lay over his omnitool, which was otherwise glowing orange against his wrist. He pointed ahead of them. "The dig-site is roughly a click that way."

"Man, it's great to be back," Jenkins said, rolling his shoulders. "I spent a tour in garrison here. This place is amazing."

"Hasn't anybody ever told you? That's how they rope people into this 'colony' bullshit," Nilsdottir opined, her full lips pulled into a smirk. "They sell you with the strange animals and then leave you to wallow in the weird diseases and scale itch, while they make money selling what you pull out of the ground for 'em."

"How remarkably cynical of you," Alenko said flatly.

"That's the way the galaxy works. Every now and then, somebody will be so kind as to not fuck you over. But you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for it," she answered the LT, in her usual, insubordinate manner.

Shepard shook her head, and started to slog through the mud. She'd made it about a hundred meters before something moved in her vision. Less than a hundred meters out. With a punch of her fist, a jet of flame seared forward, striking that target, and causing it to detonate outright upon contact. A second later, she'd pulled the rifle from her back. Then, she actually looked at it and let out a groan. Lancer? Really? Everything based on the Avenger frame was a Ostrich-horse-shit rifle, and anybody who said different was deluded. No range, no accuracy, and Nilsdottir's foul language had more stopping power. "Somebody mind telling me what that was?" Shepard asked.

Jenkins waved in front of her, causing her to lower her terrible rifle. He then walked up to another of the... bloated floating things... and began to scratch at it. It made a weirdly cute peeping sound.

"It's just a Gasbag, Commander," he said. "They're harmless."

"Gasbag? This planet has living farts?" Nilsdottir asked. "Yup. Sounds like a paradise to me."

"It takes all kinds," Alenko agreed.

"Can it and move out," Shepard said. "We're not here to play with the local fauna."

"Of course, Commander," Jenkins said, and then moved back into point.

Alenko gave her a glance. "Something on your mind, LT?" Shepard asked.

"This place. It smells like fires and death," he said.

"Ah, so we've got a poet. Don't mind if I let them shoot you first," Nilsdottir said.

"I was just pointing something out," Alenko said. He glanced at his omnitool and his eyes widened.

"Commander, we've got incoming!"

"What? Batarians? Vorcha? Elcor? What?" Shepard demanded.

"It's... The scans can't pin them. Just that there's something coming our way, and it's got a lot of power coming from it."

"Tank," Jenkins said, and quickly ran forward to the base of the hill. With a stomp, he twisted the landscape into a maze of barricades and tank-falls to stymy any armor which tried to deploy down at them. Alenko, though, shook his head. "This is... I don't think this is armor, Commander."

"Then what is it?" Shepard asked, before stomping the ground and giving herself a barricade to brace against. Alenko dropped beside her, still reading intensely, and tapping furiously.

"I'm getting five signals, but they're all outputting like a GARDIAN," he then looked up. "Wait... Could it be the..."

Her question of 'the what' was cut off when five figures moved out of the trees at the top of the hill. They looked humanoid... at first. But only an idiot would mistake their metal skin for armor. It moved with them too well. It was shot through with pipes and crackled with a reddish light. Their faces were... well, they looked like flashlights, one red eye glaring forward. Shepard hadn't the first clue.

"Geth," Alenko whispered.

"They die like any other," Jenkins said. And then, he popped out of cover, and his lancer sprayed fire at the 'geth', and more tellingly most of their surrounding area. While the bullets did manage to pock at one of them, there were tellingly two types of them. Most of them were sleek, like living shark-wolves. One, standing flashlight and shoulders above the others, was more like a platypus bear, and colored a dark red. It reached out one finger toward Jenkins. And when it did, there was a massive electric discharge.

Jenkins staggered back, and that same electricity bathed Nilsdottir, eliciting a loud and agonized 'FUCK!' from the latter and driving her onto her back. The smaller of the geth scattered, moving in perfect unison, a harsh and unpleasant buzzing hitting the air, as they quickly coopted Jenkins' bending to fire down from.

"Just tin toys," Shepard said. She popped back up, staring down the sights of her shitty rifle. "Toys break."

And with a squeeze, years of practice into motion, a stream of projectiles, each roughly the size of a grain of rice but traveling at many times the speed of sound, tore away from her gun and tore through the crackling kinetic barriers around the automaton, before finally tearing into the flesh, and causing something white and viscous to splatter onto the grass. The machine tipped back, as lifeless in death as it was previous.

She ducked back, and Alenko popped a few shots of his own. "Good shooting, Commander."

"Bending can't solve everything," she pointed out. Alenko just rolled his eyes.

She peeked out of cover, spotting Jenkins pulling Nilsdottir back behind the barricade he'd bent, and finally her swatting him away. "Hands off, I'm alright!"

"Doesn't look very alright to me," Jenkins pointed out, before raising and firing off a new stream of metal toward the big one. It just stood there, its single reddened eye watching as though mildly interested as its barriers effortlessly bounced the bullets away. It reached forward with a three-digited hand again, and there was another zorp sound, culminating in Jenkins' rifle immediately belching emergency coolant, its frame starting to glow orange. He dropped the gun to the ground. "Ow! Damn it! What the hell was that?"

"Jenkins, stay down until we can get to you!" Alenko shouted over the gunfire.

"We'll be fine," Jenkins said. "This wall is a meter thick. Nothing can get through that!"

And then, as though the big one heard him, understood him, and accepted the challenge, it raised its gun. Shepard ducked slightly, thinking it was going to take a pot-shot at her. But it wasn't. She could tell from its 'body language' that it was aiming well forward of her position. In fact, as her eyes widened in alarm, she realized it was aiming straight through the wall Jenkins was hiding behind.

"Jenkins! Bug out!" Shepard roared.

Too late.

It didn't sound like a gunshot. It sounded more like a railgun. And there was a mist of red which splattered along the grasses at Jenkins' feet. He looked down, and saw what Shepard was already seeing.

Clear through him.

"Oh fuck!" Nilsdottir managed to sum everybody's reaction concisely enough. "We got problems, Shepard!"

"Then thin the herd, I'm getting chipped to death over here!" Shepard shouted back. Nilsdottir nodded, then peeked over the barrier which was now seeming woefully inadequate. Luckily, while that supposedly man-portable cannon packed enough punch for a Mako, it had about the same refire rate. A glance to her rifle told that it was mostly cooled down, but if she tried to get a burst off, she'd be cut to shreds.

Nilsdottir cleared that hurdle by just popping one arm and an eye above the earthbent stone, and flicking out a hand. A she did, a ripple in the air swerved in a broad arc across the hill, before slamming into the center of the small cluster of geth, before the chaotic gravity fields of her Singularity began to drag them into orbit around its heart. They didn't have faces to look surprised, but Shepard like to pretend that they were exclaiming 'oh shit' in binary. "Pop 'em!" Shepard shouted.

Nilsdottir didn't nod. She just reached back, and like lobbing a grenade, hurled something forward. This one was light blue and would have smelled of ozone, had Shepard not had her helmet on, its swift form crackling with ionized energy as the intense gravity fields wreaked havoc with local reality. She didn't know much of why certain biotic abilities did different things. All that really mattered to Shepard was that when the Warp hit the Singularity, both ceased to exist, and they did so with a catastrophic and delicious explosion, far in excess of what either alone could have done.

The floating geth were torn to bits, hurled across the surroundings. The big one, on the other hand, was hurled to one knee, its armor pocked and scarred, showing that its kinetic barriers were at last down. Shepard wasted no time. She got out of cover, and started advancing, her finger tight on the trigger, her rifle belching out a torrent of metal shards which she just-barely managed to keep on target. Whoever decided that the Normandy could 'get by' on such crap equipment was going to get an Avatar-level ass-beating. The slugs smashed at armor, but the big one was regaining its footing. And Shepard didn't want that.

"Flash!" Shepard shouted, and the other two made sure they were out of sight, because when Shepard pulled grenades from her pack, she didn't bother checking how many. She just activated a handful of them, hurled them, and hoped.

It brought that cannon up to its 'eye', and there could be no other target but Shepard.

And then the grenades went off, confusing blasts wreathing it like a halo. When the explosions and smoke cleared, there was roughly half a geth, still standing, but missing from what in a human would have been the diaphragm up. Shepard wasn't taking any chances. With a heave, empowered by her small but workable knowledge of airbending, she bounded to the foot of that behemoth, before planting a boot into it's groin, and pushing. The thing tipped onto its back. She answered by pulling her side-arm and firing into the most important looking parts of it until her gun overheated.

"Shepard! Get your ass down!" Nilsdottir shouted.

"Negative contacts, commander," Alenko countered, but calmly. "Shepard, are you alright?"

"What the hell was that thing?" she said, before moving to the ruins of the weapon in question. Not even enough for R&D to sink their teeth into, probably. Then she looked down, to the hole she could now see in the barricade. "Wait, Jenkins!"

She bolted back over the terrain, only remembering roughly half-way down that she could just get the stone out of her way. She hadn't been earthbending long, all things considered. She skidded to a stop at the private's side, her omnitool instantly in hand. "Don't bother," Nilsdottir said.

"It's too late, Commander," Alenko said.

"Just get his medigel flowing. I can fix this," she said.

"What, are you a bloodbender too?" Alenko asked.

"Of course, so..."

"...but I'm guessing not _that much_ of a bloodbender, since that's the only thing which might have saved him, _if_ you'd been at his side thirty seconds ago. I'm sorry, Commander, he's gone."

"...that sucks, Shepard," Nilsdottir said, before trying to stand, letting out another loud profanity, and sinking back to the rocks. Shepard turned her attention to the younger of the two biotics on this squad.

"You're bleeding," Shepard said. It was leaking out through tiny holes in Nilsdottir's armor. "Why didn't you stay down?"

"'Cause I'm not going to let you get all the glory," Nilsdottir said. "I'll be fine. Just give me a second to 'gel up."

"Can you fight?"

"Are you seriously asking me that question, Shepard?" Nilsdottir asked, as though Shepard had just made a bad joke. "That's what I thought. Now help me up or fuck off and let me do it myself."

Alenko glanced between the two women, slightly baffled, and reached past both to close Jenkin's eyes. He was still staring, as shocked and stupified in death as he had been in life. "We should call in somebody to pick him up. He deserves a proper burial."

"That's something we can deal with when there aren't machines trying to kill us," Shepard said, heaving her fellow soldier to her feet. "That armor looks like it's doing more harm than good. Are you good without?"

"Commander?" Alenko asked. "Are you seriously asking her to drop armor in the middle of a mission?"

She pulled her helmet off, letting the dark hair she kept bottled inside fall free. Her face was actually quite a bit more feminine than Shepard's which surprised most people who met her on the field. Some people even thought Nilsdottir was a man from a distance – doubly absurd from both the name and fact that Alliance armor had breasts. She also levied her counterpart with the most condescending look a human could give to another human. "They don't tell you in the briefs, but I fought in Torfan stark naked."

"Really?" Alenko asked.

"Stop teasing the LT," Shepard said, peeling the back of the armor off, showing the network of scars which seemed to paint the biotic's body liberally and indiscriminately under her men's undershirt. The grey paste of the medigel, already settled into her wounds, made her seem like some sort of half-human ghoul. But once she'd gotten the chestplate out of her way, she waved off further help from Shepard.

"Yeah, I've got the mobility now. And I ain't stinging so bad anymore. As long as you get Alenko to stop staring at my tits – since there ain't much to look at – we can get moving again."

Alenko just stared baffled at the two women. "What's happening right now?" he asked.

"She fights better unencumbered," Shepard said, hoisting her shitty rifle and moving up toward the treeline.

"Without armor, she's got no kinetic barriers," Alenko pointed out. Shepard paused, gave a glance to Nilsdottir, and then fired a burst at her. They spanged off of a field of bluish light which seemed to glow right through the biotic's skin.

"She _is_ her barriers," Shepard said. "Any more questions? Would you like to hear about my horrible childhood on Mindoir, or can we get back on the mission?"

Alenko sighed, then shrugged. "Lead the way, ma'am."

"That's right," Shepard said, before moving forward again. "Any more of those things?"

"I'm getting signals of geth presence ahead, at the dig site," Alenko said. He was a professional, that one, it turned out. When confronted by the absurd, he did his job. That was the kind of mindset which was invaluable when the Avatar was around; the universe tended not only to play dice with the galaxy, but play with a loaded set more the closer one got to the Avatar itself.

She let the trees pass her by, moving ever closer to the dig site, sometimes pausing as something flew overhead. From the fact that Alenko kept so deadly silent, she had to assume he was reading them as geth drones. Thus she didn't draw attention. Nilsdottir, on the other hand, started to look more and more antsy. She likely wanted to punch something. She was hot headed at the best of times. In the worst, she was a damned berserker.

"Hear that?" Alenko asked.

"Gunshot. Good," Nilsdottir said. She limbered her shotgun, a distant, dangerous smirk coming to her lips, her eyes a thousand light-years away. "Means more geth to stomp."

"Whatever they're shooting at could probably use some assistance," Alenko said. Shepard scowled at him. "And from the readings they're bunkered down in the dig."

"Well, I guess that decides it," Shepard said. "Lock in and move out."

The advance had turned form a careful scrabble from tree to tree, to an outright sprint. Finally, as the rocks gave way to a bulldozed road, they took a knee, watching the edge of the off-white structure which poked up from the dirt. More of that grinding, clicking noise filled the air ahead of them, and Shepard gave a warning motion to Nilsdottir.

One delivered too late. With that smirk turning into a grin of sadistic glee, she started to charge ahead. Shepard's eyes went wide, and she motioned Alenko forward at full charge. There was no stopping the girl with the back of scars.

Shepard got a view of what was ahead just as she watched a man's head explode into chunks. Another of the big ones, with another hand-cannon. And there were more than a dozen of the little ones spread out and pinning the survivors down. Well, upon an instant's inspection, better refine that down to 'survivor'.

Alenko beckoned forward, and a bolt of force smashed into the big one, tipping him forward, but not sending him flying as the man's biotic Throws tended to. Even Alenko seemed a bit surprised at the thing's balance. But he didn't let it stop him. With his other hand, he reached out, his omnitool glowing, and there was a 'zorp' of electronic warfare taking its toll, specifically on the geth's shield generator. Shepard's concentrated fire wasn't concentrated enough, worrying away at the thing's plates, but most of the damage thus far seemed to be on the thing's fore.

There was a flash of movement, almost faster than a human being should have been able to go, as someone bolted from the crumbling pillar of cover and found a new spot to hide; even with that preternatural speed, she still got rocked by quite a few rounds. And still, with her shields doubtless on the verge of collapsing, she popped back out again, with the same shitty rifle in hand as Shepard was carrying. And landed every single slug from that burst into the flashlight head of the big one, causing it to tense up, before tipping straight back, and the rest of her slugs chased it down.

Now _that_ was accuracy.

The others, though, sensing that there was a more pressing threat than one human with a terrible gun being used too well, faced Shepard and her reduced squad. Alenko dived to one side, and was chased the whole way by slugs, before he rolled behind the alabaster walls. Shepard did likewise but reverse, ending on the other side of the opening, waiting for her shields to chirp in that they'd returned to full strength. It was taking far too long.

Shepard growled, hurling caution, good sense, and a worthless weapon to the wind. She was close enough. Shitty rifle be damned.

With a snarl and a twisting of her arms, she tore the energy in her body wide apart, and as it crashed back together, it did so as unbounded electricity, a stream which would have kept a city block alight for a day. And all of that power, screaming in every cell of her body, demanded release. It erupted out of her extended fingers with a thunderclap, its arcing length bathing the nearest two geth, and chewed through their barriers and metal bodies with the same contemptuous ease that their cannon had cut through granite, armor and flesh.

It occurred to Shepard only then that she'd left herself dangerously out in the open. It was made clear as four of those geth bounded over the dead big one, their rifles at the ready to perforate Shepard and make her one of the least successful Avatars in human history.

She was saved by a hundred and twenty pounds of unspeakable wrath. To call Nilsdottir's scream wrathful was insulting. Wrath wishes it could be what came from the biotic. Her body blue-shifted, as the metal in the base of her neck sparked to life, and for a fraction of a second, she was in two places at once, her light-shadow remaining as her body, and a monumental amount of velocity appeared in the geth's midst. A sonic boom as the air forceably displaced itself to account for Nilsdottir's appearance staggered the synthetics, even as one of them was sent flying into a wall hard enough to embed it. She flicked a scar-laced armload of biotic energy at one of them, while bringing up her shotgun and clearing out a pair of flashlights in two point-blank and angry shots.

Then, even before Shepard had the time to twist her hands again, to call that lightning once more, Nilsdottir let out the most deranged shriek yet, her fist glowing with blue power, as she hurled herself directly into the geth she'd tagged before. When she did, her fist seemed to rupture something, and space itself howled as she intentionally created one biotic field which competed with another. Both ceased to be with a calamitous blast, blowing the remains of the big one to bits, and dashing the rest of the geth on that side against the walls. Nilsdottir remained standing through it all, looking insurmountably pissed.

Alenko finally made a showing, rounding the corner and heaving hard. The bolt of power slammed into the geth which were trying to recover from the shockwave, and sent the whole lot of them flying down into a gully. Shepard turned her gun on the others, but their weapons lowered. Their flashlights went out, one by one, and in turn, they crumpled to the ground. Then, with a hiss, smoke started to rise from their corpses. Shepard gave a glance to Alenko, whose omnitool was still glowing brightly.

"Turns out the little ones are a lot more vulnerable to shield-breakers than the big ones are," Alenko said with mild amusement. Then, he turned, and let out a mild groan. "We were too late."

"Not entirely," a voice came from the pillar. The woman rounded it, and Shepard stifled a chuckle. Pink armor? Really? And she thought her own was terrible. She flicked down the face-plate, so that Shepard could see that this soldier was probably descended from the Si Wongi peoples on Earth. Few others had that dusky skin tone. "Gunnery chief Asha al'Wahim of the 212th. I didn't think anybody was coming for us," she said, before turning her attention to those around her. She moved from human body to human body. She shook her head, bitterly. They were all dead. "Damn it all, I couldn't save any of them..."

"What happened here, chief?" Shepard asked. She turned back at the group, not looking at anybody in particular.

"We were patrolling the perimeter when the first of those things hit. I tried to get back to the space-port, but those things forced us back here," she let out a groan, and drooped her head against one soldier in particular. "We shouldn't have tried to secure the dig. It was already too late," she lamented.

Shepard glanced around. The site did appear, for all it was littered with bodies, to be picked clean. A glance down at this big-one's cannon showed that it, too, was defunct. Which Shepard found mildly and distantly annoying. Damn it all, she wanted to _have_ one of those. "They must have moved the Beacon. What's the chance that they moved it to the space-port?"

"I'd say pretty good," al'Wahim offered. "That's where those things are centered. Commander, permission to help secure the port!"

"Why?" she asked.

"Because... wait..." she finally was looking at Shepard herself. "Are... you the Avatar?"

"Not important," Shepard snapped. Al'Wahid flinched back from that. "Why?"

"I want some payback for my men," she said, her tones dripping with wrath, her fists clenched, as she glanced down at her fallen comrades. Shepard shot a glance to where Nilsdottir was grinning like a hungry wolf.

"As good a reason as any," Shepard said. "Double-time. We're not letting these get get off world with that Beacon."

"What about survivors?" Alenko asked.

"That's a secondary objective," Shepard said. "Our orders are to bring the Beacon in. So that's what we're going to do."

Alenko weighed her in his eyes. She could tell he was doing it. But whatever decision he came to, he kept it quiet. "Aye aye, ma'am," was all he said. Which proved he was useful to her.

"Well, are we gonna stand here, or are we gonna stomp some geth?" Nilsdottir asked. And she sounded disturbingly eager when she did so.

* * *

One forest turned into another. It could have scarcely been more disturbing. Nihlus had been a Spectre a long time, and had seen some frankly horrifying things. Batarian 'pleasure' pits. The remnants of an Alliance squad after Thresher Maws hit them on Akuze. Piracy, assassination attempts, and the galaxy's most deranged and debauched people. He'd seen a drunken krogan tear the face-plate off of a turian woman with a claw-hammer, and had to let it happen, since his job was too important.

So when a forest of trees gave way to a forest of impaled humans, he'd had only a moment's pause, but it was a significant moment.

Nihlus looked up at the humans with a detached curiosity, on top of his disgust. It was horrible, yes, but he didn't understand why. The geth – and what the geth were doing outside the Perseus Veil after all this time he had no idea – shouldn't have been capable of terror tactics. They were machines. They didn't feel, and shouldn't be able to comprehend feeling. So why impalement? Nihlus noted one of them, a human woman of no more than twenty years, dangling from one of those spikes in the ground. Her fists flexed, her lips quivered, her eyes were pressed shut. Still alive? Gruesome.

Nihlus sighed, and gave her the only mercy he had the time and capacity to offer. A bullet in the head solved a lot of problems.

Ahead, he could see... something. He'd have called it their ship, but he had no idea that geth could create a ship two kilometers long. Come to think of it, the Destiny Ascension was the biggest ship in Council space, and it was only half so massive. He continued forward, as that human girl hung limply, now. Yet another nightmare to be relived in his sleep. He had enough of those for ten turian lifetimes. There was a sound from that ship, almost like a horn, if a horn somehow were the size of an arcology and could sound from the entire structure at once.

He saw movement on the platform of the mag-lev station, and quickly sprinted forward. One could say many things about turian physiology, but when it came to running, they were about as ideal as a biped could be. Humans might have them beaten for endurance – even over krogan, who tended to get bored and angry after more than a day – but turians had speed. So he took the platform easily enough, rifle in hand. He leaned out from behind the containers which littered the port, and what he saw caused his mandibles to flap slightly. Not in disgust or awe, but simple confusion.

"...Saren?" Nihlus asked, as he beheld his fellow turian, his fellow Spectre, stalking around the platform, watching something. Saren cast a glance his way. Most people considered Saren severe, even for a turian. His mandibles pulled back into spikes which framed his fringe, his face bare. His eyes also seemed to glow, a faint blue. His armor looked to have seen better days, as well. "What are you doing here?"

Saren Arterius faced Nihlus more directly, his own mandibles pulling into what constituted a turian smirk. "The Council decided that you needed some backup in this one," he said, walking past Nihlus and patting him on the shoulder.

"How did you get here so fast?" Nihlus asked. Saren let out a laugh.

"I have my ways of getting access to information before most. It seemed that things might get out of hand here," Saren said, staring up the hill.

"You're right about that," Nihlus said, peering around. The mag-lev was still in the station, which was a hopeful sign. "I don't understand what the geth are doing here, though. They vanished from the galaxy centuries ago. What would they want with a Prothean Beacon? None of this makes sense!"

"Don't worry. It will all be taken care of," Saren said, with a patronizing tone. Nihlus turned, as he heard a gun arming itself. And because of that, he was able to duck the shot which Saren had tried to put into the back of Nihlus' skull. Nihlus tried to bring up his rifle, to back off, but Saren moved faster. A slap of the hand saw Nihlus' gun flying away, bent like it was hit by a pneumatic punch. A kick hurled Nihlus back into the container almost three meters away, hard enough to leave a dent in its side. Nihlus shook the stars from his eyes, trying to get his body to listen to his commands.

He'd gotten that capacity just in time to feel a barrel press against his brow. Nihlus' black eyes flicked, and they saw geth gathering around Saren, he heard that grinding sound of their speech. "Goodbye, my protege," Saren said.

The crack-thoom of the gun going off sounded across the hills, almost louder, as though the world had gone silent just to make it clearer. Saren leaned back from the comrade he had once vouched for, taught, mentored, and trusted. More the pity that he had to be on the other side of this divine task.

_Voice of the Old Machine: the Beacon is ready_.

Saren nodded to the geth who had spoken to him. "Very well. Set the explosives. There must be no evidence that we were here."

* * *

Five minutes can be all the difference in the world.

Five minutes had seen four humans cross half a kilometer, despite the flashlight-heads of the geth upon them, despite the hail of their gunfire. Five minutes between that crisp, clear gunshot, and four humans at the crest of the hill.

Nilsdottir was, of course, first. Not being bound by the traditional laws of physics tended to result in that. The newcomer, al'Wahim, was just behind her, staring down the scope of a Hammer. Just behind her was Shepard, and behind her, the sole man of the group, Alenko, furiously hacking and flicking biotic fields to keep the geth at bay, as they converged. And converging was the point, to his words. If they converged on the soldiers, they'd leave the survivors alone.

"Look at the sky! The size of that thing!" Alenko exclaimed. And he was right. It was rising from the ground, red lightning crackling around it. Despite the distance, it was still monumentally huge. If it wasn't two kilometers long, then Shepard was a vorcha.

Shepard raised a fist, and all of them came to a halt. The platform below was a forest of human dead. Well, human-like. Some of them still had hair, all still had clothes. Others, though, of those spikes were littered with pools of shed hair, the pale glint of abandoned finger and toenails. A pile of teeth to each.

"What. The. Fuck."

Nilsdottir's words were on everybody's mind, and her expression was actually a departure from her usual simmering wrath. She was aback, as were they all. Why? It was a question which would have to wait. Because out of the corner of her eye, Shepard could see one of the nearest spikes dropping. This one was pooled by long blonde hair, the figure slight. But when the spike retracted with an electric pop, there was no other sign of humanity. The eyes glowed with a horrid blue light, the mouth was a gaping hole from which came a howl. And when it began to sprint toward them, it was with no human gate.

"What the fuck is this thing?" Nilsdottir asked, backing away from it. It flailed and thrashed at her. When it had officially gotten 'too close' to the biotic, she snarled, and lit up with her shotgun, blasting its legs right out from under it. They exploded with a splatter of grey goop and blue sparks. It landed with a thud on the ground, still.

"Is this usual geth strategy?" Shepard asked.

"I haven't seen anything like this in the encounter briefs," Alenko said. He glanced back. "We've got incoming, about two minutes out. Nilsdottir walked up to the thing, giving it a nudge with a boot.

"I think it's down, Shepard," she said.

Of course she had to say that.

With another roar, it heaved itself onto Nilsdottir's back, despite the notable deficit of anything below the pelvis, trying to tear Nilsdottir's arms out with its long, clawed fingers. Alenko and al'Wahim both tried to get a clear line, to shoot it off. Neither could. It was telling that this thing was strong enough to overpower Nilsdottir, and was wearing her down.

Shepard didn't hesitate. With a twist and a flick, she sheared a blade out of the stones which flanked the approach to the mag-lev platform, and hurled that blade through the ghastly ghoul, shearing its arms off, leaving them wrapped 'round Nilsdottir's wrists. Nilsdottir backed off, taking a moment to tear those limbs off of her, and brought her shotgun up again, leveling it at the now prone... thing. It looked up, its skin finally shifting wholly to grey and blue. That blue began to glow stronger. Stronger.

Until Nilsdottir blasted its head off with her shotgun. She then turned to the others. "WHAT. THE. FUCK."

"I think you're saying it the best of all of us," Alenko said. And then, his eyes went wide, pointing ahead of him. Shepard looked up. All of the spikes were lowering, as though in a wave. Those pinned atop them began to descend, drop off. They rose. They wailed.

"God help us," al'Wahim said, "And forgive what I do."

With a collected roar, they began to advance, claws beckoning. Three of the humans moved forward, with streams of mass-effect propelled slugs filling the gap between human and... husk. One stayed back, her teeth gritting. Anger boiling. Until she finally beat out the confusion and fear, and with a bound, she was amongst those things, landing with a bow-wave.

There were no words. There didn't need to be. It was human against weapon. They had weaponised the dead. Those things pressed through the fire, ignoring as limbs were torn off, just to get closer to Shepard, or anybody. One of them got too close by a half, and slammed forward a claw, its only one left.

Fire bolted out at Shepard.

Her eyes went wide, and instantly, she was calling fire to her own fist, and smashing the bolt away, anticipating the heat and brutality of a focused firebending strike. It was too easy to deflect, though. It was fire, but it didn't feel... right. So Shepard rolled that fire back, and added a hefty dose of her own, blasting that husk to a burnt cinder.

The last of the husks to fall was the one which almost got its claws onto Nilsdottir again. This time, though, she only caught one claw. Her other hand, the one which abandoned a shotgun, glowed with blue power, as she upper-cutted directly into the husk's armpit with a biotic Throw, tearing its arm off and sending it directly into a chemical fire which burned on the pad.

"Are we all here? Sheilds?"

"Intact and unharmed," Alenko said. "al'Wahim?"

"They didn't touch me," she asked. "You, half-naked woman?"

"Mind your own business," Nilsdottir snapped. "Who the fuck said you could weaponize the dead? That's against the rules!"

"How about you tell them about it?" Alenko asked with a smirk. Nilsdottir's glare rolled right off of him. Shepard, though, turned her attention to the pad, and most notably, who was already dead upon it. No humans, obviously. But one dead turian.

A dead turian she had been fairly sure was going to be making her life hell right about now. "Nihlus," Shepard said. There was a bullet-hole in his head. His rifle lay defunct on the ground nearby. "I think its safe to say that this mission is about as pear shaped as it's going to get," she said without mirth.

"Humans?" a voice asked from nearby. Instantly, gun was in hand and leveled at the man who'd spoken. He recoiled with a shout of shock and terror, cowering back. "Please don't kill me! I'm not one of those things!"

"Obviously," Shepard said. "How are you not dead?"

"I hid, back here," he said. "I usually take a nap during the stretch of my shift, but when I woke up, there was all this shooting and..."

"You survived because you were lazy?" Nilsdottir asked unhappily. Then again, Nilsdottir was seldom happy when boots were on ground. Not that she complained. Just that she was _not_ happy.

"It's not like that," he said.

"I know you," al'Wahim said. "You're that smuggler I've been trying to track down! You weren't sleeping! You were stealing!"

"You can't be serious," the man said.

"Do I need to give a shout to the geth, so they can sort this out?" Shepard asked.

He glanced between the three angry women and one uninterested looking man, and realized that his best possible position would be 'not on Shepard's shit list'. That was a wise move. "Alright, I make some money taking things that the Alliance wouldn't miss. But that doesn't matter now! Everybody's dead. My sources are dead, my buyers are dead! Even that turian is dead."

"Obviously."

"Yeah, but I saw who killed him," the smuggler added.

"Speak with haste, Agdesh," al'Wahim warned.

"There was another turian here. He looked... scary. The dead turian, he called the guy 'Saren', and the geth seemed to talk to him. He said something about a Beacon at the spaceport, and that they're setting some kind of bomb. I've seen ordnance; that thing looked like a nuke!"

"Saren? Why do I know that name?" Shepard asked.

"He's a traitor and he brought the geth to Eden Prime. He needs to die," Nilsdottir simplified.

"Look, if you're going to kill those things, take some of the grenades I was smuggling; I don't know how to use them, and you might be able to..."

"You should be ashamed of your behavior, Agdesh," al'Wahim said. "Be thankful that more than your career is on the line, or I would hold you against the wall and put slugs into your knees."

"Damn, I'd just kill him," Nilsdottir muttered.

"Shepard, you can't do this to civilians," Alenko said, his voice gentle, even if it was insistent. "This isn't Torfan. People will know."

"Don't talk about Torfan," Shepard said sharply. "You weren't there."

"And this is something which should be discussed at some other time!" al'Wahim said with a dope-slap to the armorless biotic, perhaps not the wisest of ideas, from the growl which escaped the latter's lips. "They are going to destroy the colony! That is more important!"

Shepard finished out her glare, then nodded. "Start running, Agdesh. The rest of you, onto the train. The bomb is probably at the port!"

"Aye aye, ma'am," Alenko agreed. She gave one last glance behind them all, as she bounded the guard-rail, onto the train which started to move a few moments later. A forest of spikes, festooned with the dead. Dead, which came back to life. It was a perverse mockery of everything which she knew to be right. And realistically, she wasn't sure how to deal with it.

She might have, once. Back when she was still a normal girl. Back on Mindoir.

Before the batarians.

Oh, the anger burned still.

* * *

If there was one thing which defined the track of Serviceman Jacqueline Nilsdottir's life, career, and overall existence, it was a history of poor impulse control.

It started in middle-school, which was the earliest years she could remember. They made fun of her because she always had a hunted-animal look to her, and her body was festooned with scars she could neither explain nor hide. It ended with black-eyes, broken teeth, two skull fractures and an expulsion. Her next school fared little better. One mean-spirited prank against her put two prospective high-school pro-benders into the hospital in critical condition. They survived. She was expelled, arrested, but let free because 'twelve year olds aren't capable of that kind of violence'. It was lucky, then, that nobody – including Nilsdottir herself – was aware of her actual age.

The most frustrating part of it was the looks her parents would give her after every time something like that happened. They would just shake their heads, and she would hang her head. Cry. Because she had no idea why she'd done it. At first, they didn't believe her. After the third expulsion, and when they finally decided that Ba Sing Se might not be the city for her, they finally understood. It wasn't that she made a habit of flying off the handle at the tiniest of slights. It was that when something made Nilsdottir pissed, there was almost nothing in the world which could stop her.

It was like somebody had beaten a scared little kid until she turned into an all-powerful, heedlessly wrathful bitch. And she hated it.

If there was any ray of light in her life, it was that her parents loved and protected her, no matter what. That was her only life-line. The one thing which reeled in the rage. She wanted her Mom and Dad to be proud of her. That gave her some leeway. That gave her some space.

And it gave her freedom to go absolutely wolfbat-shit crazy on things like the geth.

As the battle surrounded her, there was a warmth in her, almost like that flush which hit you as your body was getting ready for a wicked orgasm, only it never crashed over. It was sweet, and edged like a buzz-saw. She wanted more. So she fought harder. From the instant the train slid into its station, they were under fire. But the geth were machines, and they didn't account for the only Alliance Marine to have seven commendations without a single promotion.

"Damn their lack-of-eyes!" the newcomer shouted. "Every time I try to take a shot, they hit me with an Overload!"

"I can't get to the bomb!" Shepard shouted. "Nilsdottir! Clear a hole!"

"She'll get popped like the rest of you!" Alenko warned. Shepard only laughed.

"Can't overload her shields when she's not using them," Shepard answered. "Clear a hole!"

"With pleasure," she said. She focused her will, her lips pulling into a grin, and the implant in the base of her neck sparked to life, the pea-sized capsules of eezo encapsulated in her brain thrumming to life. The light before her blue shifted, as her biotics twisted space in a funnel, shoving out all of that pesky distance between her and where she wanted to go. Then, a punt to her own back sent her flying through that rift, before she detonated both fields, sending geth flying around her when she instantly traversed more than a dozen meters of open killing ground.

She didn't know herself well enough to know why she fought the way she did. She had years of training, and years more of combat experience. She'd managed to get out of boot and be assigned into Commander Shepard's squad just in time for Torfan. The two of them learned a lot about each other down there. But even then, she couldn't say why she fought so viciously, so hatefully. In drills, she'd get annoyed, yeah, but there wasn't anywhere near the orgasmic thrill which came with open combat. Knowing that one wrong move and you're dead. Knowing that the other guy wanted to kill you.

It was intoxicating.

And that was a little bit creepy.

She moved through their ranks, hurling biotic assaults as often as her body would allow. In short order, she was blasting through those geth with the same sort of utter brutality she'd shown the batarians. Only these things bled white. She launched a full biotic kick into one of them, strong enough to sheer its body in half, before snapping the field back on itself, and causing that dismembered torso to heave back toward her. Nilsdottir ducked under it, and the torso slammed into a second Geth which was trying to bash her head in with its bulbous rifle. And Nilsdottir growled, that directionless wrath starting to swell.

She twisted, hooking her shotgun into the neck-gap of one of those machines, and with a trigger-pull, the flashlight and everything attached to it was blasted away. She turned her attention to the big one next to that one, flicking a Warp field at it, just as its portable cannon misfired, blasting its barrel away. She didn't need to glance back to know Alenko was responsible for her not having a Jenkins sized hole put through her. But in this moment? She couldn't bring herself to care. With a howl, she bounded over it's head, into a cluster of white-hulled geth carrying missile launchers, heedless of the danger, and slammed her fist into the ground, erupting a shockwave of pure gravitational power. One which sent those rocket-troopers flying into the air, and getting dropped into the mag-lev rails and getting fried, or else just being smashed against the walls of the spaceport, and causing the big one behind her to burst.

She was rising to her feet, grinning as she saw the biggest one yet before her. But the air shimmered in front of her, and suddenly, that grin faded just a little, as a shotgun barrel appeared out of thin air at eye level. She didn't even have a moment to contemplate mortality, since that rapidly appearing geth was then struck by lightning, and then, its upper torso was cleaved open explosively by a metal slug traveling at hypersonic speeds, striking in what would be later discovered as the perfect spot in a geth frame to cause the thing to essentially fall apart.

She knew her stuff, that desert-girl.

Now cleared of obstructions, Nilsdottir started to focus her attention on the one which she now properly reclassified as _the_ big one. The big-ones before this one were just a warmup. This thing dwarfed those by a head easily, and they looked like they were built to withstand a tactical nuclear strike. But they were not, she guaranteed, built proof against Jackie Nilsdottir.

She flicked another Warp at it, the easiest one-two punch she had, and by a wide margin the most satisfying. Then, she howled once again, and that implant in her brain whirred back into overtime, and the world blue-shifted around her once again. She launched herself across that distance, landing with a thunk, fist first against its chest. The detonation of the competing fields was every bit as devastating as ever it had been...

But the big one, the Prime, it was still standing. She'd not even brought down its kinetic barriers.

Her eyes went wide, and she tried to hurl a biotic kick at it, to give herself some room, but the hulking synthetic was faster than that. It lashed forward with its fist into her stomach, driving her back against a crate a short distance away. Her subconscious biotics cushioned the blow to keep her from having a liquified spine, but she was running out of juice very fast. Already, her limbs were starting to weaken, and a ravenous hunger was tearing through her. She didn't have enough time to shake the stars from her eyes before a three-digited hand closed around her throat, hoisting her up from where she'd fallen.

It started to squeeze, that rattling, grinding noise filling the rumbling in her ears. It would probably take about a second more to snap her neck.

But she had a shotgun. She pressed it as close to the thing's flashlight eye as she could, and pulled the trigger. The shells didn't even make it out of the barrel, but caused the blue energy of the barrier to flicker. Another shot, slamming into the first still in place, doubtless did more damage to the gun than its target, but it was enough. The flickering reached a head, before there was a burst of electricity, care of her commanding officer the Avatar, which shocked Nilsdottir back into being able to feel her limbs. Then with those unbelievably thick barriers finally dropped, there came a loud crack, the flashlight flicked aside, a scar etching along its side where a sniper-rifle round had bounced off.

Oh, that wasn't good.

With a flick of its arm, Nilsdottir was flying through the air, and she barely had the time to be surprised before she collided with al'Wahim, sending both of them sprawling in a pile, near where Alenko was working on the nuke.

"I need another thirty seconds!" Alenko shouted.

"You've got five!" Shepard warned him. "Wait, what..."

Nilsdottir looked up, and the thing was pulling some sort of weapon off of its back. It made the cannon of the 'medium-sized one' look like a pea-shooter. Its bore was not large, but the weapon itself seemed to feed back on the superstructure of the geth, its pipes vanishing into the thing's chestplate, likely sinking right into its power core.

"BUG OUT!" Shepard ordered, and al'Wahim, being more of sound mind in that moment, saved Nilsdottir's ass. She dragged her aside, behind one of the thick supporting pillars of the launch-wall, just as that thing began to belch out what looked like a beam of solid death. It scoured the path toward them, melting and obliterating a line which would have neatly bisected both women, before continuing until something stopped it. Nilsdottir pulled her side arm, and fired a few fairly pointless shots at it. It turned its attention toward Shepard, and fired at the barricade she was ducked behind. That barricade quickly began to melt.

"Oh, hell you say," al'Wahim swore, timing her dive for the sniper-rifle which she'd had to abandon in her wild flight. The barricade was getting thinner. Thinner. The face of it which Shepard was leaning against began to glow.

Then, the hellish wail of it dropped away. It sank into its footing for a moment, and a blast of steam vented out of it. Al'Wahim took that opportunity to bound, and roll. As she did so, she pulled up her rifle, staring down its scopes. And wide open out of cover.

"Ten seconds!" Alenko warned.

The Prime turned its attention toward al'Wahim, and leveled its death-ray at her. The thing hummed its way to life. Nilsdottir prepared to watch another Alliance soldier die at geth hands in this mission.

Only she didn't. With a smile from the woman at the trigger, there came another crack. And almost instantly after that, as a bullet managed to travel up the barrel of the offending gun, rupturing the capacitor array within the cannon, the entire weapon detonated. That detonation begat others, reaching up into the very body of the Prime, and then, there was no body of the Prime.

Just a chest-rending thud, and then metal and plastic and white mist raining down.

"How much is on the clock?" Shepard demanded, moving away from her degraded cover.

"A minute."

She scowled at him. "Then what was all that 'ten seconds' garbage."

"That was how much longer I needed," Alenko said. And then, he cracked a grin, as he pulled the chassis of the bomb apart, and carefully pulled part of it out, before dropping it to the base of the mag-lev tunnel. That would be the actual detonator. Without it, a nuke was just a lot of plutonium in a fancy box.

"Is that all of them?" Shepard asked.

"No applause for the woman who killed it with its own gun?" al'Wahim asked with a swagger.

"That was reckless and you had no way of knowing that that'd work," Shepard pointed out. "A thousand times out of a thousand, it would have just greased you with its death-ray. Which now we won't be able to salvage and research!"

"I was just trying to..." al'Wahim said, her bravado fading.

"Well, that's what you accomplished," she said. She offered a hand to Nilsdottir, who gladly took it. She'd spent enough time on the ground this mission. "Alenko, any more geth?"

"I'm not getting any readings, Commander," Alenko said. "But I am getting a ping on my reads which is labeled 'prothean'."

"They left the Beacon?" Shepard asked.

"Maybe they didn't have a chance to collect it. We must have kicked their asses out before they had the chance," Nilsdottir offered.

"I'll believe that when I see it," Shepard said. The four humans picked their way through the silence which marked the end of the battle, and down to the lowest platform of the launch area. As they walked, Nilsdottir chugged what was essentially salty sugar-water, trying to get some energy back for what she'd expended against that Prime. Biotics were a harsh mistress. The only upshot is that she could be an outright slob and never gain weight.

The Beacon itself wasn't exactly what Nilsdottir expected. She'd seen the repository on Big Demon. This was nothing like it. This was a sort of monolith of black and green, energy lazily thrumming up its length. It stood, abandoned and undisturbed, right in the center of a broad nothing. Her mind instantly went to ambush, but there was nothing around. Not even a good snipers-pit.

"Is this it?" Nilsdottir asked. "Shit, I think we've been had."

"No, this is Prothean," Alenko said. "All the readings agree."

Shepard nodded. "Good. Captain Anderson, do you read?"

"Static is breaking up, Shepard. We have a read," Anderson's commanding baritone answered. "What's your status?"

"We've recovered the Beacon. Arrange a pick-up," she said. Nilsdottir nodded to herself, glancing around. Jenkins was right, the poor dead bastard. This place was pretty nice. Once you got past the impaling robots and the floating fart-bags. Alenko, though, was moving closer, taking readings with his omnitool. She didn't know how he did half what he did with that widget; she just used hers to read mail and download pirated vids.

Then, there was a whump.

Nilsdottir's eyes widened. "Shepard..." she said, warning. Shepard turned, and saw as she did.

There was a field of energy growing around the beacon, a gossamer field of pale-green light which was trying to touch Alenko. Shepard bolted past al'Wahim, and tackled Alenko, which caused both of them to touch that energy. But with a final heave, Shepard hurled Alenko free of it. The energy thrummed once more, and she was jerked up, floating off of the ground, her body stretched as though on a torture rack.

Then, a final thrum, and a bang, as the Beacon blew itself to bits. Shepard collapsed in a pile on to the ground, her eyes staring at nothing.

"Shepard?" Nilsdottir asked. "Shepard!"

Shepard didn't answer her.

* * *

Codex Entry (Technology): BENDING

_First discovered during the lowest point of the Rachni wars, brought to the fore by the newly uplifted krogan race, bending has been part of the galactic community for almost two and a half thousand years. Oddly, it has never been referred to properly in that time, until very recently. Bending was initially misclassified as a highly specialized form of biotics, until it was discovered that bending required no eezo in a subject's brain in order to occur. Its existence baffled salarian and asari scientists for generations, but it was considered a uniquely krogan abberation, so no further thought went into it._

_The discovery of the batarians upended that thinking. They could not only control earth, but also fire, once again without any need for eezo or biotic potential. Unlike the krogan, who were initially quite willing to submit to experimentation, the batarians guarded the secrets of their bending jealously, to the point where even attempting to train a non-batarian in the elemental martial arts is considered the Hegemony's highest crime, on par with treason. The salarian STG sent teams to discover their secrets, unsucessfully, for the entire period between the batarian's rise until they broke off contact with the Citadel in the wake of the Alliance-Hegemony War fifteen years ago._

_Humanity appear to be the only group who can use bending, in all of its forms, without extreme difficulty. They can trace their manipulation of the 'elements' of air, fire, water, and earth back thousands of years, and it was so ubiquitous throughout their history, that they based vast swaths of their technological development upon it. Due to advances in bending and bending technique, many technological pitfalls and dragging points were circumvented, allowing for a very rapid technological development from the time when Earth's Fire Nation developed its first steam engines. Humanity is also the only species known to be able to manipulate all elements, albeit - with one exception - only one element per practioner_. _Turians seem utterly incapable of airbending, for example, while salarians cannot earthbend, while krogan and asari seem equally stymied regarding waterbending. Some species, such as the hanar, seem unable to bend at all._

_Bending is considered by some martial philosophers as the 'technology of the soul'. While there have been brutal dictatorships based around both the possession and eradication of bending as it exists, the benefits to medicine (as waterbenders can heal wounds without any surgical aparatus), energy (as firebenders can project coherent streams of electrical energy from the atmosphere), and construction (as earthbenders can move both stone and most metals with ease usually reserved for construction equipment) make it an invaluable part of a society, one which was gratefully accepted by the Citadel Council as a 'restitution' for humanity's introduction via the First Contact War._

_It is estimated that one out of every hundred humans is a 'bender'. Of those benders, most are earth and firebenders, in roughly equal number, with a slightly smaller percentage being waterbenders. Only half of one percent of all benders are airbenders_.

:End Entry:

* * *

_Leave a Review_


	2. The Warning

**You're going to see a certain four letter word in this chapter. You'll know it when you see it, and it doesn't mean what you think. Word of God.**

* * *

He pounded his fists into the table. "What do you mean, 'control the Reapers'? Are you _deluded_?"

The other in front of him gave a smile, broad and toothy, his eyes half-lidded. "You worry too much, Avatar. With your assistance in this endeavor, our success is guaranteed. Just imagine it, Sajuuk; all of that power, ours to control. It will ensure the eternal existence of our empire! We will rule the stars until the stars burn out!"

"By selling our souls, and making a mockery of everybody who has died fighting them," the Avatar answered the charge. "You have been deluded by the machines. Lied to! That is all the machines ever do! Synthetic life _will_ destroy organic life. Have you forgotten the Metacon? The Zha'Til? Are you so dense?"

"But this won't be like those petty conflicts," his counterpart said, his form flickering briefly as the projection caught up to the transmission delay. It didn't strike the Avatar by surprise that that man would be so cowardly as to offer this plan from half-way across the galaxy. "We will have absolute control of the Reapers. Their technology will become our technology. We will have the power to retake the Citadel! Our proudest symbol will be ours again!"

"You are not simply deluded, you are _insane_," the Avatar said, turning away in disgust, arms crossed before the red panels of armor. "There can be no quarter with the machine. Only death, for one side or the other. And there can be no slavery. The Zha'Til taught that lesson clearly. Our technology becomes their flesh. Be thankful you are not here, Stranger; if you were, I would shoot out all of your eyes twice, once for being a traitor, and twice for being stupid."

The Stranger sighed, his grin fading into an expression of dismay and disappointment. "If you cannot be made to see sense, then perhaps your replacement could be more amenable."

"My replacement?" the Avatar asked.

The projection of The Stranger vanished, and the projector sphere which had been floating in the air emitting it dropped to the ground. It fizzled once, and then popped open, defunct. The Avatar looked to the soldiers who had sworn to die before allowing the unstoppable horde of the Reaper to lay a single corrupted tendril upon him. "What is this madness?"

"I cannot say, Avatar. We must complete our plans before..."

"Warning!" the voice of one of their own announced. Folding out of the Avatar's arm came a virtual presence, standing as proudly as any soldier ever would. "Indoctrinated presence detected! Thralls have surrounded this area. Recommend immediate egress."

"We are surrounded?" the soldier asked. And was answered when a wall was smashed down by the hulking mass of a Oravore Kingslayer, smearing half of the Avatar's contingent into paste under its unnaturally bloated girth. It turned, its six eyes staring deadly at the Avatar, as the latter brought up a rifle to fire upon it. But as the others scrambled back, away from the deadly form of the Kingslayer, dozens of others flooded in around it, each of them a mockery of the Avatar's form.

"ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL!" a voice reverberated from the very stone of the bunker, and the eyes of the Kingslayer now glowed with golden light, so bright and shining from within the enemy of their empire that it seemed almost ready to burst of it. It raised one of its four arms, and pointed at the Avatar. "KILL EVERYONE BUT THE AVATAR. THAT ONE IS REQUIRED ALIVE."

…

Shepard's eyes flit open, and she could almost hear the thud as consciousness snatched her away from the strangest dream she'd ever had in her life. She rubbed at her face, relieved that she could both move her arms and had a face to rub. It felt like somebody had slammed a metal pole through her brain and then set it on fire, but she'd had worse. Like that time she tried Ryncol with Adeks.

"Shepard is awake!" Alenko's voice cut into the confusion, as Shepard levered her legs over the side of the bed. And it was a bed she was on. She looked down, her vision clearing enough that she could now make out that she was in the med-bay of the Normandy. How she got here, she hadn't the first clue.

"You should take it easy, Shepard," Doctor Chakwas' voice came to her. It was a smooth and regal tone, somebody of high education and high standards. Shepard had intended to speak to her before hitting Eden Prime, but Nihlus got in the way. "You had a lot of people worried up here."

"I feel like I just got headbutted by a krogan," Shepard said, rubbing her brow.

"That's it? Then I'll tell the Captain that you'll be ready for the debrief in five minutes and a cup of coffee," Chakwas said with easy sarcasm. Shepard instantly knew that she and the doctor were going to get along just fine.

"I didn't say it was going to kill me, just that I felt like hell," Shepard said. She gave a glance to Alenko, then back to Chakwas. "How long was I out?"

"About fifteen hours. Something happened down there with that Beacon."

Alenko sighed. "This is all my fault. If I hadn't gotten so close to that thing, none of this would have happened."

"I'm still not sure exactly what _did_ happen," Shepard said. "Where's Nilsdottir? And al'Wahim?"

"They were the ones that brought you in when the Beacon exploded," Chakwas said. Shepard scowled, leaning forward.

"I don't suppose it occurred to somebody that Eden Prime has working hospitals," Shepard asked.

"You're better off here than in any colonial hospital, that I can guarantee," Chakwas said, with a tone of mild insult. "Besides, the Captain wanted to report to the Citadel immediately. I defer to his judgment."

"If I'm not needed here, I'm going to tell the Captain that she's awake," Alenko said, casting a thumb over his shoulder. Chakwas nodded, and he departed.

"Shepard, while you were unconscious I did a brain scan, and detected some things I did not expect."

"Oh, here we go," Shepard muttered.

"Besides the massive increase in REM-type brainwaves, I also found a great deal of encapsulated element zero in your cerebellum and brainstem. I was about to send the scans to Captain Anderson, but I felt I should ask you why you didn't join the Vanguard program while you were in N7. This much eezo, and encapsulated as this is, can only mean that you'd be a..."

"I don't want to hear it," Shepard said.

"I'm not sure I understand. Most young people would give away their very bending to have this kind of biotic potential."

"Yeah, and why would they give away their bending again?" Shepard asked in fine snarking form. "I'm the Avatar. I don't have time for space-magic, and even if I did, it'd just get in the way of the important things. If I'm a biotic, I can't bend. That kinda defeats the purpose of the Avatar. Now by all means, be a good doctor and let this die."

Chakwas shook her head slowly but shrugged. "As you wish, Commander, but..."

"No buts. I'm not a biotic. If anybody asks, you didn't find a thing," Shepard said.

"I will not lie to the Captain," Chakwas said, standing her ground, even against the Avatar's glare.

"Then don't offer it," Shepard said. Chakwas' next protest was cut off by the sound of the door opening behind the two of them. Shepard quickly slid to her feet, almost losing her balance for a moment, as she turned to see that Anderson had joined the two of them in the med bay.

"How's our XO holding up?" Anderson asked.

"Besides what had to be some intense dreams and some..." a warning glare from the Avatar, "other minor abnormalities, I'd say the Commander is going to be just fine."

"Then I'd like an opportunity to speak with the Avatar. In private," Anderson said. Chakwas nodded gracefully, and left them to their conversation. Far be it to say she was a nosy one. Probably the best thing about her. Anderson looked the Avatar up and down. "I hear the Beacon knocked you around pretty hard. How are you holding up? _Really_?"

"I'm..." Shepard shook her head. The dream was fading, but there were flickers of images, words, that stuck in her mind. "Not sure. This is frustrating. The Beacon is apparently defunct, Nihlus is dead, and this Saren is the one who did all of it. Geth outside the Veil... The Council's going to be on us like stink on a hogmonkey."

"So we're going to have to give them something to prove that this wasn't a complete disaster to the Council."

Shepard scowled. "The Council can kiss my pink ass. I didn't do anything wrong!"

Anderson stared at her. "I give you a lot of leeway because of your unique status, Shepard, but we're entering a new arena, where nobody's going to care that you're the Avatar. If you go out there with this sort of attitude, you're going to only make enemies. And the enemies you make will be the kind who I have no way of protecting you from. So as our collective grandmothers have informed us for a thousand years running, if you don't have something constructive to say, it might be better to not say anything at all."

Shepard sighed. He was right. "Aye, Captain."

"For what it's worth, I'll stand with your report, Shepard. You're a damned hero in my books. You saved the colony, and you dispatched the geth. But it's Saren who is our biggest problem. He's a Spectre, a living legend at that. Nobody is going to be willing to believe that he's working with the geth, let alone that he's gone rogue. He's dangerous, and his anti-human sentiment is a known. He thinks we're growing too quickly, and I don't doubt he'll do whatever he can to stop us."

"And he'll have the Council eating out of his hand," Shepard continued. "He'll spin this that it was our fault we lost the Beacon, and like the Dai Li used to say 'there are no geth on Eden Prime'."

"That Beacon was without a doubt the reason why Saren was on Eden Prime. Do you have any idea what he wanted from it? You were in direct contact with it," Anderson pressed.

Shepard sighed, rubbing her temple and flicking red hair over her shoulder. "I had... a vision, maybe?" now that she tried to remember, everything was so indistinct, so blurry. Like she was trying to remember something somebody else saw, through a different set of eyes. "I saw synthetics. Geth, maybe. They were slaughtering people. Butchering them."

Anderson nodded, not even questioning the strangeness of it. But then again, Anderson was probably well aware that he was dealing with an Avatar, and as was often said of her august predecessors, 'weird stuff just tended to happen around the Avatar'. "We need to report this to the Council," Anderson said.

"And tell them what? The super-special human who you all despise anyway had a bad dream after getting hit in the head? They'll never believe it," Shepard said. "We should just go after Saren directly."

"That isn't an option," Anderson said. "You've been sheltered from politics for a long time. Not every assignment is going to be like Torfan. Sometimes, you have to be a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. Being Avatar means you have to be the Great Mediator, as well as the bender of the four elements and the Great Bridge. I would have thought the last four years would have made that clear."

"Yeah, four years spent learning new ways to fight. _That's_ useful."

"It will be the least of your weapons going forward. Your mind and your words will be far more valuable, I think," Anderson said. "But whatever the case, if the doctor says you're cleared, then you're free to go. But don't stray too far. We're going to need to report to Ambassador Udina soon."

"He's on the Citadel," Shepard pointed out.

"And in about an hour, so will we be," Anderson said, before giving the Avatar a final nod, and departing the med-bay, leaving the Avatar to her splitting headache and the questions about what in the hell just happened to her.

* * *

**Chapter 2:**

**The Warning**

* * *

The Citadel. Center of galactic culture. Seat of the Council, which was itself the most extensive political body in existence. Hub of technology and communication for dozens of species. Last and greatest relic of the Prothean Civilization, left behind in silence after their disappearance, only to be rediscovered thousands of years later by the asari and the salarians. And it was rather very large.

There exist few constructs which stand even comparable to the Citadel; in terms of engineering, it remains a mystery to most who try to unlock its secrets, which still happened on a decade-ly basis even with the thousands of years of asari stewardship. Something so monumentally massive should, by most understanding of even mass-effect related engineering, torn itself apart by the slightest shudder of movement across the five great arms which extended forward like drab petals of a neophyte flower-bud. But it didn't. So those 'petals' were now home to more than fourteen million people and aliens. The most absurd part of the whole structure was the hub which held it together. Less than a few hundred meters thick, it spun slower than the rest of the station, resulting in lower gravity, which had to be compensated for by mass generators. That alone should have torn the station to bits. And at the very heart of that hub, like a stamen reaching up from the center of a flower, was the Citadel Tower, from which the Council pulled the strings of a galaxy, and watched how it danced.

"This is an outrage!" Udina's voice took to the sky within the Council's chambers. He was quivering with indignation. In other words, business as usual for the ambassador.

"We admit that the geth attack on Eden Prime is a matter of some concern. It's proximity to Outer Council Space gives one pause," the asari Councilor, one Ophala Tavos, said. Of course, the asari weren't women, per se; their species only had one gender, and they played fast and loose with naming conventions as a result of that. "We simply have no proof that our Spectre operative was involved in any way."

"Especially since our investigation by Citadel Security showed no evidence to support your charge of treason," remarked the turian at her side. That would be Arasthaes Speratus, his own species' Councilor. His tone was, as usual, snide and dismissive.

"An eyewitness saw Saren Arterius murder Agend Nihlus in cold blood," Udina stressed.

"We've all looked over the Eden Prime reports," the salarian Councilor placated. Shepard didn't even bother trying to remember his name, only that most simply called him Valern. "We cannot accept the testimony of a traumatized dock-worker, given the circumstances. That was a terrifying situation. Much could have been misunderstood, or misremembered."

"And we should not be surprised that the human Anderson is bringing these charges forward," the projection of Saren, the last bugbear in the room, said with the smooth, effortless arrogance of somebody who was half-way across the galaxy from where people wanted to shoot him. "As I recall correctly, your last attempt at sabotaging my good name did not end so well. And it appears that... you have brought a protege? Who would this be? The woman who allowed the Beacon to be destroyed?"

"The Avatar is none of your concern," Anderson piped up, as Shepard tried to hold her tongue.

And failed. "The mission to Eden Prime was top secret. The only way you could know about it was if you were there," she snapped.

"When Nihlus died, his files defaulted to me," Saren said with a wave of his claw. Hand. Whatever. "I read the reports. I was not impressed. But what can you really expect coming from a _human_?"

Shepard's fist clenched tight.

"Your species needs to learn its place, 'Avatar'. You are deluded if you think you're ready for the responsibilities you're asking for. No human is worthy of entering the Spectres, let alone having a seat on the Citadel Council."

"That is not his place to decide!" Udina snapped.

"In this, the human ambassador is correct," Tavos said, glancing to her fellows. "This session is not interested in the pending Spectre status of Commander Shepard. It is regarding the charges levied against Agent Arterius."

"This meeting is pointless and slanderous," Saren said. "End this before it becomes a... what do you humans call it? Ah, yes, a 'circus'."

"There's still one outstanding issue," Anderson said.

"Don't," Shepard warned.

"Shepard's vision may have been caused by the Beacon!" Anderson finished anyway. Shepard palmed her head, and could predict Saren's response, word for word.

"Are we allowing dreams into evidence against me, now?" Saren asked incredulously. He waved with disgust. "I refuse to even acknowledge this kind of charlatanism with a response."

Sparatus nodded. "I agree. Our decision must be made upon hard facts and evidence, not wild speculation and an alien's purported," he raised two of those fingers, "'Avatar vision'."

And the worst part was, Sparatus was right. Shepard shot a glare at her commanding officer. He should have known better than to bring that into this. She certainly'd had no intention of bringing it up. But no, now humanity has to be the terrified pig-duck running around like the sky was falling, because of one purported bad dream. She made a mental note to never let Anderson get into a position of real political power. He might be a damned good military officer, but even Shepard knew that the man was too easy to outfox in _this_ battleground.

"We have reached a level of consensus," Velern said. He tilted his head toward the human. "Unless you have something else to add?"

Shepard shook her head bitterly. "You've already made your decision. I won't waste my breath."

"Very well," Tevos said. "We find no reason to pursue the charges of treason against Special Tactics and Reconnaissance agent Saren Arterius. This meeting of the Council is adjourned."

In bitter silence, the Councilors filed away from their dais, and the projection of Saren vanished from sight.

"Brilliant," Shepard said. "My vision? Did you really think that was going to fly with them?"

"I had to try something," Anderson said. "Still, I don't think that this is over. Saren must have made a mistake somewhere. If we can find out what it is, we can bring him down, and destroy his protection within the Council."

"His mistake was simply being there," Udina countered. "There is too much history between you and Saren. You colored the Council's perspective with your presence alone."

"I know that man," Anderson said grimly. "He'll stop at nothing to exterminate humanity. If we don't stop him, then no place humanity has set foot will be safe. Not even Earth."

"Regardless of your feelings about him, he does need to be contained," Udina said. "You'll need to find a way to expose his connection to the geth. That will show he's gone rogue better than anything else!"

Shepard sighed, and turned, to where the others of her little party were clustered near an extranet terminal. "I take it you all heard that?" Shepard asked.

"Couldn't help but," Alenko said. He scratched at his chin. "It occurs to me, were you paying attention as we were coming in?"

"Not really, why?"

"I overheard an argument between the C-Sec executor and one of his detectives. Garrus, I think it was. This Garrus said he wanted more time to find something on Saren. Maybe he might know something we don't," Alenko said. "And if he doesn't, then at least he would be handy to have on our side."

"Man, remind me not to get laid while you're on the same ship as me," Nilsdottir said.

"I'll be sure to put my headphones on if the need strikes you," Alenko said with a smirk. Nilsdottir made a gagging noise at that, to which al'Wahim chuckled richly.

"Not bad, LT," she said.

"I have my moments," he answered calmly.

"I will destroy you," Nilsdottir promised.

"Whatever you decide, it will be up to you to track it down," Udina said. "Anderson has muddied the waters enough as it is. They need a fresh face next time something comes to the fore, and that means it must be on no hands but your own. Is that clear."

"Crystal," Shepard answered.

"Good. There is a man in C-Sec who should be able to direct you. Zho, one of the first human C-Sec officers. And if there is nothing else, I have tasks that require my attention. Please try not to create a diplomatic episode while you're on the Citadel; my job is already difficult enough," Udina said, before striding away.

"Stick up his ass must be the size of the Citadel," Nilsdottir noted quietly.

"Button it, Nilsdottir. That man deserves your respect," Anderson said.

"Sorry, sir," Nilsdottir answered, instantly a model of respect. Anderson had that effect on people.

"Zho is an Ostrich-horse's ass," Anderson said. "He's a disgrace to the uniform. Hell, I'd say he's a disgrace to _all_ uniforms. I might have someone else you could contact. He's a krogan, probably down in the wards. He might come off the brute, but he's got a cunning mind. And he owes me a few favors."

"A krogan solution is a good solution," Shepard said. "Where?"

"He'll probably be in Korra's Den. Named after one of your predecessors, I'm told," Anderson said. "She probably would have liked it."

"Seedy bars and krogan? This day's starting to look up," Nilsdottir opined.

"Are we sure this is a wise choice?" al'Wahim asked.

"How could it not?" Nilsdottir answered.

"Hardly seedy. Just don't pull a gun and they won't call the bouncers," Anderson offered. He took a moment to adjust his uniform, then nodded as they all passed by another Alliance officer who was arguing at length with a turian. "Now, I need to be very publicly and obviously seen in a place very far away from whatever it is you chose to do. You know how it is."

"This is still bullshit," she said. "You deserve better than that."

"I had my shot. I blew it. This is yours," Anderson said, which caused Shepard a moment's confusion. "I'll see you when you get something connecting Saren to the geth or Eden Prime."

He moved aside, into one of the many rooms which flanked the lead-in to the council chambers. She didn't know at that point that it was a green-room connected to a private transit hub. A pity, that she didn't figure it out until so long later.

"Elevators. I can't believe this shit. Weren't we supposed to have teleporters by now?" Nilsdottir asked as the lift's doors opened, and the gaggle of humans, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, piled in.

"You can't believe everything you see in Sci-Fi, Nilsdottir," Alenko said.

"We move shit with our minds. That's total Sci-Fi," Nilsdottir answered back.

"I had been meaning to ask you about that," Alenko said, leaning against the wall and giving the younger woman a professional inspection. "I overheard Doctor Chakwas talking..."

"Is there anything you don't overhear?" al'Wahim asked.

"Not much. I noticed the biotics you were throwing out there on Eden Prime, and Chakwas said that you were running with an experimental Amp architecture. Where did you get that?"

"None of your damned business," she said, rubbing at the back of her neck where the implant was situated.

"Hey, I'm in the same boat but on the opposite side," he said. "I'm one of the last people wired up with the old L2 configurations. And I was one of the lucky ones. Most of ALMA's early attempts at isolating biotics either misclassified them as airbenders or ended up giving kids life-long seizure disorders. I just get migraines. But you seem a bit young to be one of the L3 test-bed subjects."

"Drop it, LT," Nilsdottir snapped.

"It's a sore subject," Shepard pointed out. "Nobody's making you say anything."

"Fuckin' reverse-psychology," Nilsdottir complained. "Fine. I've had this thing in my skull for as long as I can remember. Don't remember getting it, and I ain't touched it from the time I was adopted until I joined the Corps."

"So... you're running with a decades-old Biotic Amp which is somehow better than the cutting edge out of the Serrice Council?" Alenko summed up.

"You want answers, go read the back of a math-book. All I know is that it's in there, and I got no damn idea why," she said crossing her arms before her chest. Of the lot of them, only she was wearing something resembling civilian clothing. Mostly because any armor was a waste of time in her case, and while there was no useful reason to having a squad of Alliance Marines in their armors, there was likewise no reason not to cut an impressive swath.

She was the Avatar. She had to put up appearances.

"That's all you're getting out of her, Lieutenant. Best leave it there before Jackie makes you a smear on the glass," Shepard said.

"Thanks, Shepard," Nilsdottir said, her tone distracted and distant. Nilsdottir was one of three humans who survived the butchery of Torfan, and the only one besides they two ended up scrubbing out of service on a Category Six. Her 'discovery' as Avatar was likely the only thing which kept the lot of them from the stockade.

"I feel something of an outsider to this," al'Wahim said with her hand raised. "I take it that the lieutenant is almost as new an addition as I?"

"Who said you were an addition?" Shepard asked, as the doors finally opened. Those elevators were going to be the death of her.

"Captain Anderson had her transferred to the Normandy's marine division," Alenko offered.

"What? Why?"

"You wound my pride," al'Wahim said sarcastically.

"You'd need to ask him," Alenko said. "This happened while you were out. One woman can't hold a garrison, after all."

"Not if she tries hard enough," Shepard said. She moved out first, past where one of the floating pink jellyfish things was arguing serenely with a turian in the black and blue armor of C-Sec. She shook her head at the absurdity of it, and kept walking. The Presidium was, according to virtually everybody, the crown jewel of the galaxy. Its horizon swept up, as it was all built into the outermost surface of the ring upon which the entire station turned. Running the length of its belly was a lake, broken by stretches of parkland where it transformed into rivers, before vanishing up under the horizon. Aliens of many description moved about their daily business.

"Big place," Alenko noted.

"That your professional opinion?" Nilsdottir asked.

"Imagine how many others have stood in this place," al'Wahim said with a tone of quiet contemplation. "Three thousand years of asari and salarians, and how many more thousand of the Protheans before they?"

"We're the little fish in a big pond, I get that," Shepard said. "That doesn't mean we've got to just sit back and let the turians push us around."

"It's not the turians that are the problem here," Alenko said. "It's the image we're making for humanity. The first aliens we meet were hated by almost everybody, and we have a substantial enclave set aside for them on our homeworld. Sure, it's the most dangerous place on Earth, but that point is lost on the salarians. The second aliens we encounter, we immediately go to war with. The third set of aliens we meet, we drive off of the Citadel within a year. Even if it's not intentional, we're disruptive."

Shepard had to see Alenko's logic. They all took a left, crossing a bridge over that 'river' an moving to cab terminal. Shepard did a quick head-count. Yeah, she _should_ be able to fit them all inside a taxi. And that, at least, would spare them from_ another godsdamned elevator_.

* * *

"We have word from our agents within the Alliance government," the asari said, as Saren meditated in the heart of his servant and master, the greatest force this galaxy had ever seen. "We have done more research into this... Avatar."

Saren turned to the Matriarch at his side. She hadn't always been. When they began, she had tried to sabotage him, to direct his actions with the subtlety of a razor in the dark. But he'd broken her down, piece by piece, until he had something he could build back into something useful to him. It had taken time. He had all the time in the world.

Sovereign had promised that much.

"Do tell," Saren said. Benezia rounded the 'table' that Saren looked over, and kneeled herself. She was once a beautiful woman of the asari, but time, and in particular these last few months, had given a severe and austere edge to her appearance. Her face, once rounded in good health even despite her near millennium of life, now fell gaunt, and her eyes were somewhat sunken into her head. She was running out of time. Soon, he'd need to find somebody else as useful to him.

"The Avatar is considered akin to a demigod amongst the humans. It is an entity which they claim returns once per generation amongst their warrior class."

"Their... _benders_..." Saren said, investing scorn into the word.

"Indeed. The Avatar, unlike everybody else, can utilize all four elements at once. As well, they are purportedly shamans, and were once the pivotal humans in their history. In recent days, they've become essentially celebrities, when they're discovered at all."

"So an Avatar is just as vulnerable as anybody else," Saren concluded.

"Not quite," she continued. "They can summon a force to themselves; some say they summon the strength and knowledge of every Avatar before them. They call it the Avatar State..."

AVATAR STATE

THE AVATAR LIVES

Saren felt his existence lurch to one side, and a rage rip through him, so outside of his ability to comprehend it, so beyond his capacity to control it, that he could only let it flow, and ride it as it overwhelmed him, his hand hurling the 'table' aside and causing it to smash against the wall. With a snarl which didn't even sound turian, he heaved Benezia up by her throat and slammed her against the wall. She didn't even try to resist. His hand squeezed...

And then he stopped. He loosened his hand, but leaned in towards the blue skinned alien. "We must find and kill the Avatar. No matter the cost," he stepped away from her. "My experiments on Noveria are beginning to show fruit. Ensure that the process continues apace."

"As you wish, Saren," she said, not meekly, but definitely obediently. Saren moved back to his place, and crouched back down, opting to meditate once more. He had to stay in control, ignore those whispers in the back of his mind.

Sovereign was depending on him. The _galaxy_ was depending on him.

* * *

She'd expected a vile hive of scum and villainy. She got a jazz-club.

"I expected more... filth," al'Wahim offered. The truth was anything but. The sign near the door was about the most provocative thing around; the silhouette of a powerfully built human woman, if one not wearing any obvious clothing. But as soon as the doors opened, contrary to the pulsing, throbbing beats which came out of clubs like Purgatory or Flux, this one was the smooth crooning of a tsungi-horn and a gravely-voiced woman singing songs about loss and love. Shepard was so surprised at her breach of expectations that she paused outright in the door.

"Is that a quarian singing?" Alenko asked.

"I have never seen such a thing," al'Wahim said.

"You want weird? Try listening to that elcor, Kolmare. Even the other aliens don't know what to make of him," Nilsdottir said with a laugh, then sauntered up to the bar and ordered something usually used to strip paint. Alenko gave a glance to Shepard.

"She does know that she's still on duty, right?"

"Nilsdottir works just as well with drunk as most soldiers do sober," Shepard said. The whole structure was arranged in a ring, the bar parked in the center of it, and the stage sat above it all, its four piece ensemble pointing outward, and the quarian woman slowly circling above the bartender's heads as she produced what Shepard had to assume was quarian jazz.

Not bad.

"Is that Adeks?" Alenko asked, leaving behind the biotic at the bar and moving to a booth to one side. The old establishment must have been a 'dance-hall', because the seating was obviously crammed into a space usually reserved for 'private dances', and barely had enough room for the inhabitant of the table alone. Thus, the two human women had to borrow chairs from other tables and turn them in in order to speak to the krogan at the table. "I didn't peg you as a jazz kind of person," Alenko said.

Raik Adeks was a familiar face to most of humanity, but his hearty laugh was much more homely to the crew of the Normandy. "And I didn't expect you'd allow yourself to have enough fun to come down here," the krogan countered. His eyes were large, blue, and shifted toward the side of his head. On Earth, that would indicate that he was a prey species. Then again, the krogan evolved on Tuchanka, a planet where the closest thing to a herbivore they have was called a nathak, and those things could tear a human limb from limb in a second if provoked. The fact that it needed provoking was probably why it was so far down the food chain. As for the rest of him, his skin was slightly orange, and his skull-plate a much darker hue. And of course, like all krogan, he had the face of a constipated wolfbat."What brings you down to this wonderful little drinking hole?"

"We're looking for some people," Shepard said. "One of them's Zho, a human C-Sec officer. The other's a krogan from Urdnot."

Adeks leaned back. "You don't want to deal with Urdnot. That clan's about as hateful as you'll find on the blasted earth. Pretty much every Urdnot alive is about as hateful as their clan-leader, Wreav. My advice? Find somebody else to deal with."

"Tell us how you really feel," Alenko chuckled.

Adeks rolled his shoulders, and shook his head. "I've been around a long time, human. I've gotten to know what the krogan are like. We're not all fun and cuddly like me."

"I shall take your word toward that," al'Wahim said suspiciously. She glanced around the bar, trying not to be too conspicuous. Then again, three humans in combat armor in a jazz-club wasn't exactly the height of either couture or discretion. "How will we even know this Urdnot Wrex to see him?"

Her question was answered when the doors leading in opened, and two and a half meters, and more than three hundred kilos of particularly irate looking krogan entered Korra's Den. He stomped past the people queued up for the bar, knocking one of them into a table, which caused Shepard to focus on him over the shouted recriminations and slurs.

That krogan was wearing red; the armor looked old and worn, but she didn't doubt that even if she busted down its kinetic barriers, it'd still take time to pound through that much plating. Red was very much that krogan's color. He shared it with his eyes and skullplate, and the flesh that ran in scar furrows up his face was a reddish sort of orange.

"What are you doin' here, Wrex?" the bouncer at the back of the bar demanded, staring his fellow krogan in the eye.

"Out of my way, sterile whelp," Wrex's voice turned out to be very deep, and it resonated with anger. "Unless you want to become an orange smear when I kill Fist."

The other bouncer, a turian, took a stand beside his krogan coworker. "We've talked about this, Wrex; if you bother Fist again, we're bringing in C-Sec," the turian said.

"C-Sec will be here in twelve minutes. I'll be through and gone in three," Wrex pointed out. Shepard had to say, she liked his style. But sadly, she was denied seeing if the krogan's capabilities lived up to his bravado, because the door opened once again, and fully a dozen blue and black armored C-Sec entered the bar, mostly turians with a few salarians for flavor. Wrex gave a half-amused glance back at them.

"We've been over this, Urdnot Wrex," the turian in charge said. "You can't make threats and not expect consequences. Are you going to drop this, or are we going to have to bring you in?"

"What do you think, rent-a-cop?" Wrex asked, a smirk on his very wide mouth. That question was answered by twelve automatic rifles being shouldered and pointed at him. Wrex offered them a chuckle, then turned back to the two bouncers. "You can tell your boss that I'm comin' for him. I'll just have to make a stop off, first."

Shepard got to her feet, and edged a bit closer to the angry red krogan. "Hey, scar-face," she said. His big red eye flicked toward her. "I was told to talk to you."

"Well, I'm not in a conversant mood," Wrex answered. She tried to catch his arm as he shouldered past her, but when she did, she could feel what was once considered eight hundred pounds of muscle tensing. So when his other fist twisted and slammed right into the the gut of her armor with enough sheer force to bend a steel beam, she had a fraction of a moment to roll with it. Still, it sent her flying onto Adeks' table, the wind knocked thoroughly out of her. "I said, I don't feel like talking, human. Don't try that again."

"Shepard!" Alenko said, pulling her off the table. Adeks just shook his head, and nobody got in Wrex's way as the contingent of C-Sec escorted him out of the Den. "Shepard, are you alright?"

"Oh... don't get into a fist fight with a krogan, even if you're the Avatar," Shepard recommended.

"I could have told you that," Adeks said peevishly. "That was Urdnot Wrex. He tried to shape things up on Tuchanka about three centuries back, and got shot in the quad for his trouble. If there's a bigger ball of anger and hate in the galaxy, I don't want to meet it."

"I think we might have to move on to plan B," Alenko said. "Are you sure you're up for this, Commander?"

"Please, Hong took harder hits than that to the head during the Relay 314 Incident," Adeks pointed out.

"And how could you possibly know that?" al'Wahim asked.

"I was there. Humans might be squishier than a salarian, but Avatars are made of rocks and wrath," Adeks said with an approving nod.

"We have to be," Shepard said, her voice somewhat ragged from the diaphragm pounding she'd taken. "So many people try to kill us."

"We can do this another time," Alenko offered.

"We're here, and I'm not letting Saren get any advantage over us," Shepard said, shaking her head violently. "For all we know, he's got agents cleaning up his loose ends as we speak. Which one is Zho?"

"Are you sure, Commander?" Alenko asked.

"You're my soldier, not my nursemaid. Where is he?" Shepard snapped. Alenko sighed, and nodded toward a booth near the back, which was flanked by four lovely ladies. Well, three humans and an asari. The center of that table, though, grinning like he owned the world, was a man with a long strand of beard, a fancy suit that nobody with C-Sec pay should be able to afford, and a haircut that probably cost as much as Shepard's rifle. Not that it was an expensive haircut, of course. She took a deep breath, making sure that there was no quaver to her voice. That'd just be embarrassing.

She stepped up to the foot of that table, where the lone male at its center turned away from where the woman was whispering something to him. Such a bevy of different people – and asari – eating out of one greasy bastard's hand. "You're Officer Zho Shr-Shr of Citadel Security?"

"Between ten and four, yeah. What's it to you, Army?" the man asked, his tone entirely too confident, entirely too smooth. He had the complexion of an easterner, but his eyes were blue. He could have been from literally anywhere. So she just decided to take the easiest path and ignore trying to 'talk nice' and appeal to his hometown.

"As I understand it, you've got a low-down on a turian I need to speak to."

"Lady, I've got the low-down on a enough turians. Not much point to them. They can't even eat the same food as we do. And isn't that a terrible shame, ladies?"

"Yeah, that's half the fun, Zho," the Si Wongi woman said with a grin. Well, she didn't have the accent, so she probably was a colony kid. Shepard shook her head.

"I'm not here about food, Zho. Where is Garrus Vakarian?"

"How about you sit down at my table, and maybe I'll whisper it over my pillow in the morning?" Zho asked. Shepard felt her blood pressure start to rise.

"I'd rather hump a salarian," she said. "I'm not going to ask politely again, Zho."

"Look, you've got something I want, and I've got something you need," Zho said confidently, pulling the red-haired, freckly girl to his left a bit closer. "And honestly, I gotta say, I've got a bit of a thing for redheads. They've always got such nice... skin."

Shepard gave a glance back, to where Nilsdottir was drinking. The biotic mimed a gun to her head with a smirk. Well, the devil on her shoulder had spoken.

With a hiss and a click, followed by screaming, Shepard leveled her pistol at Zho's face. His confident smirk vanished quite satisfyingly. The girls all tried to stream away, but trapped between the booth, the seat, and Shepard, they had nowhere to go, so just kept screaming. The Jazz continued, but if with a more concerned quarian, who was now trying to keep a pillar between herself and Shepard.

"Here's the thing. My skin's under four centimeters of ablative armor protection, with layered kinetic barriers. Your business suit's a bolt of silk over flop sweat and gutless bastard," Shepard said. "So you're going to tell me where Garrus is, or I'm going to ruin that suit so badly that you can't even get cremated in it."

"You're insane," Zho said. Shepard smirked, but felt a very large, very strong hand slam down on her upper arm, squeezing hard enough to almost break the bone. That krogan bouncer was not looking very happy with her.

"Put that gun away, Army," the bouncer demanded. "No bullets or bending in Fist's club; break that rule, and I break what's responsible for it."

"Yeah, that's what I figured," Zho said, as the women fell silent. Shepard glared at the krogan, then back to Zho. Shepard ground her teeth, but put her gun back against its 'holster', a portion of her armor specifically created to make a mass-effect field to hold the weapon in place. With a nod, the krogan let her go to rub her bicep and glare. "You must be one of Anderson's boys," Zho said. He waved his hands, and the ladies, to their credit, didn't return to his side, merely staying where they were in the booth. He gave a scowl at them, but shook his head. She figured that his head was finally in a place where it could think about something besides what ass feels like. "You hear his big secret?"

"You're wasting my time, Zho. I'm strongly considering breaking rules."

"That Tribesman used to be a Spectre," Zho continued. Shepard leaned back in confusion. "Yeah, I get that a lot. He managed to fail so spectacularly that they not only kicked him out, but expunged the record of his ever being one of 'em. So it's no surprise that his lackey is as incompetent as he was."

Shepard glared down, and looked to the Si Wongi. Her cup was steaming and black. Coffee? She must be an Enneadist. She looked back at Zho, then cracked her knuckles.

"So, feel like hearing about Garrus? Well, you can pay in ass or cash, and as you can tell, I've got plenty of cash," Zho offered.

So she swiftly leaned across the table, grabbing his beard, and pulled straight down. She then grabbed the coffee and held the very-hot mug to the side of his now pinned face, letting the heat build up through the ceramic. "I've had about enough of this," Shepard said with remarkable calm to her voice. "Now you can either tell me where Garrus is, or I give you a burn that medigel can't fix."

"Ow! Damn it! Security!"

"She ain't bending or shooting," the krogan said, content where he was standing.

"AUGH! ALRIGHT!" Zho said, as the woman now bolted away from the two of them, fleeing the club with all possible haste. Good for them. Shepard released his beard and drank the coffee. It was black and bitter. He glared at her, but she just stared back, stone faced, at him. "Garrus was nosing around the med-center just above the Zakara Wards access to C-Sec. Don't know why. Now will you stop trying to kill me?"

"I make no such promises," she said, finishing the coffee in a second great swig. "You're corrupt as hell, probably taking bribes from anybody who offers. Sooner or later C-Sec is going to give you the boot, but until then, just remember; sooner or later, you're going to piss somebody off enough that they're going to want to shoot you. And when they do, they won't have a krogan bouncer stopping them. So long, Zho."

She turned on her heel and moved toward her crew. "We've got a location," she said. "Nilsdottir! Form up!"

The biotic knocked back her drink with one pull, and had the barkeep put it onto the N7 tab, before joining up with the humans. "Alright, I'm feeling a bit looser. Where are we heading?"

"A med-center, a couple of stairways from here," Shepard said.

"I know that place," Adeks said. All eyes turned to him. "What am I? Mister exposition? It's a med-center, and I know about it. Big whoop."

"Garrus Vakarian is supposed to be there," Shepard said. She turned to Alenko. "Any chatter?"

Alenko's omnitool flicked on, and he shook his head. "Whatever's going on there, it's going on quietly."

"Then we'd better not waste any time," Shepard said. She gave a chuckle. "At least there aren't any elevators."

"Small mercy," al'Wahim said.

* * *

Dreams.

Death, in dreams. Screaming. So many dead. So much failure.

Vengeance. Blood.

Alone. Slow. Cold.

No. Not alone.

Another.

Shouldn't be.

Hard to think.

Too cold.

Death, in dreams, an empire falling. Eyes glowing white in the darkness.

Dreams.

* * *

"So instead of elevators, we get stairs," Alenko asked.

"If I wanted to get sober, I'd hit up Murtock in engineering," Nilsdottir muttered.

"Oh, so that was you trying to become _sober_?" al'Wahim asked.

"What, _you're_ listening too?" Nilsdottir demanded.

"I'm pretty sure everybody on the Normandy heard you," Alenko said gently. Nilsdottir growled like the barely domesticated animal that she portrayed herself to be. Shepard, on the other hand, had more immediate and aggravating concerns. They stood a bit under two meters tall, had straw-colored hair, and were entirely too eager.

"Commander Shepard! Is that you?" the eager man asked.

"Who's asking," Shepard asked, taking the immediate turn at the top of the stairs. Vexingly, that fire-ferret of a man walked with them.

"They say you were the Butcher of Torfan, but I know better," he said. "But where are my manners? My name's Conrad Verner. I'm your biggest fan!"

"Great. I have groupies," Shepard said. "What do you want, Verner?"

"They said you killed a hundred geth on Eden Prime!" Verner gushed.

"More like two. Is there something you want, or are you just going to pester me until you make a mess of yourself?" Shepard asked.

"Well, I would like an autograph! It'd make my wife so happy to have something from the Hero of Eden Prime to show off to the neighbors, you know?" Verner offered. Shepard sighed, then pulled out a grease-pencil from one of her pockets and idly scrawled her initials on his shirt.

"Will that do? It will? Wonderful. Go away," Shepard ordered.

"This is fantastic! Thank you so much, Commander!" Verner said with the glee of a girl getting her first Satomobile. With a 'squee' which frankly hurt Shepard's ears a little, he bolted back down the stairs they had come up. Alenko, though, was shaking his head.

"That was a bit harsh, Commander," he pointed out.

"He was being annoying," al'Wahim admitted.

"Hell, he should be happy Shepard didn't punt him into the nebula," Nilsdottir said.

"And speaking of," Alenko said, taking a moment to turn and face out the great windows which flanked the landing of the Wards Access. There was no doubt that they offered the best views on the Citadel. From this spot, and this spot only, you could see the the whole stretch of the arms, even though the tips were almost fifty kilometers away. The sheer scale of the Citadel made the turian dreadnoughts which floated in the gaps, each of them three quarters of a kilometer in length, seem tiny specks. "You can't see sights like this back on Earth."

"Of course not. We have better shit to do all day," Nilsdottir answered.

"The lieutenant is not wrong," al'Wahim agreed, leaning toward the distant star, burning coldly against the mass of gas in which the Citadel spun. "We stand overlooking millions of aliens. We have known that we stood amongst many for less than fifty years, and had contact with them for thirty. There is no surprise in that they see us as... how did he put it? Ah, yes; FNG's. We are quite young, to their aged, aged society."

"Ah, man, I thought you'd be on my side on this one," Nilsdottir muttered.

"I can understand why the Council wants humanity to step up or shut up," Alenko said. "We're a drop in the bucket out here. The melting pot of Republic City kinda pales against this, am I right?"

"You are not wrong," al'Wahim agreed.

Shepard felt a smirk come to her face. "What's not to like about humanity? The old vids say that we've got plentiful water, beautiful women, this emotion called love..."

"Gag me with a spoon, Shepard," Nilsdottir complained.

"They want us to scratch for every inch? Then we'll scratch deeper than they think is possible," Shepard said. She turned away from the window for a second, then second-took, staring out again. "What the hell is that?"

It was big. For a fraction of a second, before her mind kicked itself for considering something stupid, she'd thought that Saren's ship had come to lounge in space between the Citadel's wings. After that moment of stupidity passed, the differences were obvious. For one thing, it was smaller. Roughly half the length, which still made it the biggest ship in the vicinity by a heady margin. Second, it was blue. Third, it had a huge hole through the middle of it.

"_That_ would be the Destiny Ascension. Crew of ten thousand, and has cannons which could tear through any ship in the Alliance fleet with one shot, and kill the ship hiding behind it, too. Biggest ship in the Citadel Fleet. If I hadn't been on Eden Prime, I'd say it was the biggest ship in the galaxy," Alenko offered.

"Shit, man, is there anything you _don't_ know?" Nilsdottir demanded testily.

Alenko gave a shrug. "I read a lot. You should try it some time."

"Fuck off."

"Nilsdottir," Shepard said sharply.

"Right. Fuck off, _sir_," Nilsdottir corrected herself.

"That's better," Shepard said. "The clinic's just ahead. Can you jar-heads keep yourselves out of trouble for a few minutes while I talk to the administrator?"

"I can make no promises while that one is present," al'Wahim offered, casting a thumb toward Nilsdottir.

"Smart girl," Shepard said, idly punching the door control. The door opened with a chime, and she sauntered inside at a ready mosey. So much of a mosey, in fact, that she got an earful of what was around the corner rather than charging blindly into it.

"I didn't tell anyone, I swear," a woman's desperate voice came.

"That was smart. And if Garrus comes around, you'd better stay smart and keep your mouth shut. 'Cause if you don't..."

Shepard walked 'round that corner, and took in what was before her. Three thugs, all of them armed. Her gun was still on her hip. Her face was emotionless. The leader of that group of thugs turned from the doctor, as red haired as Shepard – and was there something about the Citadel which attracted the Whalesh or was it simple chance that all of the copper-haired landed here? – to Shepard herself.

"Have you got a problem, lady?"

"I'm looking at it," she answered. The man flashed forward with an arm, hauling the doctor to his chest, and thrusting his gun out toward Shepard. "That wasn't smart."

"Back off or the doctor here gets a new hole in here head," the thug said, as the other two brought up shotguns. Shotguns in a clinic? That was just untidy.

"Do you know who I am?" Shepard asked, taking her gun and setting it onto the counter which separated the front, where she'd entered, from the back, where the thugs had bunkered down. The thugs gave a look between themselves.

"Some army bitch," one of them piped up.

"So you haven't been paying attention to the news back on Earth for the last four years. Typical," she said. "Well, I was hoping that you'd do the smart thing, piss yourself in terror, and then slink away. But since my reputation doesn't seem to be preceding me..."

"Back of, bitch! I'm warning you!"

It was a mistake to warn her. Shepard's eyes flicked past the man, to a IV drip of saline which had been set and forgotten. With a twist of her hand, the long strands lashed out, coiling around the man's neck, and then constricting very tight, very fast. His eyes bugged, as he dropped his firearm to claw at his own neck, bound as it was by waterbent surgical tubing.

"She's a bender!" the goon who'd been silent 'till now offered. He raised his weapon and fired a blast, which bounced harmlessly off of her barriers. Not that that'd last long. She lashed forward with a kick, one which lit with fire, blasting that thug aside. The last backed off a step, as he fumbled with the safety on his shotgun. She vaulted the counter, one hand still clenched as she choked out the first of the goons, while focusing on a second. Finally, the last of them dropped his shotgun and grabbed the metal lid of a container, holding it before him like a shield.

"Really?" Shepard asked. And then, she punched straight through it, catching the man by the lapels. With a back heave, she sent the man face first into the plate he was trying to defend himself behind, dropping him senseless to the floor. The first stopped thrashing, so she relaxed her other grasp, and the pipes went loose, but he was still unconscious. "I'm the Avatar. You guys are below my pay-grade."

She turned, to see a shotgun in her face. Oh, she thought to herself, I hope my shields stop this, otherwise that would have been the most ironic thing anybody ever said before dying.

That worry turned out to be moot, because the side of the man's head jerked, and erupted in pink spray which coated the wall, the gun dropping from dead hands. Shepard traced that shot back, expecting al'Wahim, but instead of dark brown skin, she found grey. She backed up a step, from where a turian was calmly turning Shepard's gun around and handing it back to her. He was quite a bit taller than she was, and his mandibles weren't nearly as severe as some turians she'd seen. His face also bore blue markings, and a visor hung before his left eye. "Thanks for the distraction. I was worried that I might have had to do something drastic if I took them all on at once," the turian's voice had a bit of a vibrating tone to it. Not unpleasant, but indeed strange to Shepard's human ears. At around that point, the others piled into the clinic, weapons drawn. So they were paying attention? And also, the fight was that short? Sokka's Theory of Relativity did seem to hold some truth after all...

"Garrus Vakarian?" Shepard asked. The turian nodded, before turning to the Walesh doctor.

"Doctor Mikhayhu, are you alright?" the turian immediately asked. The woman nodded. "Who sent those men?"

"They were sent by Fist," she answered, the lilting tone of the southern archipelago clear in her voice. "They wanted the quarian who came here."

"Wait, what quarian?" Shepard asked.

"Is everything alright in here?" Alenko asked.

"Not now, Alenko. What quarian?"

"A quarian came in, bleeding from a bullet wound," Mikhayhu said, her voice quivering from the adrenaline of being involved in a gunfight. "She said that she was being hunted by a turian because of something she found. Somebody shot her to keep her quiet, with a polonium round. Somebody wanted her to die in agony..." she shook her head, tears in her eyes. "This is my fault. I put her in contact with Fist! He's an agent of the Shadow Broker, so I thought..."

"He isn't anymore," Garrus cut in, shaking his head. "He's working for Saren now. I tracked his financials; He's gotten a sizable 'gift' from Binary Helix. Two guesses who owns Binary Helix? Saren's trying to kill this quarian. I say we find out why."

"What about Wrex, Commander?" Alenko asked.

"Urdnot Wrex?" Garrus asked. "He's probably down in C-Sec right now. It's just around the corner."

"We should probably scoop him up," Nilsdottir pointed out.

"Are you forgetting that he might have broken one of the Commander's ribs?"

"She was out of line," Nilsdottir pointed out. "Plus, she tells him that she's after Fist, he'll probably jump at the chance."

"You're probably not wrong, there," Shepard admitted. "We're taking the stairs."

"The elevator's right this way," Garrus offered.

"Stairs," Shepard stressed. The turian gave a confused glance toward the others, as the Avatar made her way out of the med-clinic. The scarred biotic, who had known her longer than anybody else, could only give a confused shrug, and beckon him along, as they all filed out after her.

* * *

_Date: 12/13/312_

_Priority: Dark Purple, Admiralty Line, Rayya_

_If you're reading this, Father, then I'm probably dead. I swear, I tried to make you proud, but I think I might be involved in something a lot bigger than me, and a lot bigger than I know how to handle. I'm so sorry. I wanted to return with something special, something which would change our people forever. But I'm not sure if I'll be returning at all._

_I don't know if the file is going through. It keeps giving me a message, some 'incompatable file' warning that any bosh'tet worth his suit would know how to send; it's just geth programming, and it's inactive. But I promise, this was important. I'm going to make this right, somehow._

_Keelah, my hands won't stop shaking. My leg hurts more than you'd believe. There was something in that bullet. Oh, right, somebody shot me. No, Father, don't give me that face. I know you're making it even though I'm probably dead by now. I don't know why I'm typing this it doesn't ma_

_Right. Focus. I don't know if I can leave this anywhere. You know how important this is to our people, so promise me you'll send somebody to get it. I'm trying to find a way to talk to the Shadow Broker, but I'm not sure if he's going to listen. Or if he's even real. It's the Spectres. One of them is_

She stopped typing, three fingered hands pausing on her omnitool as bright eyes glanced around her under her purple-tinted helmet. Between the pain in her leg and the terror which coursed through her, she was trapped between being hyper and wanting to sleep. She was fairly sure either was a bad idea. One of the turians nearby was watching her. Her glances toward him were probably alerting his attention.

"Are you alright, little lady?" the turian asked, moving closer. She retracted from him.

"I'm... fine. I think this is my stop," she said.

"No stops for another couple of minutes," the turian said, draping an arm across the back of the seat, as though he was trying to grab her and pull her closer. She leaned away. "You know, there are a lot of quarians on the Citadel these days. I can't say I'm complaining."

"That's... nice," she said nervously.

"You sound cute," the turian said, inching closer. His mandibles twitched into what a turian would call an easy smile. "I figure you'd be a lot of fun on the dance-floor."

She almost wilted with relief. He wasn't trying to kill her.

Then, she went rock solid again. He was _hitting on her_.

She wasn't sure what to do about this.

"Um... I'm not sure if... I'm not a very good dancer, and..." she hemmed and hawed.

"What's to know? You just let your body move," he said, moving that hand to her knee, which caused her eyes to bulge, before having that hand migrate upwardly, "and it can take you to some remarkable places..."

Right about then, he applied pressure to a bullet wound, which caused her to shriek, twist away, and fall onto the floor, clutching at her still very tender wound. Even though the suit had been patched and resealed, it still burned like nothing she'd ever experienced any time something touched it. All eyes turned to her, on the ground. Then, they turned to the turian on the seat.

"You pervert!" a salarian voice shouted.

"I didn't do anything!" the turian raised his hands.

"You should be ashamed of yourself!"

"I barely touched her..."

"So you _did_ touch her!"

She didn't even try to get involved in the lynch mob which was quickly forming. She simply pulled herself to her feet, and ducked through the crowd to the doors. As soon as the transit tram came to a halt, she was limping through the doors, leaving the bewildered and indicted turian to capture people's attention. She opened her omnitool again, and looked over the message she'd been composing.

"Stupid, stupid," she shook her head, feeling her hair shifting under her helmet. She flicked a few keys, and deleted the whole thing. "I am not a coward. I am not a child. I can do this... I _can_ do this..."

And with a hitch in her step, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya began to move through Zakera Ward.

* * *

"We've talked before about you making threats, Wrex," the human in front of him said. Wrex just folded his arms before his chest. "If you keep disrupting the peace like this, there will be consequences."

"The only consequences are going to be for Fist. I _will_ kill him," Wrex said with the sort of ease and comfort of violence that only came with nine hundred years of life, most of which spent in turning killing into a damned art form. The human sighed, rubbing his head.

"Do you _want_ us to arrest you?" the C-Sec officer asked.

Wrex chuckled darkly. "I want you to _try_," he offered. "Better than you have attempted."

"Can we all dial back the testosterone, gentlemen?" a turian voice, sarcastic and smooth asked. Wrex didn't need to turn to see the alien in question approaching. "Wrex."

"Vakarian," Wrex answered. "What do you want now, turian?"

"Gongzhu, I think we've got this," Garrus said, waving off the various aliens who thought they were going to restrain Urdnot Wrex. Wrex turned to face Garrus square. And more tellingly, he faced the gaggle of well armored humans who were assembled behind him. "Wrex, Wrex, always making threats your fists can't keep."

"You obviously haven't seen what my fists are capable of. Unless you're giving me permission to kill Fist, then you'd better get out of my way."

"Actually, we're doing exactly that," one of the human females offered. Wrex's wide mouth twisted into a scowl.

"Is this some sort of joke, Army? Still sore that I put you onto your own table?" Wrex demanded.

Garrus looked back at her, and she shook her head. The turian then shrugged, probably thinking it none of his business. This was all something Wrex would have to plumb in greater detail in the future. "Look, you're going after Fist. Turns out, so am I," the human female said. "You want him dead? No problem, as long as I get what I need from him first."

Wrex stared at her, then turned slightly to Garrus. "And you've got no problem with this arrangement, C-Sec?"

Garrus shrugged. "If a small time scum gets painted onto a wall to take down somebody a lot bigger, I think the rules can bend a bit to accommodate things."

Wrex gave a dry laugh. "That's my kind of thinking, Vakarian. You'd almost make a good krogan."

Garrus chuckled. "We both know I don't have nearly enough scars."

The lone human male among that group caught the most verbose female's arm, and leaned in. "Are you sure this is a good arrangement, Shepard? Isn't this against the law?"

"Saren tried to destroy a human colony. The law can sit down and shut up," Shepard answered.

Wrex's opinion of her raised a little bit.

"Fine. If you're going after Fist, then I'm coming with you. I will not have that sniveling, back-stabbing pyjack jumping ship to Omega, is that clear?"

"Crystal," Shepard answered.

"Good. Now can you get these monkeys off of me?" Wrex shot a glare at the other humans who warily observed him. "I'm tired of being watched by things which I can kill without even intending to."

"You heard the large, ancient, angry krogan," Garrus said easily. "Give him some space, and this won't be on anybody's head but mine."

"Hey, you wanna take the wrap for this one, Garrus, be my guest," that human said, waving him away.

Garrus smirked at the krogan. "That better?"

Wrex shoved him aside and moved to the elevator, pounding the open button hard enough that it gave a grinding sound he was fairly sure it wasn't supposed to. Still, the doors opened and he stepped in. Then the rest of those humans followed him, arraying in the tube like a drop squad. The red haired one, Shepard, turned to face him more directly.

"What is it, human?" Wrex demanded.

"What's your business with Fist, anyway. Yeah, you want to kill him, but you didn't say why."

"He works for a turian named Saren Arterius. That pissed off _me_, because I wouldn't much mind to see that turian's head on a stick. More lucratively, that pissed off the Shadow Broker, and he's offering a pretty decent reward for putting a fresh hole in a former agent. So, money and revenge. What other reasons are there in the galaxy?"

"I like this guy," the shortest female said with a grin.

Wrex tapped his fingers along the armored plating of his suit. It was old armor, as scarred and pitted as the krogan inside it. That was just a way things went with krogan. They tended to use something until it fell to dust. Almost like they couldn't bear to part with it. And Wrex was no better; he used a century-old suit of armor, shot a thirty year-old gun, and nursed three hundred year-old grudges. The speakers crackled hideously upbeat muzak which set the krogan's blunt teeth to a steady grind. Until the music stopped.

"_News from Biotech firm Sirta Corporation; a long-standing financial dispute between krogan investors and the genetics firm have seen hitherto unexpected advances, now that the human group Samsara has stepped in as a mediator in the dispute. While analysts believe this is a token gesture, and will see no advancement to either a cure for their genetic sterility nor a return of their cash, the human involvement __has__ caused a rise in Sirta stock prices of almost nine percent._"

"Man, that's gotta suck," the small female muttered.

"What? That every krogan alive has an irreparable illness embedded in every cell in our bodies? One which makes it so that only one in a hundred eggs hatch, with most pregnancies not even reach _that_ far? No, that's just a _joy_, human."

"They couldn't have hit every krogan," Shepard said.

"If they didn't, the ones they missed have been staying very, very quiet for the last thousand years," Wrex said testily.

"Forgive Nilsdottir. She doesn't tend to think before speaking," the male human offered.

"She does not tend to _think_," the dark-skinned female countered, which drew what Wrex had to assume was a rude gesture from the female in question.

"This is why I hate elevators," Shepard muttered.

"Well, if you want to use the stairs again, it's only fourty seven levels between C-Sec and Zakera Ward Access," Garrus offered sardonically.

The music started up again, which caused Wrex to studiously ignore everything, so that at least he wouldn't be subjected to bad music. One might not be able to tell, but bad music to a krogan was the rough equivalent of dead-sober garage dentistry to a salarian. About as unpleasant a thing to be visited upon them as one could manage. There was a reason they never talked about it, even after their uplift. The turians would probably have weaponized it.

The doors slid open. "About damned time," Wrex declared pushing the two other males in the elevator out of his way so that he could traverse the dingy corridors of the Wards. Even as he moved, forcing the humans and the turian to keep up or fall behind, his lips twisted into something like a grin. There was a joy to violence in the old krogan. It could be as precise as a scalpel, or as brutal as an orbital strike, but in the end, it was all the same thing; something was getting done for a change. No standing around and talking, no arguments like those idiots and their money and their researchers. Concrete actions, with concrete effects.

"Another person would think you were trying to leave us behind," Shepard's voice came at Wrex's right. The turian soon appeared at the krogan's left.

"They'd think right," Wrex said. "If you're going to do this, don't get in my way."

"I don't think you know who you're dealing with," Shepard said.

"A squishy human, just like the other eleven billion squishy humans out there," he said. He rounded the turn first, and thus, was the one who took a hypersonic slug in the chest.

"Snipers!" Shepard shouted, pulling her side-arm and glancing around, while the turian produced a rifle seemingly from his own rectum. Wrex just gave a scowl, ignoring the crackling of the armor and the sting of orange blood where the slug had bit through armor, and looked up. He could see two of them. One of them was reloading, and thus not worth his effort. The other, though, was looking to take a shot at the human. While he did for a split second consider allowing the shot, if only to see what this arrogant human would do, he decided against it.

With a grunt of effort, he focused his effort onto his fist. There were a few things he could do with that effort, but tellingly for any, say, asari or salarian, there was no glow of blue energy, no hum of a biotic field coming to life. Because he didn't use one, not for this. So when he slammed his fist into the dividing wall between two shuttered stores, it didn't do so with directed gravity, but something else.

He forced his will through the metal, and the metal bent.

It shot up in a swift wave, mostly doing little visible past where he'd embedded his fist in the titanium mesh, but its every propogation sent tremors back to its source, and with those tremors, Wrex could 'see' his target every bit as well as he could with his eyes. And he knew the very character of the hidey-hole he'd secreted himself into, trying to duck behind a sign. With a twist of Wrex's fist, the metal of that sign bowed away, sparking as the lights were sundered, and the floor under the sniper bucked upward, dumping him into naked air.

Everybody knew that Thunderwalkers could twist the stone to their wills. Few knew that Thunderwalkers could do the same with metal. Wrex stomped to where the sniper, a turian, had fallen, still trying to bring that rifle back around, even as he was stunned on the ground. Wrex disabused that notion by introducing one bony head-plate to another. Sadly, the turian's was much, much thinner than Wrex's was, and gave with a crunch. Still, Wrex reared back with a fist, which he pounded straight through the compromised structure into the blue-black brain.

He looked up just in time to see Shepard hurling something at the first sniper, who was staked out on the roof of a small green-grocer. That sniper didn't have much of a chance to shoot again, instead voluntarily bounding down to the street. Lucky he did, since Shepard's grenade would have probably made paste of him. And kudos to Shepard on thinking ahead to bring grenades into a city-fight. Most people wouldn't have the quad for that kind of over-kill.

The human gunman landed with a roll, and when he came up, it was to spray a burst of fire at the two who were still behind the krogan. Shepard ducked against a landed air-car, but the burst caught Garrus pretty squarely, fizzing away his shields and drawing a streamer of dark blue from his shoulder. He answered by flicking forward an omnitool, and causing the would-be assassin's kinetic barriers to shit themselves with lightning.

"Stop playing with them, Shepard," Wrex demanded, and charged across that distance with a wordless roar, his path forming a brutal arc which ran parallel to the street, and toward the human. But when the human tried to bring his gun back toward the krogan, there was neither the time nor the distance. So when a tonne of armored krogan hit, the lighter of two bodies tended to get a lot of momentum imparted to it. The crunch of liquifying bones was the least of that human's worries as Wrex's charging back-hand lifted him off of his feet and sent him flying dozens of meters through the air. The much more present one was the fact that the street only went ten yards, before ending abruptly to surging air-car traffic in the lanes beyond in open space.

The splat the human made as one of the hapless air-cars intercepted him brought a grin to the centuries-old krogan's face.

"That's how you fight like a krogan," Wrex said. "Now stop cowering and let's go kill Fist."

Shepard laughed at that, which was telling of her character. As they moved ahead, Korra's Den finally coming into view, they left behind a slightly-exploded green-grocer, which finally dropped part of its roof into its displays. The grey-haired and frazzled owner stuck his head up, then looked back at his wares, before letting out a despondent wail. "MY CABBAGES!"

"Was that necessary, Commander?" Garrus asked.

"They tried to kill us. They probably would have succeeded if Wrex hadn't been here," she pointed out.

"You're welcome," Wrex said bluntly.

"That wasn't a thank-you," Garrus pointed out.

"Sounded like one to me," Wrex said. "Now. Let's see what Fist has in store inside his club."

Shepard cut in front of him, a devious smirk on her face. "How about you let me handle this one?"

Wrex stared at her for a moment. "If this starts to look like it's going wrong, I'm going to start shooting, even if you're in the way," he said, plugging the bullet hole in his armor for a few seconds. His body needed only that to stop bleeding.

She kept smirking as she holstered her gun and walked ahead of them, into Korra's Den. The Den was silent, for a change. But it was not empty. Even from behind Shepard, Wrex could count at least two dozen gunmen scattered throughout the club. Most of them were human, with a krogan and two turians making up the difference. And every single one of them had guns leveled on Shepard.

There was a moment of pristine silence.

"What was that brilliant plan, Commander?" Garrus asked.

"Gentlemen," Shepard said loudly. "Do any of you keep track of the news back on Earth?"

"I do!" a voice came from the back.

"Shut up, Wei!"

"So you know who I am, then?" Shepard asked, folding her hands behind her back, standing straight and proud.

Another moment of silence. No, not silence, Wrex knew the difference. This was dread.

"Agni help us... That's the Avatar!"

"The Avatar? She's alive?"

"The Avatar's come to kill us all!"

"OH GODS I DON'T WANNA DIE!"

Without a gun drawn, or another word said, and without that smirk on Shepard's face altering one whit, every human in the club threw their guns aside and made a break for any exit, even if it ment running past Garrus and Wrex. The krogan, in this instance, was too amused to do anything to stop them. That left three guards, facing three interlopers. The krogan took a look at them, then at Wrex in particular.

"Hell with this, I ain't paid nearly enough," he said, putting his shotgun away and moving to the bar to steal liquor. That left the two turians.

"Last chance to avoid death or incarceration," Garrus offered in a sardonic sing-song. The two turians exchanged a glance, then split out the back door. "I have to say, Shepard, you really know how to clear a room."

Shepard gave him a glance, but didn't offer the quip that Wrex was certain she was going to expel. In that, his opinion of her rose a bit. They circled the bar quickly enough, and came to the door leading into the back. Wrex smirked, then stomped the ground, heaving at the metal to tear the thing out of its mooring.

Nothing happened. That smirk twisted into a scowl, and then Wrex remembered a salient little tidbit about the skills of a Thunderwalker. "Lead? Who the hell puts led inside a door?"

"Somebody who doesn't want a metalbender opening it 'remotely'," Shepard answered. "Damn it, where's Alenko when you need him?"

"Got it," Garrus answered, his omnitool glowing. The krogan and the alien turned to face him. "These things have a lot more uses than people realize; even a commercial one can hold... surprises."

Shepard gave a shrug, then pounded on the green haptic tile, causing the door to open with a hiss. And then a second hiss, as a pistol expanded in the hand of a desperate looking salarian. Wrex had his shotgun out and in front of him before he could even second-think, but Shepard just looked annoyed. Black eyes flit wildly amongst the three invaders.

"Everybody stay back! I don't want to hurt anybody, but _I will_, unless–"

Shepard haymakered the salarian into the wall, where he crumpled to the floor in a more-or-less boneless heap. She leaned back up, shaking her fist. "Hurt me? I barely felt a thing," she answered.

"Please don't punch me! My helmet couldn't take it!" a quarian voice answered. Wrex sighed, and put up his shotgun.

"It's the band, Shepard," Wrex said.

"Fist said that somebody was going to be shooting their way in," the turian bassist said, scooping up the woozy salarian. "Remnes here thought it'd be a good idea to keep a gun, 'just in case'."

"Well, your friend is an idiot," Garrus said. "Pulling a gun on somebody's the best way to get yourself shot."

"Yeah, but... Oh, thank the spirits, C-Sec is here," the turian said, turning to his fellow. "Did you run off the criminals?"

"Something like that," Shepard said. "Where's Fist?"

"The human who runs this place? He's still in back," the quarian said. "I mean, I didn't see him leave."

"He's there. Stop chatting with the band, Shepard. We've got a job to do," Wrex said, pushing the turian and the door behind them. This one opened up without anybody needing to fiddle with its circuits, which suited the krogan quite well. He stomped into the room, and immediately raised a brow under his skull-plate when his foot stopped clanging against metal and instead 'gooshed' into damp shag carpeting. He didn't pause long.

The human he was looking for had his back to the door, furiously typing on a console. With the carpet managing to muffle the stomps of a tonne of angry Urdnot, he took the opportunity presented to 'sneak' behind the no-good, two-bit traitor. The only warning that Fist got was when Wrex's shotgun hissed upon its opening.

Fist turned to him. He was the kind of red that humans got when somebody pale spent too much time under the sun. Or any amount of time under Aralakh. His face was criss-crossed with thin scars, and his eyes were a watery color. "Trying to leave the Citadel without saying goodbye, Fist? That's just inconsiderate."

"Wrex, think about this. You don't have to kill me," Fist began.

"He certainly believes he does," Shepard added, entering the room with rifle out and pointed at the criminal. "You're working for Saren, and Saren wants a quarian dead. Where is she?"

"She's not here," Fist said quickly.

"Then you're useless to us," Wrex began, raising that shotgun for the head-popping shot.

"Give him a second, Wrex. He's probably getting to the important part," Garrus said impatiently as he entered on their heel.

"C-Sec! You can't just stand here and let these people intimidate me, threaten me!"

Garrus shrugged. "I'm here on a non-official capacity at the moment," he said.

"You've got five seconds before I rip your balls off and feed them to a krogan," Shepard said. And then she paused, and turned to Wrex. "How _do_ you like your human testicles, anyway?"

"Raw. Preserves the vigor," Wrex answered.

"Alright alright!" Fist blurted out. "I sent her to where Saren's commandos are waiting, it's in the Wards Access, just outside one of the Keeper Tunnels. If you hurry, you can get there before the kill goes down!"

"That's probably the best news I've heard all day," Shepard said. She clapped her rifle to her back once again. She glanced back behind her. "Who's the next of kin on this bar, anyway?"

"...the bartender, why?" Fist asked.

Shepard and Wrex shared a look, and something like an understanding. And with that, the krogan offered a grin, before idly turning, holding out his shotgun at human-face level, and erasing that part of Fist's anatomy.

Garrus leaned back, mostly trying to keep the chunks from landing on him. Wrex turned to the turian next. "I suppose you're going to have to arrest me now, for this act of cold-blooded murder?"

"Fist was scum, earning his money off of sexual slavery in the Wards. You've just saved me a lot of paperwork," Garrus said easily. "How about we agree that I didn't even get here until the body was cold. I have no idea who could have done this heinous, heinous, _appropriate_ crime."

"I like the way you think, turian," Wrex muttered. "Now, where did he hide that damned thing..."

As Wrex stooped to start rifling through the former Fist's pockets, Shepard was working on her omnitool. Her eyes grew wide.

"Gods damn it, that's... far," she muttered. "I've got to go. Whatever you're doing, good luck with it."

"Yeah, I'll be in touch," Wrex said. He continued his rooting, while the turian idly tried to make sense of shag carpeting, as the Commander bolted from the club. Fist would know where Actus was. Wrex staked his three remaining testicles on it.

* * *

There was quite a bit of running, all told. So much that only the fact that she was an N7 marine, on top of an Avatar with some degree of airbending, allowed her to maintain the murderous pace she pushed herself on. However, that pace made it so that after about a minute, she intercepted the humans she'd left behind in her headlong advance toward Korra's Den.

Alenko raised a hand toward her. "Shepard, why are you running..."

"No time to explain pull a weapon and keep up!" Shepard shouted as she sprinted past. And to their credit, they did exactly that. It was bad enough that she had to reach a distant location in the Wards Access, but she didn't wager lightly that Saren was sending more than a few incompetent flunkies to deal with a threat to his plan's integrity. So that meant a side-track to group up with the humans who'd been left a couple minutes behind by the krogan's fairly ruthless advance.

"You mind... explaining... now...?" Alenko asked, as he drove his pace to keep up with his commander.

"The quarian is about to be assassinated," Shepard offered. That was going to have to do, since she didn't feel like explaining further. The crowds began to grow more thick, more obscuring and curtailing. And Shepard was running out of time. With a growl pulling at her lips, she pulled her side arm, pointed it at an electrical transformer, and squeezed off several shots. "Get out of my way!" she roared, and with the explosion of electricity, on top of the gunfire in the Wards, the people parted like a swimming pool before a hydrophobic waterbender.

"Was such extremity necessary?" al'Wahim asked.

"Maybe not. Fun though," Nilsdottir chuckled.

They moved forward, a small band of humanity cutting through the heart of an alien culture, a place which, given the choice, would rather have none of them. The streets got dingy, then dirty, as they escaped the oversight of the branch of C-Sec, and the air-cars turned from decent models to old beaters, and then, to frames with most of their workings removed and left sitting atop cinderblocks. While Teyseri Ward had a worse reputation, it was hard to see why.

Of course, the reason was obvious; if a dead quarian turned up in a place like this, who would even notice?

Shepard skidded to a halt at the mouth of an alleyway between tall, smutty buildings. A glance into it showed somebody within, pacing with hitched step. "That must be her," Shepard said.

Shepard moved quickly, storming into the alley. The Quarian, a woman from the presence of breasts on the armor, recoiled slightly. "_Hello? Are you the Shadow Broker?_"

Her voice had a very synthetic quality to it, but then again; quarian. They spent their entire lives locked in those things. It was obviously not something a claustrophobic would enjoy. That voice also sounded very, very young. Shepard gave the quarian a confused glance, up and down. "You're the one with the information on Saren?"

"_I'm only giving it to the Shadow Broker,_" the quarian said.

"Well, Fist lied to you. The Shadow Broker never meets with people in person and he's..."

"_You're here to kill me, aren't you?_" She recoiled back. Shepard palmed her face.

"No, but we are," came another voice, over another rifle. Shepard's own weapon was still on her back. Reaching for it would take too long. "I would gloat about how easy this turned out to be, but I've got another appointment."

Shepard's eyes flicked aside, to the Keeper tunnels. Instead of green-plated, four legged bug-things, there were black armored, blue skinned women with various implements of ballistic death. A glance up, showed that there were the bulging helmets of salarians in full armor, preparing to drop. Shepard looked back down. Outnumbered, surrounded, and because of the terrible equipment the Normandy had shipped out with, outgunned.

Needless to say, Shepard smirked. This was going to be fun.

Without a word, Shepard kicked wide, her armored toes scraping along the wall. A ripple traveled through that wall in a spare moment, before erupting in a block of rebar-laced concrete, which smashed the turian in the side of the face. Instantly, Shepard hit the floor, because she knew that her biotic companion would be advancing immediately. The asari tried to blast the quarian at point blank, but after a second, and a rush of displaced air, there was an angry, half-drunk biotic in the way, and that asari was being blasted into the wall from the advance.

One of the other asari gestured broadly at Shepard as she tried to get back to her feet, now that Nilsdottir had joined the fray. Rather than pushing to her feet, she found herself being dragged up off of the ground. Her eyes bugged wide, and all the wider when her shields began to crackle as bullets pinged off of them. Damn it! She couldn't get any traction! But her salvation came in the form of a biotic kick from Alenko, which smashed the asari aside and down over the rail of the Keeper tunnel. She'd heard that it was rather a long fall. Shepard immediately dropped to the floor, and rolled aside as the salarian tried to put a slug through her. That attempt was answered by al'Wahim instantly putting one through the salarian's helmet.

She pushed to her feet, and was greeted by a sight she didn't expect. The quarian wasn't running, fleeing, hiding; she had quickly grabbed the shotgun from Nilsdottir's back, and was laying about her with surprising capability. When that turian sprayed her with bullets – which bounded off of her own shields – she answered him with a pair of shotgun blasts to the face. Shepard looked up, then down. Pipes. Lots and lots of pipes. That smirk returned.

With a heave and a stomp, a motion exactly half-way between metalbending and waterbending, she tore the water which flowed through the utility area to her command. With a twist, it was forming into a broad ring, which she lashed out with with ease and aplomb belying the many difficult years it had taken her to even get a grasp on the element. Once she had, though, the possibilities became endless. So when she flicked out her hand, and with it, razor-sharp ice, it was with the brutal efficiency of a woman who would take anything and turn it into a weapon, the hate of somebody who almost forgot how to be happy.

By the end, she was screaming like Nilsdottir.

By the end, only the humans and a quarian were left standing. Blood, of light and dark blues and greens, was slowly mingling on the ground, until Shepard let the water drop from her control, and spill as it would. Alenko gave a glance around. "Udina's not going to be happy about this," he noted.

"Udina's never happy," Nilsdottir said. She then turned to the quarian. "Gimme back my gun, you stupid bucket-head..."

"_I can't believe I was so stupid!_" the quarian exclaimed. "_I honestly thought that Fist was going to help me!_"

"Help is contingent on having what I need," Shepard said. "I hear you have data which implicates Saren."

The quarian turned to Shepard. The helmet was very concealing, and only the barest hints of a nose, the sparking shine of gold colored eyes could be seen through it. "_Oh, right,_" she opened her omnitool, and a wave-form appeared above it. "_I was digging through a geth platform I found scuttled in the Armstrong Cluster. They usually self destruct to keep any programming or information inside them from getting stolen, but if you're careful, and quick, you can sometimes..._"

"Out with it, quarian!" Shepard snapped.

"_I have a name!_" the quarian answered, with annoyance. "_I am Tali'Zorah nar Rayya. Who are you?_"

Tali.

Shepard shuddered a moment, then shook her head. That was the past. She faced the quarian again. "I'm Commander Shepard, Systems Alliance," she answered, with a forced politeness. "So what did you find?"

Tali flicked a few commands, and when she did, there was a sound of deep clicking and grinding, the sound that geth made. But then, a voice.

"_Eden Prime was a great victory; the Beacon will surely show the way to the Conduit._"

Saren. She'd made a point to know that voice very, very well. But Tali didn't switch off the recording. Instead, a feminine voice appeared, cool and authoritative.

"_And that is one step closer to the return of the Reapers._"

There was a buzzing in her head, a crackling behind her eyes. Reapers. Why did that seem so familiar to her?

"_I came with this to the Citadel as soon as I found out what it was_," Tali explained, showing that the vocal spectrometry showed a positive match to Agent Saren Arterius of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. "_It was obvious that any Spectre who was working with the geth was somebody who needed to be stopped_."

"Of that, we are in perfect agreement," Shepard said, shaking away that sense of... deja-vu. She gave a smirk to Alenko. "I think Udina's going to forgive a little property damage when he sees what we'rea bout to bring him."

"I certainly hope so," Alenko said idly, glancing around. Just then, a section of the wall crumbled, leaving a bewildered looking salarian in a towel standing facing them, toothbrush in his mouth.

They stared back at him.

"I'm... going to go now," the salarian said, before carefully backing away from the heavily armed humans. Shepard amended her chances. At least, with this information, Udina wouldn't be quite _as_ furious.

* * *

_Leave a review_


	3. The Citadel

Most of the others had fanned out, milling about in the chambers which led up to the Council's 'throneroom'. Only four remained near it's head. One was a quarian, fidgeting as much as one could expect of someone so young before an assemblage so august. One was a Tribesman, a renowned leader of men. And, purportedly, a washed-out Spectre. The second, was a snappish and vocal pedagogue, who even now argued as vehemently as ever to the aliens arrayed before and against him. The third was a child of no clear national background; the Avatar.

"Think he's made his point, yet?" Shepard asked.

"He's getting there," Anderson coached. Shepard crossed her arms, her jaw set with a question she was wondering if she could ask. And when she remembered who she was, that question answered itself.

"Captain, is it true you were a Spectre?" Shepard asked.

"Is this the best time to talk about this?" Anderson asked.

"Is there a better one?" Shepard asked, continuing their tactic of answering questions with questions.

Anderson scowled, staring through a wall. "It was two decades ago. Right after the First Contact War. The Council saw Humanity as the newcomer species who'd actually managed to bloody the nose of their strongest military species. Of course they were interested in what we had to offer. And when I was offered the position, I jumped at it. Things just... didn't pan out as we all hoped."

"Considering nobody even knows you were a Spectre, I'd say that was an understatement," Shepard noted. Anderson gave her a glance, then looked up to the podium.

"Udina's getting to his point. Come on."

Anderson and Shepard both moved up the stairs to flank the ambassador. As usual, the three most arrogant aliens in the galaxy were in attendance. Why wouldn't they be? As they listened, the voice of Saren, smugly mocking the ineptitude of humanity, filled the air, causing Speratus' mandibles to flick. Shepard assumed it was disbelief. In truth, it was outrage, but she knew almost nothing about turian expressions. Tavos nodded, consideration plain on her almost-human face. Valern's expression was best described as 'Valern'. "You wanted proof? There it is. It was sent through the same communication buoy as when he mocked us in this chamber; its timestamp has been verified by Citadel Security. The voices of Saren and his counterpart are clear and untampered."

She assumed Speratus was annoyed to have to eat his words. "This evidence is irrefutable. Saren will be stripped of his Council Spectre status effective immediately, and all efforts will be expended to see him brought to justice for his crimes."

Tavos tilted her head to one side. "That other voice is familiar. It could only be Matriarch Benezia T'Soni."

"She's allied with Saren, so she's a traitor as well," Udina once again took the words from Shepard's mouth.

"I would not have believed it of her, but the evidence is clear," Tavos said, not even trying to defend her fellow asari. "She was a powerful biotic and had many followers. Her siding with Saren gives him, if not an army, then at the very least a very formidable force to reckon with."

"I am somewhat confused about this mention of 'Reapers'," Valern asked. Once again, there was a buzz in Shepard's brain, but she shook it away. It was getting easier to ignore. "What information is there on this entity or ideal?"

"You would have to ask that of the person who extracted the information," Udina waved aside, to where Tali was apparently trying to make herself appear as small as possible.

"_I, ah, I mean to say when I extracted the information, there was a... Keelah, this is so..._" Tali sputtered, hands kneading.

"Just tell them what you found, child," Anderson coached. The quarian glanced to him, then straightened her back.

"_When I searched the geth memory core about the term 'Reaper', I found programming which ascribed absolute and overwhelming value to it. If they were organic, I'd call the behavior 'worship', like they believe these Reapers are gods. They view Saren as... something like a prophet for these Reapers._"

"That Conduit that Saren mentioned must be the key to bringing the Reapers back," Anderson said. "They were believed to be the cause of the end of the Prothean civilization; if they return, they might well do the same again."

Speratus and Tavos shared a glance, one which spoke a light-year of doubt. Valern leaned forward. "Do you know what this Conduit is?"

"No, but if Saren's after it, he has to be stopped before he finds it," Shepard answered.

"Are we seriously considering the charge that Saren is attempting to bring back hypothetical civilization-ending mechanical beings from beyond the known reaches of the galaxy?" Speratus asked. "Where would they go that we couldn't find them? The asari and salarians have explored space for almost four thousand years; even the turians have guarded the stars five times longer than you had electric lights. This is absurd!"

Shepard scowled. "We tried to warn you about Saren, but you refused to see the truth," Anderson answered the charge.

It was vexing that Shepard had to be the voice of diplomacy here. "And that's beside the point. Whatever it is Saren's after, he can't be allowed to get it."

"Well put, Commander," Tavos said. "Since he has been stripped of his position and resources, he only poses a minor threat, but that threat must be expunged in its entirety. His connection to the geth is itself beyond troubling."

"He is no minor threat," Udina shouted. "He has already attacked one human colony, of his own initiative! How many other colonies must burn before we receive help? He could be anywhere in the Attican Traverse even now, plotting his next move! Send in the Council Fleet."

Speratus' mandibles fluttered a bit. This, as it turned out, was turian anger. "If we send a fleet into the Traverse, the Terminus Systems will see it as an act of war. We can scarce afford another open conflict with them. Besides, even ten thousand ships could not track one man in a place like the Traverse."

Shepard looked up at them, her hands tightening into fists. "But I can," she finished. All eyes fell onto her. "All I need is a ship and a crew, and I can bring Saren down. No fleet in the Traverse means no war with the Terminus Systems. Everybody gets what they want."

Tavos gave a glance to Valern, then to Speratus. The first gave her an immediate nod. The other leaned back. "No. It's too soon. Humanity is not ready for the responsibilities of the position."

"If not now, when? Humanity will not sit in the shadows forever," Udina said.

"And it is ill-advised to force them to," Tavos said. "The vote already stands two to one. I would prefer we be unanimous, but..."

Shepard arched a brow, but Speratus let out a very human-sounding sigh of annoyance, before tapping a few commands onto the console before him. Tavos smiled, then looked to Shepard. "Commander, please step forward," She did so. Tali was probably just happy to no longer be the center of attention, and be allowed to flee to some place not so public. Udina and Anderson watched with expectation. "It is the decision of the Council that you be granted the rights and privileges of the Special Tactics and Reconnaissance branch of the Citadel, by unanimous decision."

From the outskirts of the council chambers, dozens, then hundreds of expectant faces began to lean forward, beholding a ceremony that few could have expected. No few of those faces were human. To them, this was likely the apotheosis of decades of hard politics, finally seeing fruit in the light of day. Valern, ignoring such hope and expectation, gave his own nod. "Spectres are not trained, but chosen," he intoned. "They are individuals forged in the fires of service and battle; they are those whose actions clearly elevate them above the rank and file."

"Spectres are an ideal, a symbol," Tavos continued, with dignity and poise. Of course she did. All asari sounded like that when they wanted to. "They are the embodiment of courage, determination, and perseverance. They are the right-hand of the Council, and agents of our will. They bear a difficult burden. They are the protectors of galactic peace: both the first, and last, line of defense. The safety of the galaxy is theirs to uphold."

Speratus actually managed to not sound snide when he spoke. "You are the first human Spectre, Commander. This must be a great honor for both you and your entire species."

It somewhat fell flat since Shepard knew it was a lie. "About time," She muttered to herself. "I'll get Saren. As long as I know where to look..." she prompted.

"As a Spectre, you will have all of the assistance we can provide," Valern said. "We have no doubt that Saren's fate is as good as sealed."

She might not have been an Avatar long, but she knew that those words were probably the worst ones to utter out loud. She bit her tongue to keep from pointing that out, though.

"This meeting of the Council is adjourned," Tavos said. And with that, the aliens began to file out.

"So I'm a Spectre now. Great. I'll pin it next to the ribbon I got for being the Avatar," Shepard said as she descended those stairs, to where the quarian and the Udina were waiting.

"This might not seem like much, but it's a big step forward for humanity in galactic politics," Udina pointed out. "Even if we had to scream until our throats were bleeding, we will be heard. If I can see a human amongst the Council in my lifetime, then I will die a content man."

"_Good luck,_" Tali muttered sarcastically, until Udina shot her a glare, and she wilted. "_I... I didn't mean..._"

"She's not wrong," Shepard said. "The hanar have been howling for a seat... can they howl?" the quarian shrugged, even if the two military men didn't bother to answer, "for about eight hundred years. The volus have been vocal about wanting one for twice as long as that."

"And I thought you didn't keep up with galactic politics?" Anderson said with a chuckle.

"I bunk next to Alenko. I have no choice but to remember _something_," Shepard said, rolling her eyes. "I still need a ship."

"I'll sort that out, Shepard. It will take some time, but you'll probably have what you need by oh-six-hundred tomorrow morning," Anderson said. Udina gave a nod.

"Now please try to spend the next fourteen hours _not_ causing massive property damage in the Wards," Udina said with an annoyed tone.

"I can offer no such promises," Shepard said, as she trod away. In fact, such trodding managed to get her all the way to the elevator – and damn them for there being no other way in or out of the two kilometer tall Presidium Tower than this – before somebody dared interrupt her. In fact, inside the elevator was a somewhat familiar face.

"Shepard," the very red krogan said, as he leaned against the walls. A glance upward, to the ceiling of the elevator, showed that the speaker was dangling out of its housing.

"Wrex," Shepard answered. "What are you doing waiting in an elevator?"

"I haven't been allowed in the Presidium Tower in nearly five-hundred years," Wrex said testily. "That doesn't prevent me from using the elevators."

"They still remember a ban they put down five centuries ago?"

"One of the Council Races is the asari. They live almost as long as a krogan can. I'd say they have carrying grudges just as down to an art as we do."

"There must be something on your mind, Wrex," Shepard said, pounding the key which would drop them in the Presidium Ring.

"I need a ship. It seems I've given myself something of a bad name with my usual mobility providers," Wrex noted. "And since you're going after Saren, I figure we can both deal with a mutual problem, provided you help me with a little problem I have."

"Are you offering mercenary work?" Shepard asked.

"Depends," Wrex said.

"Upon?"

"Did they actually get their heads out of their asses and make you a Spectre?" Wrex asked. Shepard nodded. "Then yes. I'm offering."

"What's your price?"

"Killing a particular turian. Taking back what belongs to me," he said. "Of course, the down payment is something you can deal with right now."

"Oh, here we go," Shepard rolled her eyes.

"Do you know about the Consort?" Wrex asked.

"No."

"An asari prostitute. A remarkably skilled one, at that. She's got half the galaxy wrapped around her finger. Guess which half?"

"The one with the penises, I assume," Shepard said with a smirk.

"If only just," Wrex laughed. That laugh soured quickly. "She's in a snit about something, and she's using some of her flunkies to put pressure on me. The elcor ambassador has been... oddly forceful. Then again, those are the only things I wager could win a fair fight against a krogan, so I don't tend to mess with 'em."

"So you want me to put the fear of god...gods – goddess? – into her?"

"Get her off my back, and I'll keep Saren's goons from putting a bullet into yours," Wrex offered. Shepard nodded, and extended a hand. "This mean we have a deal?"

"For the time being. We'll revisit it if something needs to change."

"Good," Wrex took that hand and gave it a shake which almost hurled Shepard into the elevator's door. She regained her balance just in time for it to open, and see them through to the entirely-too-white environs beyond. "Her place is hard to miss. Just look for a place which looks like a bordello."

Shepard nodded. "Wrex," she said, as she strode out onto the path.

"Shepard," the krogan answered her, before heading off on his own way.

* * *

**Chapter 3**

**The Citadel**

* * *

She was having a much easier time walking, now that she wasn't trying to move fast. Every twitch of her thigh still burned like somebody ramming an iron bar through it, then setting it on fire, but now, those twitches came less often. And to be honest, it wasn't even as painful as it had been at first. She'd even managed to bang her bullet-wound into a table on her way to the Tower without bursting into tears. Now, though, she was just happy that people were done trying to kill her.

She moved through the crowds of the Dark Star Lounge, which was easy enough, because people tended to subconsciously step aside when a quarian came near them. For all quarians were considered the best mixture of galactic proportion with asari body-type, they tended to... How did he describe that? 'Freak people out'.

The sound of the music was smoother here than it had been in Flux, the last place she'd passed by. Not that it mattered. She could be sitting in the midst of a pentagon of raucous hogmonkeys, and hear nothing but soft tunes on ancient quarian pipes. Living in an exosuit had its benefits, after all. Many, many drawbacks, but some benefits. Such as that when she looked at her bullet-wound, it'd been the first time in three years that she saw her own leg.

A glance toward the cavorting aliens brought a sting to her leg, which reminded her that dancing was absolutely out of the question. In fact, the whole reason she came in here was frankly, because she'd never been in a place like this before. They always made her quite uncomfortable. Not the noise, nor the press of people; both of those helped ease some homesickness. No, she didn't like this kind of place because it was loudly, overtly sexual.

Which was why she was so surprised to see a particular human sitting in a quiet booth in a corner, reading a pad, and occasionally tapping a device on the table. She limped over toward him, and when he looked up, he smiled at her. It was a wide, easy, and genuine smile. And it made her feel a bit funny. "Mister Alenko? I never thought I'd see _you_ here," she said.

He was quite the specimen. Broader shouldered than you'd see in a quarian, but built as though he'd been cut from stone. She wondered how he got into that armor he was wearing when he'd saved her life – and didn't that just inspire sappy poetry in her young mind? – and came to the conclusion that he'd had to be poured in. "Please, it's Kaiden. Honestly, I didn't think I'd see you here, either," he answered her.

"I like the crowds. It makes me feel like I'm back home," she answered.

"Right. The Flotilla," Kaiden nodded. He gave a chuckle. "I can't imagine what living in space my entire life would be like. Especially the way you do. Always moving. Never in one place for very long..."

"It's just living," she said with a shrug. "I mean, having people around all the time was just... normal, back on the Rayya. It was actually strange to be alone as long as I was."

"Forgive me for assuming, but you sound rather young," Kaiden said, pausing to tap on his device, give a nod at whatever was displayed on it, then turn back to her. "Are you on your pilgrimage?"

She leaned back. "You know about the Pilgrimage?" she was understandably surprised.

"I read a lot," Kaiden said casually. "Although, there's not much about what the whole thing is about. Only that it exists, and that every quarian does it."

"Its a rite of passage," she explained. "A quarian has to prove that she can bring something of worth to the Flotilla. I'm surprised that you even knew about it. Most people just assume that quarians are... are amoral thieves and vagabonds, ready to steal anything we can get our hands on."

"Most people don't pay attention as much as..." he trailed off, tapped the device, and then turned his attention back to her, "...I do. That comes with the job, after all."

"What is that thing?" she asked, pointing at the device.

"This?" he asked. "It's a scanner."

"Why isn't it built into an omnitool? Everybody uses omnitools. Even I do," she said, opening it up, and quickly having to turn off several settings, since she left it about to play the geth data again, and that would have been confusing and dangerous to be seen with in a bar. That, and her other settings were about causing feedback loops in shield generators, or else nano-forging explosive chemicals for speedy delivery. Again, not something most people should bring to a bar.

"That's an interesting looking tool," he said. "Is that a Nexus?"

"Mark seven. Father wanted me to have the best when I left the Flotilla," she blushed under her helmet; again, benefits to the exosuit. Nobody could tell when you were embarrassed, unless you went on at a ramble like Tali did. Frequently.

"Your father must have some pull," he said, quickly tapping the thing again, and nodding at its output. "The seven isn't even on the market on Sar'Kesh yet."

"He's... got some friends," Tali said uncomfortably. So she changed the topic as awkwardly as ever. "So... what exactly is that thing scanning for?"

"Keepers," he said. She tilted her head. Kaiden shrugged. "There was a salarian messing about with the Keepers up in the Tower. I didn't see any harm with helping him get some scans."

"Well, Keepers are all over the Citadel. You shouldn't have any trouble finding them," Tali offered.

"Oh, I'm finding enough of them," he said with a smirk. She tilted her head the other direction. "There's a reason I'm sitting in this booth. It's directly over a Keeper Tunnel. Any time one of them comes close, tap, and I've got a reading. I'm actually managing to catch up reading on that turian author, Serpius, instead of running around. Easy as pancakes, as my father would say."

"That's very intuitive," she said. "I mean... I would have been running around the Citadel all day trying to find Keepers."

"Sentinels are trained to find the unusual solution," Kaiden said. He leaned back, then forward again to tap the scanner, then back once again. "It was fortunate that you came. I've heard from the Captain that he wants you to be part of Shepard's squad."

"Me? Why? I'm not a soldier. I'm just a..." she was about to say, just a kid. But the truth was, she was on her Pilgrimage now, and that meant that if she ever wanted to be a quarian woman, she was going to have to start acting like one. "I mean... I have a responsibility to my people."

Kaiden shrugged. "I think Anderson is doing this for your good as much as Shepard's. Saren might still want to 'tie up loose ends', and sadly, you're one of them. You'd probably be far safer with us than on your own."

"Oh... That makes sense," Tali said. She fidgeted briefly, before looking up at him again. "Um... Can I ask you something... about Shepard?"

"You can ask. I don't know if I'll have the answer, but you can ask," he said.

"Why is she so... angry... all the time? I mean, she killed those assassins in the most brutal way possible. She didn't even bother to shoot them; she just ripped them apart!" Tali shook her head. "Is that _normal_ for humans?"

"No. Not even remotely," Kaiden answered. He sighed, leaning forward with his chin upon his knuckles. "That's one thing I haven't been able to answer. I mean, the obvious point is that she was a Mindoir survivor, and surviving the batarians will twist you up inside but... there's more there, and I don't know what it is. Not yet. And I'm not sure if I should even ask about it."

* * *

The whole thing had Shepard deeply wondering what the krogan considered a bordello looked like. Between the 'surprise' at Korra's Den, and now this, she was seriously starting to wonder if any of the old Sci-Fi vids she'd watched when she was a child were true. Or any of the Westerns; this certainly didn't look like any of the 'cathouses' which featured prominently in 'Soong Alone'. In fact, from the street, it just looked like a retail store or a small business block. She shook her head and headed for the doorway. She had barely made it five steps when there was a crystalline chime in the air, and an asari turned from chatting with another of her ilk to face her.

She was, like all asari, pretty much human looking in the broad strokes. The fine details were where the distinctions made themselves known. While they shared a human face, that face was either blue, or else one of the shades leading toward purple. Of course, they had no hair; rather, they had some sort of tentacle-things which wrapped over their heads, tapering to the back. Their eyes tended to be blue, but she'd heard from Alenko, her constant source of trivia from across the galaxy, that they could be just about any color, and could even be amber or gold. This ones were blue, as was apparently usual. Another feature was the one which tripped Shepard up the most; asari didn't have any godsdamned ears. She sometimes found herself leaning slight to one side when talking to one, trying to figure out how they even heard things. And this one, bright blue as the species tended to be, was showing a great deal more blueness than most that Shepard had encountered. Her dress was more a rough idea of a dress than one in practicality.

Which was right about when Shepard realized why Wrex called this place a bordello. It might not have appeared it from without, but from within, the place oozed sex. But not even raunchy, naughty sex. This was the kind of sex that people saw in movies. It was clean, fun, spirited, and... Shepard didn't even have the words to describe it. There was an artificialness to it all, but that was doubtless part of the charm. And the asari weren't the only half-dressed members of the galactic community. There were quite a few humans as well. Even some of what Shepard had to assume were turian females. Either that or turian transvestites, which caused Shepard to have to stifle a chuckle before it came out.

This place was weird.

"Welcome to the Consort," the asari before her said. "I am Nelyna and I will be your receptionist today. Who are you scheduled with this afternoon?"

"I'm not 'scheduled' with anybody," Shepard said with a note of confusion. "I need to talk to the Consort herself."

Nelyna gave a laugh which Shepard heard as condescending, even though it was actually just indulgent. Needless to say, her jaw set and her fist tensed at that. "I'm so sorry, but one does not just 'pop-in' with the Consort. Would you like me to arrange an appointment?" she asked, and instantly, without even waiting for Shepard's answer, started flicking through the console built into the entryway. "Hmm, I see that we have an opening at ten-hundred fifteen," it was thirteen hundred now... "on Tuesday..." it was Wednesday... "just in time for new-years!"

Shepard did the math in her head. "Six months? Are you telling me that that woman is booked solid for _six goddamn months_?"

"Yes, she has had a slight dip in patronage since the Batarian Hegemony released its embassy," Nelyna said understandingly. But not understanding enough.

"She fucks _batarians_?" Shepard asked, disgusted.

"Please, calm down," Nelyna glanced around, not sure why the human before her now had her hand on her gun. "I'm sorry to have caused you inconvenience, but some things just cannot be changed. Please, accept a voucher for a free session when the schedule permits..."

Shepard almost shook with a rage which quaked through her, but she forced it down. Fire, either literal or figurative, wouldn't help her here. "Hell with this. I'll find some other way to talk to her."

She turned away, already trying to think of how to do it, but was forestalled as Nelyna waved a hesitant hand, and brought the other to... well, it certainly wasn't an ear. "Yes, Sha'ira?" there was a pause. "Yes, of course Mistress, I'll send her right away."

Shepard's glare was all the question needing asking.

With a nervous chuckle, she nodded inward of the building. "It seems that you've caught the attention of Consort Sha'ira. She's requested you speak to her immediately."

"So no waiting six months?" Shepard asked.

"No, it appears not," Nelyna said. "But... could you please leave your gun at the front desk? This is not _that_ kind of establishment."

Shepard glared, but her grinding of teeth only saw her calming down enough to realize that the blue woman wasn't wrong. With a minor growl, she hefted her sidearm up from her hip and tossed it to the woman, who caught it like she had no idea how to hold it. Civilians. How helpless they were. She strode into the building, past the turians and humans and volus. That actually caused her to miss a step, and stare for a moment. The volus were a tiny species, comparatively. The tallest of them came up to about Shepard's groin. Considering they were about as wide as they were tall, they were hardly any sort of physical threat. And even less so, when one realized that the exosuit they were wearing was the only thing keeping their body from exploding under the comparatively tiny air-pressure that most species enjoyed. What one wanted here baffled the mind.

Once again, Alenko's trivia to the rescue. She was going to punch that man for putting all this information into her head. It was as good as done.

Shaking her head at the absurdity of volus and interstellar life in general, she moved to the back of the building and then up a set of well lit stairs. Obviously she wasn't trying to create ambiance here. That was probably something saved for her chambers. Which, after a turn, also disappointed on that front. Shepard was beginning to doubt she'd see anything prostitute related here besides the attire, after all of that mental building-up. Hell, in the walk over, she'd half considered that there would be _whipping_ going on! The lack of it was, for reasons she couldn't readily explain, somewhat disappointing.

Sha'ira's chambers were well appointed, and had numerous touches of luxury and class, but this place lacked even the sanitized sex of the room below. In fact, it just looked like a reasonable woman's study. And the woman before her, but for the blueness, and the tentacles instead of a hair-bun, could have been any of of her elementary school teachers. She was even dressed _conservatively_! Shepard remained at a gawk for a moment. This whole situation was anything but what she was expecting. And worst of all, she saw the likelihood of problems being solved by a raucous fist-fight dropping precipitously. "You wanted to talk to me?" Shepard asked.

She glanced toward Shepard, her eyes warmer than most. "I've heard a great many things about you, _Spectre_," she said with her blue lips pulling into a light smile. "You're certainly the talk of the Presidium of late."

"And you're obviously somebody who listens where they really shouldn't," Shepard said.

"I don't apologize for doing my job," the Consort said with a shrug. "It is my business to know when important people arrive on the station. Many of them end up becoming clients, so it behooves me to be in the know."

"You're beating around the bush. I don't appreciate that," Shepard said.

"And you are frightfully direct," the Consort said with a slow shake of her head. "Always pressing forward, never looking to the left or right, never expanding your vision beyond what is before you. Tragedy befalls the blind much more swiftly than those who see, Spectre."

"Enough of this. Why did you call me here?"

"I have business to discuss," she said.

"So do I. Urdnot Wrex," Shepard said. Sha'ira sighed, and glanced aside.

"He and I were close, once. But those days are long over. Now, he is a threat to my clients, which makes him a problem for me," she gestured toward a very comfortable looking chair, taking a seat in one opposite it. Shepard moved to it, but out of simple cussedness, remained standing. "I think we can save each other a lot of trouble and see that our interests intersect. I pressure Urdnot Wrex because he is damaging my client base. One in particular is Septimus Oraka. Between my former associate Urdnot and a... falling out which we suffered recently, Oraka has begun a campaign against me."

"So you're stuck in the middle of a love-triangle gone horribly wrong?" Shepard asked with a smirk.

"In this business, there is no polyhedron with enough sides to explain how complex relations can become," she said shaking her head lightly. She looked back up to the human. "I appreciate that you have not asked why he has turned against me. I respect his privacy too much to speak of it. But if you could convince him, soldier to soldier, to end this slanderous feud, I would consider it proper to release Urdnot Wrex into your care."

Shepard leaned back. "You make it sound like you've got him on a leash."

She gave a chuckle and a smile. "I hold many leashes, whether I want to or not," she became serious once more. "And if that isn't enough, I am sure I can arrange for some other form of payment."

"Don't twist my arm," Shepard said simply. "Where is Oraka?"

She rose to her feet, quite gracefully, and gestured toward the door. "He spends his days in a human club down in the Wards, drinking and spreading his lies about me."

"And the universe plays with loaded dice in three, two..." Shepard muttered.

"Excuse me?" Sha'ira asked.

"What club was that?" Shepard asked, already pretty sure of the answer.

"Korra's Den," the Consort said.

"Called it," Shepard muttered. Louder, she addressed the asari before her. "I'll deal with Oraka and be back when he's called off the feud."

She nodded, a clear understanding in her. In fact, the whole time they'd spoken, Shepard never felt like she was talking to an alien. That was odd, especially coming from an asari. "I will be grateful when this difficulty is behind us. Now I will ask you to take your leave. I have clients who are doubtless already anxious to see their appointments filled."

"You don't seem much like I'd expected you to be," Shepard noted, as she walked to the door.

"That is another of my jobs; becoming the right person for each client," the Consort's words came, as she crossed the threshold. Shepard was about to turn and ask her what she meant by that, but the door slammed shut directly behind her, cutting off sight. She stared at the red square which hovered in the center of the door for a moment, before shrugging, and starting back down to the goddamned elevators. Korra's Den again. At this rate, she was going to have to set up a tab.

* * *

Executor Pallin's nail tapped against the table, letting out a clack which reverberated through his embassy chambers. His mandibles flicked with growing consternation the longer he had to wait, and his blood-pressure was probably at a level that Doctor Opij would probably gawk at. It was hard enough to keep a job when people 'conveniently misunderstood' what the law aboard the Citadel was. It was even worse when one of the people who 'misunderstood' was a turian who supposedly carried the badge to enforce it.

"Vakarian, I know we've had our... disagreements in the past," he practiced, trying to find a way to say it that didn't make him sound like green-blooded and soft, and simultaneously not like 'a raging cloaca' as Opij would have called. He scowled, and thought of a new tack. "Vakarian, sometimes I wonder why you couldn't be more like your father. He was a... No, he'll never listen to that."

That was the burden of rank and status. The hierarchy was built from the lowest levels with strict accordance to stature and place. While not as brutally restrictive as, say, the Batarian Hegemony, it was a stratified society. Pallin found himself amongst the higher of the thirty two layers of the Turian Hierarchy, but he'd gotten there by being professional, careful, and having an eye for weeding out problems before they became interminable. And he was starting to get that feeling from the officer he was waiting on.

The door opened, and Pallin leaned back, his hands out before him on the table. Vakarian entered, alright; he did so with another turian very close at his back. Antonius Bellick, a much lower-ranked officer in C-Sec. He probably wouldn't have a momentous career, but he was reliable and dependable. Vakarian was his dipole opposite in that regard.

"Is there a reason you're here, Bellick?" Pallin asked.

"There was an altercation in the Presidium, Executor," Bellick answered smartly. His blue-black eyes flicked toward the source of Pallin's continuing consternation.

"An altercation?"

"There was a hanar in the Presidium causing a public disturbance. I just made sure that he didn't escalate things," Vakarian said smoothly. Pallin turned to Bellick.

"He pulled his gun on the hanar, sir."

"You did what?" Pallin asked, even though he'd heard quite clearly.

"The problem was dealt with and the hanar won't be causing any more problems accosting passers-by," Vakarian said. Pallin could only sigh, palming his face with a three-digited hand.

"Garrus, no matter how much rope I give you, you insist on tying it into a noose," Pallin muttered. "Bellick, you're dismissed."

"Aye, sir."

"It worked," Garrus said simply.

"That's not the point," Venari Pallin interrupted. "There is a way to do these things, Garrus. A way which you constantly ignore for the sake of convenience! What happens when that hanar brings a civil case against this precinct? Have you thought about that?"

"Rules and regulations are getting in the way of actually causing a meaningful difference on this station," Garrus leaned forward, slamming a hand down on the table. "If you'd just get out from behind your desk once and a while, you'd see that."

"Your father would be ashamed to see what his name has become," Venari muttered.

"My father has nothing to do with this," Garrus answered. "In his day, he wasn't so strangled by red tape that he could actually get something done. I don't know if it was the batarians leaving or just a really bad change in leadership, but the last decade has been all down-hill."

"I'm going to ignore that insult on my character," Pallin muttered.

"If it wasn't for all of these restrictions, I guarantee you, we'd be able to remove hundreds of monsters from the Wards. There's no reason that another Saleon couldn't turn up, and I refuse to allow a monster like him to get away again," Garrus stressed.

"We're not here to talk about old cases, Vakarian. We're here to talk about gunfights in the Wards and sloppy detective work. And apparently, threats of lethal violence against hanar. You're going off the rails, and there isn't much more I'll be able to say to prevent severe disciplinary action. If you are willing to make a formal apology to the hanar, and take a pay-cut then maybe I'll be able to keep IA from shuffling you out the door, but..."

"Apologize for doing my job? Never," Garrus shook his head, his arms crossed before his chest. Pallin sighed. "Honestly, I've gotten sick of this. I'm sick of everybody staring over my shoulder, so fixated on doing things the right way that nothing ever gets done. I'm sick of having to let psychopaths walk on technicalities that are a thousand years old."

Pallin nodded, since he knew where Garrus was going. "I think I know what you mean. Maybe C-Sec wasn't the ideal path for you after all."

Now, that was a painful admission. After all, Pallin had been the one to bring the son of the legendary Haephes Vakarian into C-Sec at such a young age; practically straight out of his mandatory stint in military training. The decision, and more importantly the ramifications, were on Pallin's shoulders every bit as much as they were on Garrus'. Garrus leaned back.

"You want my badge and my gun, don't you?" Garrus asked.

"We both know you don't use the gun I issued you, so I'll take it out of your locker, but yes," Pallin said. He sighed, shaking his head with dismay. "I wish there was another path to take. Realistically, I just wish you'd be a little bit more..."

"Quiet?" Garrus asked, head canted to one side.

"Reasonable," Pallin offered. Garrus shook his head, mandibles pulling in in consternation.

"We both know I'm not a reasonable person. I've gotta do what needs to be done."

Pallin nodded. "Then you won't be doing it here. I'm sorry, mister Vakarian, but your services are no longer required by Citadel Security. May you find better fortune with your future endeavors."

Garrus didn't say a word. He just pulled the omnitool from his arm and set it down onto Pallin's desk, before walking out of the office. Pallin just sighed at the whole affair. The galaxy was simply not ready for a turian so bloody wrong-headed. They already had Saren to worry about. His eyes flicked upward to the ceiling for a moment. Dear spirits, he invoked silently, please don't let the boy follow in those same, dark footsteps.

* * *

Korra's Den was much as Shepard remembered it. It flowed with smooth jazz and raucous conversation. Well, it did, until Shepard opened the door, and both stopped instantly. True, the music did continue, but as soon as the quarian singing caught sight of Shepard, she halted mid-note with a terrified squeak and hurled herself behind the pillar which fastened the stage to the bar. The other musicians hit a sour note, but kept playing. After a few moments, mostly of Shepard looking around the room and most notably not shooting anybody, the conversations started up again, and the quarian came out of hiding, returning to her singing. Shakily.

Shepard moved down into the area of the bar. "Welcome to Korra's Den," the bartender said, his voice carrying the same cat-like vibration that most turian voices had. He seemed mostly focused on his job. "What will you be having?"

"Information," she said.

"Sorry, I don't serve that. Only drinks," he said. Then, he looked up at her, and blinked. "Oh. You. I suppose I have you to thank for owning this place," he said.

"So you're the inheritor of the bar?"

"Yeah, I'm still not allowed into the back room," the turian cast a thumb over his shoulder. "C-Sec hasn't even finished shampooing the former owner's brain out of the carpet yet."

"They clean crime-scenes?"

"They've got a whole division dedicated to it," the turian chuckled. "Something about the absolute necessity of sanitary conditions on the Citadel. I think they just don't like having human blood on the ground around turians. Like we could even get sick off anything you've got," he laughed aloud at that.

"What's so funny?" Shepard asked. He stared at her for a moment.

"Because of the proteins," he answered. She stared flatly. "You do know we're Dextro, right?"

"And that means...?"

The turian shrugged. "Our bodies just do things differently than yours do. And the rest of the galaxy, pretty much. We can't eat your food, and we can't drink your alcohol unless it's absolutely one-hundred-percent alcohol-by-volume. And who'd drink that drek? But that doesn't matter. Do you want something? I'm pretty sure I've got some Batarian Whiskey down here, if you're feeling adventurous."

"The only thing I do with anything batarian is shoot it. Out of a cannon. At a black hole," Shepard said testily.

"Fine. We've got brandy from a monastery on Lesuss. It's a famous vintage," he offered.

"I'm looking for a turian general. Anybody like that in here?" she waved the bottle of blue liquor aside.

"Well," he craned his neck, and pointed to a booth in a corner, where a dark-skinned... plated?... turian was staring up at the jazz quartet, his gaze distant and unfocused. "We've got one guy who keeps going on about 'discipline' and 'the fate of traitors'. I figured he's just an angry drunk. Honestly, if you're his ride home, I'd be quite thankful."

"I'm something like that," Shepard said, cracking her knuckles and moving to the booth. Notably, it was the same booth Adeks had been sitting at yesterday. He didn't even register her until she sat down opposite him. "Septimus Oraka?"

He finally turned away from the quarian and stared at her, his mandibles twitching around his very sharp teeth. "I am he. And who would that make you?"

"Somebody who should have better things to do," Shepard said. "You've been causing a lot of problems for Sha'ira with the things you've been saying."

"Good!" Oraka slurred slightly. "Maybe she can feel a thousandth the pain that she's given me. Then the galaxy will be a just and proper place," his head dipped, until his brow was almost pressed upon the tabletop. He shook it slowly. "I've seen... so many horrible things in this galaxy. There as only one woman who could make me forget them. And she rejects me. Me! Septimus Oraka, general of the Seventh Turian Fleet!"

Shepard shook her head with disdain. "Some general you are, getting shit-faced because an asari turned you down. Have you even thought about how bad this makes turians look? That they can't even stand a little bit of rejection? No wonder we managed to press you right to the Trebia Relay; you roll over at the first sign of resistance."

"You wouldn't have made it past the Relay, I assure you," Oraka said, slowly throwing off the paralytic inebriation. "We would have crushed you into dust if you tried coming through. And for your information, those troops can kiss my leathery backside. I was just going to retire, to be with _her_..."

"And this is probably why she kicked you to the curb," Shepard said without humor. "She saw that you were going soft, in more ways that one I can only assume. So she had no more use for you."

"How dare you talk about her like that!" Oraka shouted, banging a fist against the table. Shepard smirked.

"How is it any worse than the things you've been saying?" she pointed out. Oraka fumed for several long seconds, before he leaned back in his seat, and let out a weary sigh.

"You're right, human. Spirits preserve me, but you are right. I'm the reason she rejected me. That is the only truth that there is, and I'm being an idiot for not admitting it. A drunken, old idiot," Oraka commiserated.

"If you ever want to even be worth having another shot, you're going to have to be better than this," Shepard said.

"So just straighten up and act like a general?" Oraka asked. He gave a chuckle. "You know, for her, it's worth the effort. Even if she won't take me back, she's worth trying."

"Good," Shepard said, turning away.

"One more thing, human," the turian at his back said. Shepard moved back to the table but didn't sit down. "Some of the lies... weren't exactly lies. There was an elcor whom I learned some compromising things about. I made it seem like they were being spread from her. Take this manifest; it shows how I got his information. Tell him where it really came from. She doesn't deserve what I did to her, even by proxy."

Shepard glanced down at the data, and raised an eyebrow. So the target was the elcor ambassador? She glanced distantly for a moment as she considered that the old Avatar Effect was still in fine form; there was no such thing as coincidence when she or any of her generational precursors were nearby. Notably, this was the person who'd been giving Wrex such a hard time. "Alright. I'll deal with this. And you... Just drink whatever the turians use for coffee and shape up. I never thought I'd say it to a turian, but come on, man! You're a soldier for gods' sake!"

"Maybe after I finish this drink," Oraka said, and set about nursing the last of many cups on the table. Shepard just shook her head. Sometimes, she wondered why she even bothered.

* * *

The lights of the Normandy were pale and blue tinted. Not surprising given that the ship wasn't entirely of human design; turians could see better in blue light than humans could, and it let them keep their night vision if power failed. But all in all, it was more than sufficient for a gunnery chief to do her work, and in her work, she found some degree of satisfaction.

Unlike the other who was stalking around the bay of the Normandy. Al'Wahim gave a glance to the scarred biotic who was seemingly trying to wear a hole through the deck panels with her bootsoles. Al'Wahim kept her peace, though, and kept her guns clean. If nobody else was going to do it, then she would fill the breach. After all, she had to earn her keep aboard this ship. "Where is he?" the biotic demanded tensely.

"And whom do you wait for?" al'Wahim asked.

"Stop eavesdropping, sand-foot," Nilsdottir barked. The Si Wongi soldier turned and gave her a wan expression.

"Sand-foot? I expected a greater and more depraved form of obscenity from you. Something which cut to the bone and saw me bleed. But you default to ethnic slurs? Shameful," she tutted primly

"Yeah, well... fuck you!" Nilsdottir answered.

"You are waiting for the civilian Murtock, yes?" al'Wahim asked as she pulled the buffer from the Banshee that she'd brought with her from Eden Prime. She gave a cluck of her tongue and a shake of her head. At this rate, it'd be worn down to a nub in a matter of weeks. And Avenger frame rifles were supposed to be reliable! Hah! Cheap is what they were!

"If I wanted somebody watching my every fuckin' move – which I don't! – then I'd lurk around Alenko. You can just piss off," Nilsdottir snapped. Al'Wahim frowned a moment, though, as she quickly put the biotic's favored shotgun back together.

"The man is a source of confusion," al'Wahim admitted. "I did not know that there were to be civilian contractors aboard this ship."

"We're already playing host to two different kinds of alien, and you're worrying about the guy who cleans the toilets?" she asked with confusion.

"I hold strong reservations about the quarian, and stronger in that the Commander seems intent to bring other aliens aboard," al'Wahim admitted. "They are not human, they cannot understand human thoughts, and will think less of us then they do their own. They will use us to their ends. I am not confused by this, I am only annoyed by it. Confusion finds me in other places. Like your Murtock."

"I ain't your girlfriend, sandbender. I don't gossip in a corner like you do," the biotic muttered harshly.

"I am no sandbender. Were I, I would still take up the rifle. It is in my blood. Were it not for my ancestors, you would likely have fought 'gainst the turians with swords and bows. You care deeply for this Murtock, yes?"

"Just 'cause he tends to show up naked in my bunk, don't think that means I care about him," she said harshly. Al'Wahim raised a brow at that. "Oh, what now? Are you laughing at me?"

"I think you do care for him. I only wonder why?"

Nilsdottir glared at al'Wahim for a long moment, before turning and leaning against one of the great struts which held up the ceiling from the deck. "I've... got a hard time trusting people. Always have. Don't know why. When my back was against the wall, Murtock could have done just about anything he wanted to me. Instead, he peeled me off the wall, put a loaded shotgun in my hand, and told me to go nuts. I figured I should return the favor."

"Sexually."

"What? No. Well, yeah, but..." she shook her head. "He needed a way out. I gave it to him. Now shut up, go back to playing with your guns, and stop goddamned talking!"

"As the biotic wishes," al'Wahim said with a small smile, which didn't go unnoticed by the irate biotic. Then again, irate was pretty much the best that one could hope for from her, apparently. That was something else that al'Wahim didn't understand. How somebody so prone to wroth and rage – and so frequently demoted! – could still be in the service. She glanced aside. "Why are you not a mercenary?"

"What are you talking about?" Nilsdottir demanded.

"Your temperament speaks more to fighting for money than for cause. And the freedom would, at a blush, seem to better suit. So why do you cleave to the Alliance?" al'Wahim asked.

She shook her head. "I'm done talking to you," she said, walking away. Al'Wahim only shook her head lightly at the lost chance to have her curiosity sated. She didn't doubt, if she remained aboard the Normandy, she would have ample opportunity to learn more. If all else failed, she would simply have to speak with Lieutenant Alenko. He seemed in the know about a great many things.

The elevator opened even as Nilsdottir was approaching it, showing the fairly long haired man who was frequently unshaven, his grin showing several broken teeth. The edges of tattoos peeked up past the neck of his blue and white jumper. This would be the Murtock character she had so enamored upon. Nilsdottir shoved the advancing Murtock back into the lift.

"Whoa, babe, what's up?"

"We're getting off the ship. You're taking me out for dinner."

"I thought you said you had an itch," Murtock asked.

"Yeah, well, I'm learning the benefits of delayed gratification. Now shut up and treat me like a lady."

As the door slid shut, al'Wahim got one final glance of him looking utterly baffled. "...are you sure you're a lady?" he asked, just as the bulkhead slid into place.

"Oh, fuck you!" Nilsdottir's voice came, muffled though it was, through the layers of explosion resistant metal, which brought a distant chuckle to the Si Wongi's face. Nilsdottir was angry, the Gods were in Heaven, and all was right with the galaxy.

* * *

"Delighted welcome: Hello human. Welcome to the embassy of my people."

Shepard felt a moment's pause as she looked upon the elcor which inhabited the room. She'd learned a lot about the elcor when she was young. Unlike the turians, whom she'd had no interest in, and the batarians which she presumed lawless savages, the elcor had seemed so like kindred spirits. They were grey of hide, their faces blunt and beady-eyed, and stood at a remarkable height. Their great arms were coated with dense muscle, and were completely capable of mashing anything that angered them into a paste. But they were so long of temper as a species and even down to their surliest scum, that only the hanar were more polite and friendly. They managed to be a part of galactic society for almost a thousand years, and had never started a single war. There was a time when Shepard respected that.

The room was white, as most of the Citadel's Presidium was. She was starting to get tired of white. Also present was another elcor standing nearby, twitching slightly, while a volus in those nearly-spherical suits stood in a degree of discontent nearby. "Is one of you ambassador Xeltan Honsnori Goribashnu?"

"Distracted and upset: I am," the one standing aside the desk answered.

"Heh," Even Shepard couldn't withstand the chuckle actually being in the room with these things brought about.

"With honest concern: How may we help you today?" the other asked. "I am Calyn Kyormin Danazrid, and I am the ambassador of the elcor peoples on the Citadel."

Shepard had a moment of confusion. "I thought Xeltan was the ambassador."

"They both are, earth-clan," the irate volus answered, his breath hissing as he had to suck deep of the methane-mixture that the volus used to survive. "Another insult from the Council. Not only do they reject the Vol Protecterate from a seat on their august body despite all that we've done for them, they force me to work in a shared space with both of these... newcomers!"

"Chastising rebuke: Din, we are only newcomers to you by two centuries. The Council only accepts those who are willing and capable of fighting external threats. With solemnity: for all their savvy, the volus are not great warriors," Calyn pointed out. They spoke mostly through small gestures and pheremones amongst themselves, so had to preface everything they said to make it clear to aliens. Shepard had found it adorable in her youth. Now, she just found it... well, still adorable, but she'd never admit it aloud.

"Bah! The humans will have a seat before the volus, with the way that the Council made them their pet," Din answered with a wave of his stubby arm.

"Pet? How are we their pet?" Shepard demanded. "They look down on us like we've got a communicable disease, ignore everything we say, overlook us on every meaningful decision..."

"With strained patience: please ignore Din Korlack's anger. It is not directed at you personally. With pride: Xeltan and I both provide our services to the council as ambassadors, as all perspectives of elcor culture must have representation. I provide the male perspective. Xeltan, the female."

"You're female?" Shepard asked.

"With annoyance and barely concealed tension: I thought that it was obvious," Xeltan answered.

Shepard glanced between the two elcor. Both were wearing pants, but besides that, only the gravity mat which they wore on their backs to be comfortable in the comparatively puny gravity of the Presidium. Then again, since the ring only had three-fifths Earth gravity, it wasn't exactly comfortable for Shepard, let alone for something which evolved on a four G world.

She shook her head. "You've been putting pressure on a krogan named Urdnot Wrex recently, am I right?" she asked, arms folded.

"With shame and outrage: the consort Sha'ira is using him to spread information which would compromise my authority as ambassador. I cannot say more. It is too embarrassing."

"Well, you can leave both Wrex and Sha'ira alone," Shepard said, handing a pad toward the blunt face of the elcor. It daintily reached up with one of the fat-fingered hands it was balancing on and took the thing, holding it close to its face.

"With shock and alarm: these are the facts that were being held over me. Confused: how did you find these, human? With pitiable humility: what do you want from me?"

"What? Nothing," Shepard shook her head. "These were being spread by a turian, not the Consort. And he had to jump through some extreme hoops to get them. So I'm pretty sure that nobody who could use that against you actually has access to it."

"With overwhelming relief: thank you, human. You have cushioned a great fall," the entire massive frame of the thing drew down for a moment, tension leaving it. Then, its great head peeked up again, and its... mouth-like thing fluttered for a moment. "With sudden alarm: I have done disservice to the Consort, and must atone for it. Please forgive me, human, but I must go at once."

"You can go after the day's work is over, Xeltan," Calyn pointed out in the exact same drab, monotone voice that they used with aliens. But a little girlish part of Shepard let out a very much buried 'squee' as it didn't do the same explaining-before-talking thing that it did with aliens. The rest of Shepard, who had suffered and fought and killed for a decade and more, she just rolled her eyes. "With admiration: thank you, human. You have eased a burden for my comrade. If you have any need of service from the elcor embassy, feel free to ask it."

"Just what we need," Din muttered irately, "an Earth-clan interrupting us at all hours of the day."

Shepard shook her head and started walking to the doors.

"With annoyance: not every human is out to get you, Din. Some of them, like this one, seem to have our best interests at heart."

"Bah. She had an ulterior motive for being here. That's as clear as glass," Din countered. And he was not wrong.

Shepard walked away from the embassies, past the Avina terminal where the holographic asari tried to be more helpful than a computer pop-up, and invariably failed. Across a bridge which overlooked a massive statue of a krogan on one side, and some impressive fountains on the other. This part of the Presidium seemed custom built for people to saunter out of their day-jobs in the embassies, drool over the Consort for a while, buy some over-priced crap, and then take the elevators down to the Wards. Little did she know that she was closer to the truth than she realized.

It was only a matter of minutes at a stiff walk before she reached the entrance to the Consort's bordello. Even as she approached, she pulled her gun from where it clung to her side. Nelyna, still working the entrance, widened her eyes in alarm. And then in confusion when Shepard turned the gun and pressed it into the asari's chest as she moved onward. "I'm sorry, but you can't just go in there without..."

Shepard stopped, and turned, and glared at the asari who was now carrying Shepard's gun. Despite being the armed one in the confrontation, Nelyna flinched. Doubly so when Shepard let out a snort which lit with fire.

"I-I-I'm sure that Sha'ira is expecting you. Please, go right in," she said with the sort of fragile cheeriness that only outright terror could inspire. Shepard didn't really give a damn. She moved past the females of many species and up the stairs at the back of the room. The doors opened before her, and saw that Sha'ira was sitting at the table at the far side of the room, clad in a towel, and still glistening as though she'd just taken a shower. Shepard stopped, silent, for a moment at that.

But then she shook her head. The sooner this was dealt with, the sooner she could get moving again. Saren needed to die. This was an obstacle to that result. "I've done what you asked. Oraka stopped his campaign, and there should be a chastised elcor slinking in here in a few hours," Shepard said.

Sha'ira turned in her seat, and nodded. She rose, rolling her shoulders. "Thank you, Shepard," she said. "That was a matter which, understandably, I couldn't exactly resolve on my own. Urdnot Wrex, I grant you. He will have no more trouble from me from what he's done in the past. I can't extend that offer to any future misdeeds, but I'm sure you understand that."

"It's only sensible," Shepard agreed, still looking the asari in the eye. "Krogan will be krogan, after all."

"You have my gratitude, nonetheless," she said.

Shepard scoffed. "You can't spend gratitude," she said. And there were some thing she desperately wanted to buy. Like a rifle which wasn't so terrible that it qualified as a prison sentence. Sha'ira shrugged.

"I don't make a habit of incurring debts, Shepard. A few credits for your expenses will be transferred to your account. But if you're interested, I also offer a gift of words," she said with remarkable level-headedness, despite her subject matter. Shepard raised an eyebrow at it. "I can see your skin, Shepard. It is hard and unyielding as the scales of any turian. A wall, you build between yourself and those around you. You push them away, so that you cannot feel them. You use your strength against those who wrong you, but you have not yet learned the lessons of restraint and forbearance. Not all problems can be solved with a bullet."

"Most of them can," Shepard said. Sha'ira's glance told Shepard to shut the hell up with the same sort of efficiency as a glare from Admiral Hackett.

"This is who you are, but it is not who you will become," Sha'ira explained. "It is only the foundations of what greatness will come to you. And I am sure that greatness will come. You are better than you believe you are. Remember this, when doubt descends, Shepard."

Shepard glanced to one side. "Really? I don't suck as much as I think I do?"

"Is that insufficient?" she asked.

"...kinda?" Shepard offered. The Consort's brow rose, and she flicked a finger toward a wall, her body glowing blue for a moment. When she did, the lights dimmed slightly, and the soft music which had been playing in the background grew a bit louder. And as she did, every inch of Sha'ira changed. Not the grotesque alteration of the monster-movies. No, this was the most subtle of things, just the tiniest shifts of body-language and posture. But because of that incremental change, she changed from somebody who was almost gender neuter in Shepard's eyes, despite her state of near-nudity, to somebody who was the absolute embodiment of sexual lust.

"Well, perhaps I can offer something else, then?" Sha'ira asked, her lascivious lips now pulling into a venal smile. Shepard's eyes grew quite wide. Then, the towel started to slip. This had just gotten... unexpected.

* * *

The asari at the door seemed quite beside herself. Then again, they frequently did when he was around. Krogan tended to inspire that sort of reaction from most aliens. In fact, in Wrex's long history of dealing with puny aliens, he'd only encountered one which didn't immediately fear and revile his kind, and that was the humans. Instead, they treated krogan like pets. And the krogan let themselves be so treated, which was disgusting and pathetic. That was a grudge for another day, though. He'd had enough of them stacked up that he could stop eating tomorrow and the sheer bile in his hump would probably see him through a decade.

As he stomped closer, he took a moment to glance to his right. The statue of Gatatong Okeer still sneered over the people who walked along the Presidium. He'd been only a few decades old when they made that statue of him. Now, he was probably the oldest sapient being alive. Even Wrex would have to double his own age to come close to that level of longevity. And he had no doubts that something would kill him long before he got the chance. At least they would never take it down. There might not be many krogan, and those that were, never got to come up here, but they would still probably raise a holy stink if they learned that the one glory that the galaxy would admit to them was getting torn down for some politician's ego.

The asari finally noticed him. Not the one he remembered, but then again, the last time he'd been welcome by the consort was about forty years back. Only asari could come close to the sort of life-expectancy, but they tended to be a lot less rooted. "Oh... I'm sorry sir, but we're booked solid for the moment. Is there somebody in particular you want to speak with?"

"No," Wrex answered. He leaned aside, and noted that Shepard's gun was haphazardly tucked into the nook beside her console. "I think I'll just have a sit for a while."

"Um... I'm not sure you're supposed to do that," the asari said. Wrex just let out a sigh.

"Are you going to stop me?" he asked, his tone weary. She glanced from her console to him, then shuddered a moment. "That's what I thought," he muttered. Then, without all the grace and and poise that the krogan were renowned for, he dropped himself onto the well-padded couch, which had the unfortunate effect of creating a very loud creak as the metal buckled just a little bit under his weight. "There. Out of sight so I don't scare off foot traffic."

"Sir, this place is for paying customers only," the asari offered with a very worried tone.

So the blue girl had a quad after all? Or maybe, she just really wanted to keep a job out front where she wouldn't have to deal with the perverts and the volus – when the two didn't overlap. Wrex pulled a couple of credit bars, each one of them a small amount of Eezo pressed into platinum, and tossed them at her. Unlike a chit, they had defined value; notably, he wouldn't need to get them back when he was done. It was the last circulated currency left, ever since the volus took over banking pretty much everywhere. "There. I'm renting a couch," Wrex snapped. She flinched and turned her attentions decidedly elsewhere.

Sha'ira's missive had been fairly unexpected. Doubly so that it landed so quickly. For a human, Shepard had a way of bending people. She also had a very krogan way of solving problems; notably, by punching them until they were no longer problems. He could respect that, in its way. And now, since he knew where Actus was, it was just a matter of getting her pointed in the right direction. Most people said that krogan were impulsive and hasty. Truth was, they were as patient as stone when they had to be. They had to be. Rashness got krogan killed on Tuchanka for millions of years, just as inaction did.

As he sat, he thought, combing through the memories of the last century or so. It was a practice which was once common, widespread amongst the krogan. A meditation, taken in moments of quiet, so that the very old could cull the pointless memories from their minds, and keep the lessons learned from them. Wrex himself could tell anybody who asked a dozen ways to kill a turian, all of them learned first-hand, but not for the life of him recall when exactly he'd learned them. Those memories didn't matter, after all. Other fights, like Aleena? Those ones were worth holding on to.

Wrex sifted his memories, sitting in a brothel, because if he didn't, he'd get just as crazy as Wreav.

"Hello, Garrus, welcome back," the asari's voice took on a more relieved tone. "Are you here about the... little problem?"

"I'm not an officer anymore, Nelyna," Vakarian's voice came upon the solipsistic morass which Wrex sat in, and caused him to flick his eyes open. He didn't need to turn to see the turian; perk of being prey on the most dangerous planet in the galaxy, they had essentially three hundred sixty degree vision.

"Oh?" Nelyna asked. She glanced toward Wrex, worry still on her face. "I thought that you were here for..."

Garrus turned and gave Wrex a nod. "Wrex," Garrus offered.

"Vakarian," Wrex answered.

"Has Urdnot Wrex caused you any trouble while he's been here?" Garrus asked, obviously expecting a certain answer.

"Well, no, but..." Garrus nodded at that.

"I might not be an expert on the law," Wrex laughed at that, "but I'm pretty sure you can't arrest a krogan for being a krogan. Hell, you couldn't even pull that on a batarian," she fidgeted a bit, and the turian sighed. "Look, if it makes you feel better, I'll keep an eye on him."

"Thank you," she said gratefully. And then, Garrus, still wearing the blue and black C-Sec armor but apparently no longer amongst them, sat down on the other side of the couch, which let out another ominous groan.

"I didn't think I'd see you here. I heard there was bad blood," Garrus offered.

"Was being the operative term," Wrex answered. "So. Finally gave you the boot from the force, did they?"

"You make it sound like you were taking bets," Garrus chuckled.

"_I was_. And you couldn't have lasted another three weeks? Bastard, you just cost me a thousand credits."

"Well, for what its worth, I hear some physicist down in the Wards won the pool," Garrus pointed out. "I'd ask you what you were doing here, but I think we both know who you're waiting for."

"I might surprise you," Wrex said.

"Shepard," Garrus answered. So in fact he didn't. "I'm surprised you're looking to work with her. Her anti-alien sentiments are pretty well known."

"Anti-_batarian_, and the way those idiots have been acting the past few centuries, they deserve getting human boots up their asses," Wrex shrugged. "She doesn't seem to have any trouble with your kind beyond the post-war jitters."

Garrus nodded for a moment, leaning forward on the couch. "That's... relieving. I'd heard some dark things about her from one of our agents who had friends in the Alliance."

"Such as?"

"Butcher of Torfan," he answered. "Only saved from a lengthy prison sentence because she was... whatever those humans call that..."

"Avatar," Wrex supplied the term.

"Yeah. I always wondered what it'd be like to be a bender."

"Are you sure you're not?" Wrex asked, a sarcastic smirk on his face. "Humans have the edge on us there. Where a krogan walks, he walks with thunder. But them? They can throw lightning and ice and even fly, without a speck of Eezo in their brains. It hardly seems fair," Wrex said.

"You've been giving this some thought."

"I've had a very slow couple of decades," Wrex justified.

"So. How long has she been up there?" Garrus asked. Wrex glanced to his suit's built-in chronometer. He was too old to fart around with omnitools, and they were too fragile anyway, considering the way he fought. So he'd been meditating for more than an hour? It seemed to pass so quickly...

"A while," Wrex answered.

"You don't think that..." Garrus asked. But the answer to that particular question came staggering out of the back room of the Consort's chambers, her clothes untucked and obviously recently put back on. Her red hair, which had been tied into a tight bun at the back of her head last Wrex saw her, now spilled tangled and disheveled across her back. And she had the most hilarious look of utter bafflement on her face as she came to a stop before the krogan and the turian that Wrex couldn't deny himself at least a bit of a chuckle.

"Shepard, you look... rested," Garrus said with a smirk.

"I... It was so... _pebbly_..." Shepard said, obviously not entirely recovered from the experience. Wrex could empathize. Sha'ira had a way. That way could lead to some truly remarkable sensations. "...everywhere pebbly..."

Wrex got to his feet, no doubt to the relief of the couch under him. It almost definitely wasn't built to bear a tonne of weight on it, even with the reduced gravity of the Presidium. "You got the Consort of my back, just like you said you would. Where's your ship?"

"...so blue..."

"Shepard!" Wrex snapped. She shook her head, blinking, as she finally returned to the waking world.

"Does... does this mean I'm a lesbian?" Shepard asked.

"Only if you decided to swear off men forever," Garrus said with a chortle. Shepard affixed the turian with a glare which was more to do with not wanting to admit that she'd been got than any racial tension. "You're going after Saren, right? Well, you can count me in on that."

She finally seemed to cast off the befuddlement completely, and that scowl turned into a querulous expression. "And what about your work with C-Sec?"

"Not an obstacle," the turian answered. He got up, and nodded out the door. "Out there, I can actually get something done, without the red tape strangling me and hounding my every move. Saren's a threat and a black-mark on the name of my entire people. If he's really found a way to control the geth, then he has to be stopped."

Shepard stared up at the turian for a moment, then shrugged. "Welcome aboard. You can take your armor and a footlocker's miscellany. I'll clear it with Anderson."

"And am I going to need to be cleared?" Wrex asked with a dry tone.

"You're a krogan," Shepard said, as though that was an answer. But unlike every other alien in the galaxy, that answer went a different direction than most he was used to. She raised a finger to her ear. "Alenko, are you still shorebound? What? Well, tell him to smarten up or you'll shoot him..."

Garrus and Wrex shared a confused glance, and a shrug.

"Who told you to scan the Keepers?" Shepard asked, followed by a long pause. "Look, I don't care. Just fix it. If they want to kill each other so badly, let them. And send a message to the quarian. She's not going to want to... Really," Shepard glanced ahead. "Never pegged her for the club-going type."

"How _did_ you peg her, Shepard?" Wrex asked.

"A _hugger_," Shepard answered darkly, like it was the worst thing in the galaxy. He could empathize. The last thing he needed was a quarian pyjack hanging off of his chestplate. "We leave at eighteen hundred. Shepard, out."

"Getting into trouble?" Garrus asked.

"Getting into business of somebody elses' which is about the same thing," Shepard answered. "Come on. The ship is moored at the Alliance's private dock off of the C-Sec academy."

That must have cost them a fair bit of coin, Wrex considered. After all, giving anybody non-temporary moorage meant that they were costing themselves commercial traffic. That meant lost money which had to be recuperated instantly and wholly. Wrex tried to think of where he learned about that. The memory attached to the knowledge was long, long gone. Such was the way with krogan memory. They just weren't built to hold so many centuries of memories, like the asari were.

Their path took them up a long elevator. Wrex felt a smirk twist at his broad lips. "So it must be difficult for you to have all of this death and destruction coming from the hands of a turian Spectre, eh Garrus?" he asked.

Garrus just rolled his eyes. "Saren is either a traitor or a madman. Taking him down will restore the good name of turians everywhere."

Wrex laughed. "Good to hear it. I was losing sleep over the prospect of people not loving the turians."

The smirk on Shepard's face showed that she agreed with that assessment. "I just hope that you're willing to pull your weight when push comes to shove. Even if that shove means you have to shoot krogan," Shepard said.

Wrex shrugged. "_Anybody_ who fights us is either stupid, or on Saren's payroll. Killing the latter is business. Killing the former is a favor to the galaxy. Krogan included."

"Good to hear it," Shepard said. The elevator mercifully came to a halt, and opened onto another elevator. Shepard glared at it like it had done her personal wrong, and then moved into it, punching the up button with that same vigor. Tinny, terrible music started to flood in on them as they ascended yet again, which caused Wrex to grind his teeth. One day, the krogan would either be extinct, or have enough of a voice that they could demand the muzak stop, permanently, everywhere. On pain of Crush.

Finally, to break the silence, Wrex cleared his throat. "So. Garrus. Who do you think'd win in a fight between you and Shepard?"

Garrus looked to Wrex, and the krogan half-expected a confused comment, but then, he turned to Shepard, seeming to gauge her very carefully. "Honestly, I can't say. I'm going to have to get back to you on that," Garrus admitted.

Wrex shrugged. "Fare enough."

"Do you size up everybody for a fight, even your allies?" Shepard asked.

"Yes," Wrex pointed out the obvious.

She shook her head, and started walking before the door opened. It managed to drop out of the way just before she walked into it. Instead, though, she started beating feet across an outcropping which jutted out from the outer floors of the Presidium Ring, almost naked to space, with the atmosphere only held inside by a delicate mass-effect field. The ship didn't look like any Wrex had ever seen. Too curvy. Almost like Grandfather said the Rachni used. There were two humans on the dock, waiting for them. One was small, greyed, and looked like the universe used him as a toothing rod. The other... Wrex had taken one look at that man twenty years ago and decided that there were in fact humans whom he felt no desire to pick a fight against. And pointedly, there were humans he wasn't sure he could _win_ against. That sensation remained to this day, despite how much twenty years could do to a human.

"Udina. Anderson," Shepard said.

"Vakarian," Anderson said with a nod.

"Anderson," Wrex muttered.

"Wrex," Anderson answered.

Garrus glanced between all parties. "Shepard?" he asked.

"Don't push it," Wrex said. "It was funny 'till you ruined it."

"So, is this my ship?" Shepard asked, turning away from the one which had caught Wrex's eye, toward a bulky, blocky freighter which had moored opposite it. Slightly disappointing, actually.

"No," the human who was by process of elimination Ambassador Udina said. "Captain Anderson is stepping down from command of the Normandy. It's your ship now."

Shepard leaned back, disgust on her face. "What? No. This will not stand!"

Anderson shook his head. "You needed your own ship, and this one's quick, quiet, and you know her crew. It's the perfect ship for a Spectre, and it _needs_ to be in your hands," Anderson answered the indignation. Shepard glared, but not at Anderson. Even Wrex wouldn't have tried that.

"Come clean with me, Captain. Why are they agreeing this?" Shepard asked. "You owe me that much."

Anderson's face pulled into tightly controlled anger. "I was in your shoes twenty years ago. I was a Spectre, but one mission with Saren and it all fell apart. That man was a monster then, and is a monster now."

Wrex didn't say anything, but he wagered that Saren wasn't this human's biggest problem with being a Spectre. Namely, his inability to be anything close to discrete bordered on krogan. Shepard took a deep breath.

"Saren isn't going to get away from us," She promised.

"We just have to find the Conduit first," Anderson said, which Wrex tucked away for later inquiry. "There, he has the advantage. His geth are combing the Traverse for clues."

"There were reports of geth in orbit over Feros a few days ago," Udina mentioned. "As well, Saren very recently... and not very legally... came into possession of a controlling stock in a biotech firm on Noveria."

"Not very legally?" Garrus asked.

"A spousal claim deferral from Benezia T'Soni to Saren. Which is impossible, since there is no marriage on the books," Udina said. Wrex raised a brow at that. So the little pyjack had a use after all, even if it was tracking paperwork across half a galaxy.

"What about T'Soni? He's obviously controlling her, but how?" Shepard asked.

"It might have something to do with her daughter," Anderson said. "She was last seen delving into a Prothean site in the Therum system. Saren may well have imprisoned her there to gain cooperation from her mother."

"So I guess we have our first stop," Shepard said. "As long as she doesn't turn out to be Mommy's Little Villain, we'll remove Saren's control over the matriarch, and his plan starts to crumble on itself."

"I wouldn't be so confident," Anderson warned. "Saren is a very smart man. He knows how to keep things together, even when they should be flying apart. I hate him, but I will not underestimate him. He's after these Reapers, and it's up to us to stop him from bringing them back."

"But for the love of the gods, Shepard, don't make any messes out there," Udina said with annoyance. "You may have all the fun, but I'm the one left behind to clean everything up."

"I will stop Saren," Shepard swore. "You can deal with the rest."

"Good hunting, then," Anderson said with a nod. "And keep our Avatar out of the fire, Wrex."

"I will offer no such promises," Wrex answered flatly. Then, he stomped his way into the ship he'd be working on for the foreseeable future. There'd be a nice quiet spot for him to have himself a lean; he just had to find it. After all, an hour's contemplation in a whorehouse was hardly enough once you got as old as Wrex.

* * *

Anderson and Udina had left, claiming paperwork in both cases. The aliens had filed in in rapid succession, with the quarian having caught up during the stretch that Shepard was stuck talking to the diplomat and the old soldier. That left her last through the airlock. The Normandy was a ship quite unlike any else in the Alliance fleet. The airlock opened just behind the helmsman, rather than well out from anything vital. But conversely, it was well ahead of the CIC, which was protected from hypothetical incoming fire by all of the bulk of the rest of the ship. Rows of gunners, cyberwarfare specialists, and other soldiers of technical expertise lined the path leading from the helm to the holo-tank which sat nearer the heart of the ship.

It was a small crew, but then again, the Normandy was a small ship.

"Joker," Shepard said, glancing to the man who seemed glued to his pilot's seat. At least somebody was on the ball today. "Bring us out of dock in half an hour. Jump to the Artemis Tau cluster, Knossos system."

"Aye, Commander," Joker said, not looking back. "ETA, about nine hours."

Not bad for a trip two thirds of the way across the galaxy. She turned to leave, but she heard a creak behind her. She turned back, and saw that Joker was trying to rise from his chair, and not succeeding very well. Maybe he was sitting down because he was drunk? Finally, he abandoned rising with a shrug and pivoted the chair slightly toward where the copilot sat. "I heard the news that you'd be replacing Captain Anderson. That just doesn't seem right. Survives a hundred battles against the turians and the batarians, and he ends up getting hamstrung by politics."

"He understood what was at stake," Shepard pointed out. "Not much I could do about it now in any case. What did you want, Joker?"

Joker shrugged, and flicked at the haptic displays, priming the ship-wide intercom. "I figured you might have something you wanted to say to the crew. Now'd be the time."

"And why exactly am I supposed to be delivering rousing speeches? I'm a soldier, not a politician," Shepard dismissed.

"Yeah, but you're _our_ soldier. And call me crazy, but I think you should let them know that," he shrugged. "The whole 'power of a thousand generations of benders' thing couldn't hurt either. Just sayin'."

Her pointed glare told him that she agreed with him, but wasn't happy about it. "Listen up, Normandy. This is your commander speaking," the Avatar said. "We have our orders. Find Saren before he finds the Conduit, and I refuse to allow anything to get in the way of that mission. The council wants to ignore this. No big surprise; they've never helped us in the past and they have no reason to start now. But we don't need their help. We can do this on our own," Shepard rose, her back straight, as she stared up through the displays and past the guts of the Citadel, into the diffracted light of the Widow Nebula. "Wherever Saren goes, we'll be on his heels. When he searches for the Conduit, we'll be the footsteps in the dark which keep him awake at night. If he flees into the blackness of Dark Space, we will follow him, and I guarantee you, he will not escape from us. None of the other species have the guts, grit, or balls to deal with this. Luckily, humanity's got enough to make up for everybody else. As of this moment, Saren Arterius is already dead. He just doesn't know it yet."

"Wow. That was kinda terrifying," Joker pointed out. She turned a look at him. "But in a good way," he offered, throwing up his hands in mock horror. He gave a chuckle. "Look, Anderson would have been proud. Seems like his kind of pep-talk."

"Fancy speeches aren't going to solve any problems," Shepard pointed out, turning away from the helmsman. "The only thing which ever solves a problem is a proper application of metal, at sufficient velocity. And next time I see you, you'd better be sober, Joker."

Whatever answer Joker had to that was lost as Shepard moved through the ship, past where al'Wahim was talking to Pressly. The Si Wongi woman gave a nod to her as she passed, and moved down the stairs. She strode past where Alenko was fiddling with a blinking panel, and ducked into the bunks which she'd temporarily called home. It was something of an irony that she'd ended up bunking opposite Alenko in the ship just as she had both in Republic City, and on that... side-trip... to Tuchanka. Now, though, there would finally be some distance. And she wouldn't be forced to learn through osmosis. She was not an educated woman. She had no time for it. She stopped at the small, almost coffin-like bed. She stared at it a moment. She'd been living in beds like this, sometimes hot-bunking, for almost as long as not. Even when offered better, she still didn't feel... right. She reached under that bunk, into the slot which held her footlocker. With a heave, she pulled it out, slinging it onto her shoulder. Her entire life. Crammed into around a cubic meter.

She hauled her life on her back, across the mess. Nobody spoke to her. Fitting, since she didn't have anything left to say today. People said that there was a post-coital glow about folk; she hadn't had that experience. Momentary bafflement, sure. She had no idea how that had happened. It happened so... quickly. It was like the escalation which almost hit nuclear war, after Avatar Korra's time. She reached the other side of the doors which lead to Anderson's... to her chambers, and leaned on the closing doors. It didn't really sit well with her that she equated casual, unexpected sex with a near-doomsday scenario.

The room had been picked clean of Anderson's possessions. Not surprising. He probably knew that he was out even while Shepard was talking to the disgraced general. She tossed her footlocker onto the table, and cracked its lid. Out came two uniforms, taking up a fraction of the space in the fold-away dresser. A few books on military tactics, penned by Prince Iroh back in the thirty second century. Her predecessor, Avatar Hong's definitive biography of every known Avatar who came before him. Including the gaps when they weren't found for an entire generation. That was... just about it. The vid-chips she'd never gotten around to watching sat in a corner of the locker. Now, she might actually have the chance. The Commander probably had a final say on what got watched during down-time. Other than that, there was just two things.

She picked up the higher of the two objects. It was an old-style photograph, but held up well, even though it had singed edges. It showed a family together. Two girls, one of them little more than a toddler. A man in a grey business suit, a subdued smile on his face. The woman, on the other hand, was beaming, waving toward the camera. The second child was covered in mud, so that the only thing visible on her face, really, was the bright white of grinning teeth, as she sat on the haunches of a somewhat amused looking elcor.

There was a dull thud as the docking clamps let go of the hull, and the ship started to slip into the black. She stared at that photograph. At the man. At the woman, with the pale blue arrow pointing down toward the bridge of her nose as she stood proud in her orange and yellow dress. At the mud-caked girl, for whom only glimpses of similar shades could be seen. How had she ever been that... young? Innocent?

Everybody in that picture except her was dead, now.

She put the picture back into the corner of the locker, and pulled out the last contents of it. It was dark orange and yellow and red and black. Only the first two colors were supposed to be there. It was also much too small for her to wear. But then again, it had been more than half a lifetime since she'd worn the kavi. Almost that long since she'd airbent in any meaningful capacity. It was... actually harder than waterbending, now. Which confused her to no end, since it had came as easily as breathing when she was young. She shook her head, a quiet, hollow sigh rising up in her throat, as she dropped her own singed, bloody Air Nomad kavi back into the footlocker.

That was a person she could never be again.

* * *

Codex Entry (Citadel Races: Culture) THE AVATAR

_Seemingly unique to all of the species in the galaxy, the Avatar is a human (having not appeard to any other race) who is able to 'bend' or manipulate all four of the 'elements' at will, rather than being limited to only a single type. The Avatar also serves in a diplomatic and spiritual leadership role amongst humanity, historically. The position is neither hereditary nor appointed, and can only be bestowed by birth._

_The Avatar (or perhaps, bearer of the 'Avatar Spirit') is a reincarnation of those men and women who have come before. An Avatar is born on the day of the death of the previous incarnation, and was once usually identified early in childhood, but only trained in their non-native element from the age of sixteen onward. This practice came to an abrupt halt with the Purge of the Air Nomads by the Fire Lord Sozin. From that point on, rather than knowing whom the Avatar was and then training him or her once reaching a proper age, it was a matter of simple chance that the correct child could be found. With the rapidly spiking population after the end of the First World War, and the number of benders commensurably increasing, identifying the Avatar amongst all newborns, even if the proper element was known or the time of death of the previous incarnation was had with certainty, became a daunting prospect. Several incarnations were not discovered at all within the last two centuries._

_Historically, the Avatar held a position of superseding politics and rank. An Avatar's word was more than law; if demanded, an Avatar was well within her rights to empty a throne, rebuke an army, or punish a criminal, regardless of stature nor nationality. This power was clawed back sharply after the incarnation of Avatar Aang, although Avatar Korra still managed to impose upon the politics of the day, it was much more from within the system. In the modern era, there is no official political sanction or power which is af__forded the Avatar, but a certain degree of respect for the position is usually given, out of the sake of tradition._

_The most well-known and feared ability of an Avatar is 'entering the Avatar State'. In this state of heightened connection to the past incarnations, an Avatar can act with the combined strength, skill, and endurance of all of his or her previous incarnations. This tends to result in bending of a spectacular scale, including but not limited to wholescale manipulation of oceanic tides, physical rearrangement of the surface of a planet, or fundamentally altering the state of another person's soul. _

* * *

_Leave a Review_


	4. The Archeologist

Therum. A human colony, although one only taken recently due to its less than hospitable nature, it was one of the primary sources of heavy metals for the Alliance's ravenous appetites. Orbiting a hot, bright star, and having a scorching surface did little to appeal to colonists, but the call of platinum so plentiful that it liberally erupted from the surface of the planet made up for such minor peccadilloes. That the planet also seemed to have been favored by the Protheans during their time at the forefront of the galaxy was an additional treat, one only discovered when human feet started shifting earth. Some problems, though, were much more effective at dissuading human presence.

One such problem stood four and a half meters tall, its shell dull white and lightly scratched. A long neck reached up from the turtle-like shell of its back, terminating in a mechanical iris which belched white light. Just under that light and optic aperture was a second opening, that one for a small mass accelerator cannon. The quarians called it a geth Armature, a militarized heavy lifting drone. The miners of the region referred to it – briefly – as 'what the hell is that thing? Oh my gods help me!'. Needless to say, the four spike-like feet of the Armature were coated in red, both from the ferrous dust of the dirt, and the blood it walked through heedlessly.

The Armature swung its head to and fro, runtimes calculating if there were any more hostiles that needed to be dealt with in its singularly unpleasant manner. Organics needed to be destroyed. They were a threat to the geth. The Sovereign had said so. The Sovereign had to be right. The math agreed with it. It swung its eye, viewing from abrupt horizon to horizon, even going so far as to scan the field of flowing molten rock which belched up from the cracks in the supervolcano the platform was standing atop. Nothing.

Of course, the geth made the one mistake people kept making when dealing with airbenders.

It didn't look up.

While the ignition of jump-jets gave the Armature a moment's warning, it was far from enough to move the platform. The runtimes were already abandoning the platform into the shell of a Colossus several kilometers away when five tonnes of the M35 Mako Infantry Fighting Vehicle came crashing down onto its 'head', smashing that neck down and into the shell which housed its electronic entrails. There was a grinding sound of a geth trying to burst transmission, before the weight of the Mako removed even that capacity, snapping the torso from the legs, and driving it down into the stone hard enough to cause the shell to crack right open. Then, with another flutter of jets, the Mako bounced off of the now defunct Armature, and came to a halt a few meters beyond it.

"Good God," Alenko swore, sweating profusely where he sat, eyes bugged out in his helmet. "Do you always drive like that, Commander?"

"What? Did we hit something?" Shepard asked from the controls of the IFV.

"You drive like a krogan," Wrex noted where he sat comfortably. Beside him, the scarred biotic gave a grin.

"That some sort of compliment, big guy?" Nilsdottir asked.

"What do you think?" Wrex asked without anger. More like... a healthy dose of anticipation.

"Pardon Commander, but I have some experience with this device," the Si Wongi soldier rose a finger from where she was strapped in. "Would it trouble you if I drove?"

"I'm behind the wheel," Shepard said testily. "Just give me a second to adjust the drive core and we'll be off."

"Did it feel like we hit something back there?" Alenko asked.

"Probably just landed wrong on a rock or something," Wrex gave a shrug.

Shepard turned on the rear facing camera, and gave a moment of a smirk. But that smirk was short lived. There were many more geth where that one came from. With a foot driven right down to the firewall, she accelerated the Mako along hot dirt and scorching stone, toward a dig-site at the heart of an active volcano.

Maybe the old vids weren't quite as inaccurate as she'd feared?

* * *

**Chapter 4**

**The Archeologist**

* * *

Where Therum was a seat of terror and violence, which was climaxed by even greater violence and terror as the Avatar no doubt set about her, aboard the Normandy, the scene was one of relative boredom. True, there was an ever-present risk of imminent bloody death, but the crew kept themselves wary, but not at full alert. Geth ships were in system, but even a pea-shooter like the Normandy's cannon would have been able to take out the roughly bee-shaped craft. So the crew kept close to their stations, and those at the comms and the sensors kept a wary eye. The rest had a lot more freedom of movement.

Especially the aliens.

"Oh, damn it," Garrus swore as he was once again killed. "This guy's got to be cheating."

His outburst caught the attention of the quarian who was usually keeping to herself down in the engine rooms. She leaned over his shoulder, and he could well imagine her eyebrow raising at the game which was playing on the console. "_Should you be playing that right now?_" she asked.

"As I see it, unless you need something shot from very far away, or a gun kept in its finest trim, I'm not of much use. The krogan in the engine room doesn't like me hanging around the guns. I can't imagine why," Garrus answered wryly.

"_I'm surprised that the humans and the krogan get along so well. Don't the krogan hate just about everybody?_" Tali asked, still looking over Garrus' shoulder. "_Oh, they're coming in from..._"

"I see them," Garrus waved her off. She didn't move back, though. "As I understand it, there's a bit of a funny story about humans and the krogan. Want to hear it?"

"_Have we got much else to do?_" she asked.

"Well, the next time I..." and once again, his virtual skull was burst by a virtual slug. "Damn it! Same guy! This guy's been ventilating my head all day!" Garrus shook his head, a smirk coming to his mandibles. "He might be a better shot than me. Well, now that I've got a moment; the humans discovered the krogan about twenty years before they ran into us. You remember the Relay 314 Incident? They jump out of what was Batarian Space, opening every Mass Relay they can find. My species gets a stick up their butts, and they start a war. But with the krogan, it was a lot more... personal."

"_How so?_" Tali asked.

Garrus turned and leaned against the console which usually stood beside where the Mako was berthed. With the machine down on Therum, it meant it was now essentially in the middle of nowhere. "Well, as I hear the history told, the humans jumped past Arcturus and were scanning a planet for minerals. Instead, they found electromagnetism. They sent down their scout team, headed by a human woman, to investigate whether they had, in fact, discovered whether they were not alone in the universe. What they discovered was a crashed ship full of krogan," Garrus said. The faintly glowing bits which Garrus presumed were her eyes widened a bit at that.

"_It must have been a slaughter,_" Tali said.

"Not quite," Garrus said, scratching at his nails. "The human in charge goes up to these aliens, who were about four times bigger than her – she wasn't a big woman, I hear – and they start shouting at her. Now, she can't speak krogan, and they didn't have translators back then. But they start getting pushy, and she's standing her ground. Until one of them gets way to close, and pulls a knife on her. So she headbutts him."

"_She __**headbutted**__ a krogan?_" Tali asked, incredulously.

"Yep, although I'm told she was wearing a helmet at the time. Put him on his scaly backside. The other krogan start laughing at that one, and he decides he's not going to stand for getting insulted by something so small and squishy. So he comes barreling at her, and she 'earthbends' at him. Turns out, even a krogan can't charge through a three foot thick stone wall. That pretty much stopped it dead. When he wouldn't back down, she spent the next five minutes bashing him with rocks. Finally, he's unconscious, which I understand is rare for krogan, and she's standing on his chest, fists in the air, demanding to know in a language that they didn't speak if they wanted more where that came from."

"_I'm almost afraid to ask what happened next,_" Tali said.

"Well, the other krogan decided that the one who'd been talking for them was an idiot, an that Yange Beifong deserved respect. Especially since she seemed to be a Thunderwalker. As I understand it, there aren't many of those outside of Tuchanka. The krogan agreed – through interpretative dance, I have to assume – that they could leave the deserted world and come to Earth, since it was obvious their ship was completely trashed. With their navigator, captain, and all of the batarians who were crew dead, they didn't have much other option. So they lived on Earth for twenty years, before humanity figured out how to get them back to Tuchanka. And by then, some of them decided to stay."

"_The humans allow another species to live permanently on their planet?_" Tali asked, baffled. He could understand why; the same largess was hardly extended to the quarians.

"As I understand it, there's some islands just north of their 'Fire Nation' which are about as deadly a place as exists in this galaxy. The kind of place where even the herbivores and the plantlife is trying to kill you. To the krogan, it must be a great place to work off a bit of homesickness," Garrus said with a shrug. "You could ask the engineer more. I'm pretty sure he'd have more of the story. He was there for all of it, after all."

"_I might have to ask him,_" Tali agreed. She then looked down at the console again. "_I'm confused why you're playing that. Isn't it made by humans?_"

"Humans aren't that bad. They make good movies, better music, outstanding art, and fantastic video games," Garrus said. He turned, and respawned into the game. "Even if it is a game first made so they could shoot at the spiky-faced aliens, it's tight, and lets me feel like I'm keeping my skills sharp even when I'm... Damn it!"

He'd barely cleared cover when he was headshotted again. By the same guy.

"I'm going to fire off a message to the Admins. This guy is obviously using a targeting VI," Garrus muttered. Tali shook her head.

"_I wouldn't be too sure of that_," she said, pointing at the name. Defranz1183. "_Quarian marines tend to be pretty good shots_."

"How do you know he's quarian?" Garrus asked.

"_Defranz was one of our cities on Rannoch. It's a naming tradition amongst our people that prominent cities from Rannoch be used to name ships; that way, we still feel like we have some connection to our homeworld. Defranz was where my culture came from,_" she said. Garrus shrugged.

"Well, you might have a point," he said. He then respawned again, walked fifteen steps, and as soon as he cleared the spawn bunker's flange, he let out another strangled noise as his virtual avatar was thrown from his feet by a slug through the head. "I'd be more annoyed if he wasn't such a good shot."

And then a message popped up.

Defranz1183:Maybe you should try playing on the initiate servers? You might last longer.

Garrus stared at it, then turned to Tali. "Do quarian marines tend to trash-talk?" Garrus asked levelly.

"_How should I know?_" Tali asked. And because of Garrus' fuming, he didn't stop to wonder if she might be lying a bit. She then looked aside, at something which was sniffing at her leg. It was about a meter long, had white and brown fur, and large, round, black eyes. "_One more thing. What is that?_" she said, pointing down at the creature which she seemed fairly sure was going to try eating her. After all, it wasn't too dissimilar from a varren.

Garrus spared it a glance as he respawned. "Giant Space Hamster," he answered simply.

"_What is it doing in the cargo hold?_" Tali followed up.

Garrus just shrugged his ignorance, moved out into the virtual battlefield, and got headshotted again.

* * *

Part of what made the Mako such a popular IFV was that it was remarkably easy to drive. Any idiot fresh out of Basic could jump behind the controls, put the hammer down, and cross nearly fifty kilometers of terrible terrain in an hour. The mass effect fields, generated by the tiny drive-core at the machine's heart, reduced the effective weight of the machine to roughly eight kilograms. Notably, because of a design oversight, they did so in an unusual way, projecting mass in directions it shouldn't go. That meant that it could climb almost ninety degrees. It also had armor thick enough to keep the crew from getting killed by anything less than a disruption torpedo, as long as its barriers were up. Both of those proved vital.

Because the way Shepard was driving, it would require a level of divine intervention to keep everybody and everything on the mining colony of Therum from getting killed by eight kilograms of very, very destructive metal. The krogan in the back seat tapped his fingers against an arm with impatience. He'd probably been on hot-drops against entire hives of feral vorcha in a drop-pod a fraction as tough as this. In a word, he'd seen worse. The humans, though, had varying reactions to the madness. As Shepard twisted her control slightly so that she swerved a little bit to the left, just enough to catch a geth which was trying to shoot at her in the face with her fore armor plate, the scarred biotic let out a whoop of triumph. No doubt, celebrating the resounding clunk of defunct synthetic life as it was dashed to bits under their transit.

Alenko, on the other hand, had undone the majority of his restraints, and activated his full Fortification suite, leaving him sitting about a millimeter above the actual seat, the stacked kinetic barriers actually levitating him slightly, as he sweated profusely and waited for this death-ride to end. Operating in his vein of thinking, the rifleman across from him had her hands clasped white-knuckle tight – which was impressive considering the chocolatey tone of her skin – and quietly but intensely prayed to the gods of her people. Praying to Djehuti to protect her from madness. Praying to Atum that she would see another sunrise. Praying to Sobki... well, the god of the water was hardly an ideal target, but at the moment, she felt an urge to cast a very, very wide net.

"Oooh. Big one," Shepard said, a sadistic smirk on her face. She slammed her other foot down, and the jump-jets built into the frame of the Mako sent the machine catapulting up. Then, with a flick of the hand, a procedure she'd actually practiced as soon as she heard that a Mako was going to be aboard her ship, she turned off all of the mass reduction from the drive-core of the IFV as it hurtled through the air. Therefore, rather than eight kilograms of speeding death, it was closer to ten tonnes, traveling seventy kilometers an hour, in an almost graceful arc. After all, it was hard to make a ballistic trajectory weep.

That arc ended with the mother of all car-crashes, as almost twelve-thousand Newtons of force slammed into something almost tough enough to resist it. But not quite. Everybody was hurled in their braces, which caused a not inconsiderable amount of bruising to the pilot, as the back end of the Mako dropped slowly, before slamming into the ground. The alarm klaxons on the dashboard cried out that the structural integrity of the vehicle was essentially zero, and that the drive shaft was missing.

"We've arrived," Shepard said.

"Took you long enough," Wrex noted with a level of composure that even the biotic couldn't match. Nilsdottir had, after all, been thrown hard when the crash happened, and wasn't wearing nearly as much armor as the rest of them to ameliorate the hit.

"What did you drive us into?" Alenko asked, bewildered.

"Remember when we ran over an Armature about three klicks back?" Shepard asked, as she undid what buckles she could, and tore out which buckles were stuck.

"It is not a memory I shall ever forget," al'Wahim pointed out, her hands still gripped together.

"Yeah, well, I think this one was their mommy," she said, and pushed at the door. It, too, was warped out of shape, and stuck. She took a breath, placed her hand on the metal panel beside the door, and then sunk in her fingers. With a grunt of angry effort, she tore, and the metal moved with her hand as though it were damp cardboard, opening a hole which she then kicked free of its moorings. The heat hit her in the face like a sock full of pudding, instantly driving a sheen of sweat out across her brow. It flooded the compartment of the Mako, prompting the others to seek egress as she was. She dropped onto the volcanic soil, which reminded her as sort of an odd cross between the Fire Nation and parts of the Western Earth Kingdoms. Dark and rich, but red-hued soil. Also, lava. The others stepped out, and when they did, even Wrex had to let out a low, impressed whistle.

Mostly because the entire fore-section of the Mako was buried inside the reinforced frame of something which made the Armature look like a Miniature Giant Space Hamster compared to the genuine article. The great geth platform sparked and growled, but its 'voice' grew weaker with every passing second, until with a final grinding, the whole thing went dead, slumping completely.

"Looks like we're covering the the last kilometer on foot," Alenko said, his sweat now seemingly appropriate. Of the lot of them, only al'Wahim seemed comfortable in the blasting heat. Then again, she came from a desert, so it stood to reason. Nilsdottir shot Shepard a look.

"Really? You couldn't have trashed our ride until we got there? I though we were trying to bring out this blue-chick alive if possible," she said, limbering her shotgun.

"We'll improvise," Shepard said. She idly fired a few rounds from her rifle into a sensitive looking spot of the Geth Colossus, just to make sure it was completely defunct. "And besides, do you really want to get into a firefight with that thing _behind_ us?"

"Shepard's got a point," Wrex admitted. He turned to face the human male. "What exactly are we looking at between here and there?"

Alenko brought up his omnitool, and a satellite map flickered into being above his palm. "I'm seeing... a lot of abandoned mining equipment. A couple of buildings, some looking worse for wear. A few geth drop-ships are landed on the other side of the caldera. And I'm only reading one Armature on the ground. But it's fairly near the dig-site. It must be guarding her."

"Guarding or protecting?" al'Wahim asked.

"We'll find out soon enough," Shepard said. "Zip up and move out. It's going to be a hot slog, like Basic on Big Demon."

Al'Wahim gave Shepard a glance. "You trained on Big Demon? What garrison?"

"The one next to the Prothean ruins, why?"

She shrugged, keeping up as the group moved. Her own hands were wrapped around a sniper-rifle this time, and her eyes kept flicking through the scope toward the horizons. "Simply that I recall my time there. 'Every marine a rifleman, every rifleman HPC-certified'," she offered a chuckle, which made Shepard wonder how different her own Hazardous Planetary Conditions training had been from the Si Wongi's. "I still remember the feel of my boots on the sand. I was so... arrogant. 'I am the first human to set foot in this place', I thought. Then, I was sternly kicked onto my face for 'goldbricking'."

Shepard paused, glancing back at her as they prepared to round a corner marked by a scree of reddish boulders. "Don't tell me you had Gunny Ezhu," Shepard asked. Al'Wahim couldn't but nod at that. "I've never met anybody else in the Alliance that used the term 'goldbricking'. Why the hell were you serving with a garrison force with that kind of training under your belt? They don't exactly hand that out with candy on the holidays."

"It is a... long and unpleasant story," she said, her face darkening, either with embarrassment or anger, Shepard couldn't immediately say.

"Are you two done nattering?" Wrex asked as he moved past them. "We're here to kill geth and pull a blue girl out of a hole, not chat about how your militaries coddled you."

"The Alliance does _not_ coddle," Alenko countered.

"Does the Alliance send its squads out, four people at the most, to survive a day in the harshest parts of Tuchanka with nothing but the guns they bring with them, and the food they can kill with those guns?" the krogan asked haughtily.

"Yeah, that's N7's special HPC," Shepard pointed out. "Gotta say, you've really messed up your homeworld."

"You've been to Tuchanka?" Wrex asked, pausing by a boulder.

"It was a few years ago. Not N7 related, of course," she shook her head. Wrex shrugged, and leaned around the stone. With a 'vwoorp' sound, something slammed into him, causing him to spin back, a crack in his blood-red armor which leaked orange blood, just under his shoulder. "Well, I guess that means somebody's waiting for us."

Alenko flattened his back to that stone, and waved a hand past it, glowing orange. Then, he held that hand up again. "We've got a Destroyer and a couple of rocket troops," he said. He frowned for a moment. "This makes me wish we'd brought Garrus along."

"The aliens aren't here. Make due without," Shepard said.

"And what does that make me?" Wrex asked, staunching the blood from his wound with a fingertip and very little apparent discomfort.

"Krogan don't count," Shepard dismissed. She looked at the display that Alenko was compiling. "Nilsdottir, do you think you can pop that thing if you get close?"

She looked it over, and shook her head. "I can bring down its barriers, but it'll smash me flat."

"If you bring down its barriers, I can do the rest," al'Wahim promised. Shepard raised an eyebrow, which the Si Wongi took at its intended meaning. "Yes, Commander, I am sure of my own capabilities."

"You'd better be. If your pride gets Nilsdottir killed, you're taking a quick trip into a lava field," Shepard said. Nilsdottir chuckled.

"Aw, I didn't know you really cared," she said with a sing-song tone, dripping with sarcasm. "Give them a pop before I go. I don't want to be on my own out there."

Shepard nodded, and moved Alenko aside. She took a deep breath of almost scaldingly hot air, then popped around the corner. Just a feint, because she had to spin back in as another 'vwoorp' slammed past her, followed by a second which she could feel almost tearing clear through the rock she'd ducked behind. With that shot landed, she spun lower, and from a knee, began to belch fire at the overtopping form of the Destroyer, even as Alenko moved at Shepard's back, and reached out with an electronic hello which ended in arcing electricity. While the first shock was expected, a shield capacitor blowing out, the fact that it arced to one of the rocket-wielding geth and fried them as well was impressive. Doubly so when it arced one further time, knocking the second rocket trooper back on its mechanical heels. All of this, though, was a prelude for the real action.

With a biotically empowered jump, Nilsdottir mounted the rock, then, there was a 'whoomp' of air being violently displaced as she red shifted away from Shepard and the others, slamming into the midst of that small cluster of Geth. Then, with a scream, she pounded down, causing a hemispheric ripple of mass-effect fields colliding chaotically. And last into the fray was al'Wahim, who rolled out from behind Shepard, prone and staring down a scope. The Destroyer turned to smash at the biotic which was now at its feet, but for its trouble, it got a roughly rice-sized chunk of metal, flying at hypersonic speeds, in a delicate portion of its frame, for its trouble. It slumped with that grinding noise, tipping forward onto its face and almost flattening Nilsdottir under it.

Wrex almost idly rounded that corner, at the end of it all, and cast out a hand. Blue energy surged around him, and then a bullet of biotic force sped across the distance, striking the last uninjured rocket trooper, sending it flying off a slope and rolling it down into lava, just as Nilsdottir turned and gave the only geth remaining a flashlight-face full of shotgun as a parting gift. There was silence, as Alenko waved his omnitool around, picking up updated footage from the satellites the Normandy had left trailing as it flew in stealth overhead. "We're clear, Commander. Next set of geth is four hundred meters that way. They'll know we're coming, though."

"Good. That way we won't need to hunt for them to kill them," Wrex said as he advanced, pausing only briefly to grab the cannon from the fallen Destroyer and affix it to his back.

* * *

She should be dead by now. While she didn't have an exhaustive understanding of asari biology, as that was never her chosen field of focus, she knew from examples quoted time and time again that an asari could last only three days without water. Since she'd been hanging here for what she estimated to be a week, she concluded that she was either already dead, or just a very poor reckoner of time.

The time could have eluded her while she was digging. It often did. From the first time she dug up Mother's back yard in Armali, she'd been a frequent misplacer of time, often delving for hours what some would become bored of in minutes, and spending days on what some could at most stand for hours. Archeology was a perfect match for her. The ability to move at her own pace – which was the sort of murderous zeal one could not expect to pay for without suffering from workplace revolt and a class action lawsuit – and a separation from the people who so consistently baffled and shunned her made it her ideal work environment. The instant that the humans opened the dig-site to the Council, she'd jumped onto a freighter and had been shoulders deep in the dirt ever since.

Funny, how it somehow eventually led to Liara T'Soni, archeologist and advocate of the Reaper Theory, spread mid-air in an archway, facing a platoon of geth. There was a sort of grey haze in the clearest path between her and those mechanical beings. Likely that was thousands of sand-grain sized projectiles, trapped and stilled in an attempt to murder her. It was fortuitous that the first attack on her, as those mechanical men shouted that grinding noise at her and shot at her, that she wet herself then. That way, when she escaped – and found new pants – she had nothing left in her to repeat that performance when they tried to gun her down where she now hovered.

"I spy... with my little blue eye... something grey. A geth. Excellent," she said. "Hello, George."

The geth continued to stare at her, along with six to twenty of its brethren. Since she couldn't turn her head, she couldn't be sure if the things at the edge of her vision and the lower extreme of the portal in which she hung trapped were more geth, or just figments of her imagination. It was telling of her mental state at this point, either because of extreme dehydration or simply that her months of working in almost absolute solitude had finally driven her insane, that she'd named the geth that observed her, patrolled near her, and occasionally tried to bring down the protective barrier the Protheans had put in place five hundred centuries ago. They inevitably failed. One, which she called Wuffles, was particularly intent to that task.

"I spy... with my little blue eye... something..." Liara began. Then, there was a loud 'zworp', and Wuffles was sent catapulting off of the catwalks, spinning away with its arms mostly melted. "Oooh, no Wuffles! You were my favorite! You didn't try to shoot me once. Yet. Right. I spy... something... white."

Silence, as the asari tried to convince herself that she wasn't already dead. Then again, if she was dead, than the afterlife was much less interesting than she'd been lead to believe. No bright lights, no joyous reunion with the mothers which passed on before, no hedonistic land of honey and Maidens as far as the eye could see. Liara came to the conclusion that this was either Hell, or else a place very close to it. Would it have killed Oravor to at least send one demoness to keep Liara company, then?

Now that was a shameful thought. Actually pleading to the asari king of demons for some company. And from a scientist who had vocally opposed theism in college. If her professors could see her now... they'd probably laugh, sums of money on wagers would exchange hands, and she would be held up as a cautionary tale to future asari students. 'This is what happens when you dedicate your life to the Protheans, instead of spending your formative years killing and dancing for money.' Stupid Liara.

"The wall. Excellent," Liara answered her own question.

It occurred to Liara, briefly several days ago, that this might also have some sort of built in stasis functionality to it. After all, Liara didn't feel particularly thirsty, nor hungry. Although, that did serve to make it increasingly difficult to figure out how long she'd been here. Hunger was a very clear indication that Liara had to get out of a ruin and at least make a token appearance to whatever sun she was working under. It was telling that Liara had seen so little sunlight in her life that she actually freckled when exposed to it. So far as she knew, that almost never happened!

"Well, if you are actually there, Oravor, you can make me a sexy demoness, now," Liara hazarded. "Open me to the evil and... and the lust and... And now I realize I don't really know anything about what is supposed to be my religion. How embarrassing," Liara admitted. "You can ignore that, Oravor."

Talking to herself. That was a fairly clear sign that she'd gone insane. But then, she'd been talking to herself since she came up to Mother's knee. At least, according to Mother, she no longer muttered such sentiments as 'I'll show them, I'll show them all, and they'll see who's _really_ mad! Muahahaha!', although, in her defense, she was fairly certain that as a child, she never did add in the maniacal laughter. She was always a quiet child.

If only she followed Nelyna's advice and got out into the world for a while. While Liara considered 'shaking her ass' for money to be crass and degrading, there was a fairly remote chance that cavorting mostly naked would result in her being attacked by geth and trapped in a Prothean kinetic barrier. And if it did, then it would be a fairly remarkable party that she'd been invited to, and even this hypothetical stripper-Liara would have to write a sociological paper on it.

"Good going. Hang yourself to death in a Prothean wall and consider abandoning your doctorates for the sex-trade. Mother would be _so_ proud," Liara mocked herself. Half way through her Maiden stage, and she hadn't even had one incredible story, romance, or shoot-out. Well, actually, this probably counted for the last one. The self-defense lessons Mother foist upon her also came in _so_ handy as well, in that as soon as the bullets started flying, Liara's reaction was to wet herself, run in a direction perfectly away from the dusty locker which held the top-of-the-line armor and weapons Mother had demanded be sent with her, and get herself trapped in plain view of the things which tried to kill her.

"If these things don't kill me, Mother is going to," Liara said with a degree of certainty. "Mostly out of maternal embarrassment."

There was a stomping sound, and she flicked her eyes to one side, as the great, nearly-black crested krogan came into sight. "Hello Sugar Queen!" Liara exclaimed with unusual enthusiasm and eagerness. "I'm still here!"

"Will somebody shut her up?" the krogan Liara had dubbed Sugar Queen in a moment of uncharacteristic sarcasm said, waving a clawed hand toward her. The geth all made grinding sounds, and the krogan walked away.

"No! Stay! You can tell me about the moon butterfly!" Liara shouted. Then, she stopped. "Moon butterfly? Yes, I believe I am now officially crazy. That made no sense. Everybody knows that the butterfly is in the sun."

Such was the way when an asari mind was starved of stimulus. She flicked her eyes around again, hoping for something to change. The krogan was gone, as though he never was, and the geth were staring at her as they always did. Maybe Sugar Queen was never even there? And with a grinding sound, the lights began to fade, and darkness pervaded where the geth had been standing. Ooooh, maybe the geth weren't really there either! What a twist!

"Hmmm," Liara said. "I spy, with my little blue eye... something..."

* * *

"Do you see it?" al'Wahim asked, as she peered down her sighting scope. Shepard, on the other hand, was currently using the rifle, which was absurd, because everybody knew Shepard was about as good with a long rifle as she was on a dance floor. Alenko had received some tacit death-threats when he revealed that tidbit.

"It would be a miracle to miss it," Shepard said with her usual snark, before passing the rifle back to its proper owner. "We've got a lot of ugly between us and the way into that dig-site, and we don't have ten tonnes of angry to hit it with."

"Bah, you're thinking like a turian," Wrex chided lightly. The orange stream down his armor had dried long ago, a bloody plug already scabbed over and quickly regrowing flesh. "You don't punch a nathack in the mouth. You go around behind and pull its tail."

"Two things, what's a nathack, and why do you pull its tail?" Nilsdottir asked.

"Big, slow, sharp teeth, and a tendency to attack anything it sees. And you pull its tail, because it is physically incapable of looking behind it," Wrex explained. Nilsdottir gave a shrug at that, and peered forward through binoculars again. Shepard could see the Armature stomping to and frow, amidst the mostly-intact structures of the mine. Prefab buildings still sat, some blasted open, others undisturbed, on the path toward the great drills which bored down into the stone of the supervolcano. Only because of the high concentrations of palladium and iridium did people bother. After all, digging into a volcano was asking for a supervillainish death. It had also been naked circumstance which revealed the uppermost levels of a Prothean ruin.

"When the krogan is the one telling you to take a subtle approach, I think we should listen to him," Alenko offered. Shepard nodded.

"I concur with the lieutenant. Through the complex," she said. With that agreement, the entire troupe descended from the ridge they were spying from, and moved past the fallen geth. There was certainly no shortage of them. Shepard glanced back at Wrex. "You look like you've got something on your mind."

"I've got a lot of things on my mind," Wrex said. "At the moment, it's that I've never killed anything which bled white before."

"It's not blood. It's probably coolant," Alenko pointed out.

"I didn't ask you," Wrex dismissed. "It's a good life, killing for credits. At least, that's what a lot of krogan seem to think. A lot of them leave Tuchanka and never go back."

"How many krogan _are_ there in the galaxy, anyway?" Nilsdottir asked.

"Less than there were last year," Wrex answered gravely.

Alenko was, by proxy, taking point in that his hacking of every camera and satellite which was moderately useful gave him eyes over the entire dig-site, but it was the krogan and the biotic who moved forward into the gutted Prefabs. Nilsdottir went in shotgun first. "So you're an earthbender _and_ a biotic? Didn't think that could happen," she said quietly. Wrex didn't need to turn to her, what with the side-of-the-head eyes.

"What makes you think that?" Wrex asked.

"Well, I've always heard that a bender can't be a biotic, an a biotic can't bend," she shrugged. "Must be a human thing."

"Probably is," Wrex agreed. "We've had biotic Thunderwalkers since the Rachni War. And I've seen plenty of biotic batarians still able to throw fire around. Price you pay for having the Avatar, I'd guess."

"What's your take on the Avatar, anyway?" she asked.

"I really can't say," Wrex said. And then, he turned, and reached through a window, hauling in something which crackled with power but was otherwise invisible, before stamping down on it with an armored foot. The invisible broke apart with the sound of exploding capacitors, and a black-hulled geth platform was lying, its 'face' smashed flat under a tonne of krogan. All guns went forward. "I haven't exactly given it a lot of thought, and she hasn't exactly shown a lot that _requires_ thought."

"Good spot," Alenko said from his place at the back of the pack.

"I could feel him a hundred meters away," Wrex said. "And there's another getting ready to shoot Shepard once she crosses the threshold."

Shepard's eyes flicked from him, to the side. Then, with a clench of her fist, she turned and blasted out a wave of almost-white fire, bathing the corner in metal-melting heat, which was broken only in its noise by the sound of something bursting from sudden pressure, then a thunk of something falling to the ground. Once everybody blinked away the brilliant after-image of Shepard's fire, there was roughly half of another of those geth Hunters on the ground near her. The Prefab also sagged a bit in that corner, glowing orange, but they were alone again.

"Did you see all that with just tremorsense?" Shepard asked, striking the ashes from her armor's gauntlets. Wrex nodded, continuing to move forward. "That's impressive."

"I've had eight hundred years to practice it. If I'm not impressive with it by now, then I never deserved to have it in the first place," Wrex pointed out. Shepard leaned back to Alenko.

"Are you still having trouble picking up individual signals?"

"They've probably got a jammer inside that Armature," Alenko said. "Otherwise I would have spotted the Hunters. We're close, but I don't want to face that thing in here. It could just bring down the roof on us."

"Valid point," al'Wahim said. She moved to one of the shuttered windows ahead, and peeked through the slits. "It's not alone..."

"How many?"

"I cannot say with certainty. Blast, but what we could have done were the quarian here."

"And why exactly would we bring a civilian into a firefight?" Shepard asked, moving toward the junction. As she suspected, it was open air allowing her to jump down if the far door proved too much of an obstacle.

"She is obviously a prodigy in dealing with synthetics," al'Wahim said, rechecking her rifle. "She could have subverted them, turned them against each other."

Shepard gave her a look. "Are we both thinking about the same Tali'Zorah nar Rayya?"

"Have you not spoken to her?"

"Well, no, but..."

"Asha's right," Alenko said, his omnitool for the moment powered down. "Tali's got some skills that you shouldn't overlook."

"This isn't the time to second guess my manpower strategy, is that clear?" Shepard asked harshly. The humans all raised hands and backed away from the question.

"I think you just don't like aliens," Wrex said with a krogan smirk. Shepard scowled at him.

"If I hated aliens, I'd be voting Chikyu Noboru Party and bombing embassies with the rest of those crazy hate-mongers. I've got better things to deal with," Shepard said with finality. "Any other questions?"

"Why do you hate elevators so much?" Wrex asked, grinning with dark mirth. She growled in the back of her throat. "Fine. I guess that's the kind of question I can wait to hear answered."

"Let's just kill some geth before I start killing squad-mates," Shepard said.

"Sounds like a plan," Wrex agreed, his tone becoming serious and focused. Shepard raised a hand, and began to count down fingers. When she ran out, she bounded out the junction, hitting dirt under her boots, and stared up along the sights of her rifle. Bending was, after all, a very intimate weapon. Only lightning had worthwhile reach, and that fell well short of the operational effective range of even a poor-quality rifle. So as the barking of firing began to sing into the hot, dry air, it was just a new step in human military dogma, pioneered by the Fire Nation, perfected by the Water Tribes, and tempered against the turians.

Hundreds of shots leapt that distance, rebounding off of the shimmering shields of the Armature. And now that Shepard had to look at it directly, she was somewhat taken aback by how _large_ it was. But that moment of awe was kicked aside when there came a glowing from the bottom of the Armature's 'face', and she had to hurl herself aside behind a defunct industrial truck. The cannon-shot which would have probably burst her, armor and all, like a rotten melon, instead landed in the solid engine-block of the machine. It still lurched horribly under the impact.

"Take down those shields! That thing has to go down!" Shepard shouted, and the rest of her squad heeded her. They spread out, keeping to cover, which was for the wiser, since as soon as the Armature let out that first shot, geth seemed to appear out of every crevasse. There were the usual kinds that they were used to seeing, armed with either rifles or rocket launchers. But there was also a more sinewy, scuttly form which bounded up onto the frames which surrounded the dig, clinging their like anti-gravity.

Shepard turned to the closer of the two bounders and began to send fire at it, before rolling her eyes at her own stupidity. She let her rifle fall to her side, and twisted her arms quickly through a form, before releasing a bolt of lightning up at the geth, but more importantly, at the frame it was perched upon. The thing bounded away before the bolt struck, but nobody could say it was a bad idea. Al'Wahim stayed well back, taking pot-shots at the Armature, before ducking back as the chainguns socketed into its frame tore at her shields. Wrex, on the other hand, abandoned subtlety for brute force.

One of the rocket-troopers brought up a weapon toward the krogan, but Wrex was already close enough that any impact was going to reach it as well. Any organic would have hesitated. The synthetic, though, pulled the trigger without care, and the rocket's exploding across Wrex's shields blasted it to bits. Wrex only staggered, though, before an emergency shield came up, and he let out an almost feral howl, giving himself two more stomping strides before he grabbed ahold of a second geth which was in the process of shooting him. A twist of meaty hands, and the rifle was broken, before the krogan shifted his grip to hold the geth by its 'neck', and he started to swing it at the Armature, as a grotesque, oversized club.

Alenko tried to run to where the bounders kept Nilsdottir so pinned down that she couldn't move, ducking through streams of rapid-fire so absolute they almost look like the death-rays out of old vids. He turned, and cast out his omnitool, causing a burst of crackling orange energy in one of the bounders. The other turned toward him, its eye glowing a much brighter red, and then there was a 'kathunk' sound, and Alenko immediately dropped to the ground with a scream of pain, clutching at his leg. Notably, clutching what would have been in earlier ages an arrow, which transected his limb, straight through his armor and out the other side.

This, Shepard would not abide.

She heaved herself up out from behind the truck, and began to fire until her gun started to glow. When heat began to belch out of the sides of the frame, she threw it aside and pulled her pistol, firing that too. Those bullets spanged off the bounder's shields, until there was finally a crack and her next bullets tore through its body, letting it drop like a bowl of noodles to the ground. "Alenko! Are you alright?" Shepard asked. Nilsdottir gave her status as 'alright' by bringing down the other, which Alenko had somehow borked, with her shotgun.

Alenko stifled a shout. "I don' think I can walk on it, Commander," he said, his voice very tight and in pain. "Just get me behind something."

Shepard didn't even waste the time to nod. She just heaved him onto her shoulder, and sprinted back to the truck. It looked quite capable of taking another hit, even after the Armature, ignoring the raging, geth-armed krogan at its feet, fired a second cannon-shot. "Is the medigel helping?" Shepard asked.

"I don't think it's going to make too much of a difference," Alenko pointed out, his face quite pale. "I'll be alright. Just get to T'Soni."

"If you die up here, I'm personally going to the Sea of Souls to kick your ass," Shepard promised.

"I consider myself warned, Commander," Alenko answered with a pained but sardonic smile. Shepard glanced past the engine-block again, and saw that now all three of her her squad were pounding on the Armature, but it still managed to stand its ground. "Give them hell, Shepard. I'll keep the door open for you."

"You'd better. I'm not getting locked in a cave," Shepard said. Then, she got up, running toward where she'd left her rifle in the dirt. She didn't pick it up, though. While hitting a bounder at such range was unlikely with lightning, she knew for a fact that a target as big as an Armature was well within her capabilities. So this time, when she sent forth the lightning, the thunder sounded with the distinct shattering sound of a shield capacitor being overwhelmed. Wrex, now armed with only half of a geth, threw that 'corpse' away, to cast out a fist, just as Nilsdottir did likewise, finally rising from her bullet-riddled nook. Light seemed to twist as the two Warps hit the Armature one after the other, but where one was probably trying to set up another biotic explosion, the other was taking a more direct approach.

And who ever said that a stomp to the knee didn't hurt a synthetic lifeform? Wrex's kick sundered one of the Armature's four legs, causing it to lose quite a bit of its balance, before he took the sharp end of the leg and slammed it up and into the mass of cables and myomers that made up the Armature's 'neck'. The thing let out a grinding sound, and listed, but Wrex took a step back as Nilsdottir moved in, sending out what Shepard was informed was the most basic of biotic abilities, the Push. Striking two independent Warps, one of them keyed specifically to ignite, it did so with outstanding power, tearing the Armature almost in half right where Wrex had 'stabbed' it.

Wrex took a few deep breaths, then leaned over and spat out a few blunt, broken teeth from a bloody mouth. "Well, that was interesting," he said. "Can we see if the asari is evil, now? All of this 'is she or isn't she' is getting on my nerves."

"Just a second," Shepard said. She tapped the implant which reached into her ear. "Joker! We need a pick-up at the dig-site. Can you get in under the geth's no...ey... flashlights?"

"Definitely. The only problem is if they use optic scanners, I'll be a sitting turtleduck," Joker warned.

"Alenko's down and needs med-evac," Shepard said. "We'll have the asari on board in no time. Keep frosty."

"Aye aye, Commander," Joker answered, before the line cut. Shepard faced the krogan, then back to Alenko. She didn't like leaving him behind, but he'd said it himself. They had to deal with T'Soni, one way or the other. "Alright. We're going in."

"Fantastic," Nilsdottir said. "If she's evil, I call dibs on her evil-scientist catsuit!"

Wrex gave the biotic a glance as she moved up into the bore-hole which led into the dig, then turned to Shepard. "Are all human females like this?" he asked.

"I am lead to believe Nilsdottir is a... remarkable specimen," al'Wahim answered.

"Fair enough," Wrex said with a shrug, and then, those that could, descended into the earth. Shepard, at the back of the group, allowed herself just the slightest tremor, before leaving the sun behind.

* * *

The increase of hubbub in the cargo bay told the two dextro-protein aliens that something probably went wrong. Of course, they had little to do except stand aside and let it happen, as they weren't Alliance and they were only marginally crew. "_What do you think happened?_" Tali asked, standing before the console, sending glances in their direction.

Garrus flicked a glance toward where the grey-haired human woman was standing, her back straight, medical implements in hand. "I would say that somebody's been shot in a place that medigel isn't the best at corking. Keep your eyes on your fringes, Tali. It's a long walk back from the respawn."

"_I cannot understand the human fascination with the undead_," Tali said, before letting out a squeak of alarm. "_Keelah there's one right there! It's looking at me!_"

"Has it seen you yet?" Garrus asked.

"_I... don't know. It's just walking around_," Tali looked like one of those 'zombies' was in the room with her, her posture was so tense. "_Should I shoot it?"_

"Are you kidding? You only start with nine bullets and most of the other players would love to have them. Just sneak past it," Garrus coached. While she proved to be worse than hopeless at the long-game that Medal of Duty tended to default to, a quick server change and she was in a close range face-eating fight between hostile zombies and even more hostile players – who were armed with, at best, a double-barreled shotgun. And despite her occasional squeaks of surprise, shock, or alarm, she seemed to really be having fun. Which was a good thing; she looked about ready to jump out an airlock from all the people around her all the time.

He was going to have to talk to Shepard about that.

The ship gave a sudden lurch, and the doors of the cargo bay opened, causing a billow of great heat to surge into the ship. The humans pressed through it, though, bounding down onto red dirt and quickly heaving up one of the fallen ground-party, not even bothering with the stretcher until they'd gotten him onto the lip of the door. Garrus was already moving forward, with Doctor Chakwas two steps ahead of him. "Who do we have?" she asked.

"Impalement wound of the adductor magnus," Alenko hissed through grit teeth.

"I wasn't asking the patient for a prognosis," Chakwas chastised. She leaned in to examine the wound. "There's nothing I can do about this here. Mister Vakarian, Private, bring him to the elevator."

Garrus shrugged, and helped hoist the lieutenant off of the injured leg. "How exactly did you get a chunk of rebar through your thigh?" Garrus asked. They didn't even notice the other humans struggling to heave an odd looking weapon into the hold.

"Geth," Alenko said, just as they passed Tali. She turned away from the game instantly.

"_What? I've never heard of a geth that used anything like this,_" she said, instantly horning in on Garrus' personal space.

"Could we please give Alenko room to maneuver?" Chakwas demanded with an authoritative tone. All knew to obey. Such it was they at they reached the elevator, and ascended. Tali, who'd taken the ladder nearby, was awaiting them when the elevator stopped. "Alright, into the infirmary. Quickly now!"

It was lucky that humans weighed less than turians, since the private seemed willing to let Garrus shoulder most of the load. It was still a bit of a relief to set the human onto the slab. Tali leaned in again, almost reaching to the bolt through Alenko's leg before she restrained herself. "_Excuse me, doctor? When you extract that, could you let me examine it? The flotilla needs to know that geth are using this kind of weaponry, now, and..._"

"Of course," Chakwas said with impatience. "Just give me some room. None of you need to be here right now."

"Come on, Tali. Let's see if you've gotten your brains eaten yet," he said, pulling her away from the med-bay. Left behind, Alenko banged his head against the table, slowly releasing a groan instead of a loud and impolite stream of profanities, numbering from seven human languages and two krogan.

"You can relax, Lieutenant. You're in good hands," Chakwas said, pressing a pain-killer syringe into his thigh, numbing the wound.

"That's not what I'm worried about, Doctor," Alenko said. "She's down a man, down there. Anything could be waiting for her..."

"And all you would do if you were still beside her would be to slow her down and bleed to death on her. This is something which is in the hands of fate, now," she said. "Luckily for you, and for your leg, I make a habit of ignoring fate's decree. We'll see if we can't keep you walking on two legs."

"Your confidence is comforting," Alenko said with a degree of wry humor.

"While I have you sedated and under my power," Chakwas said, turning on a laser scalpel and beginning to cut away the tissue caught on the bar, "I thought I could ask you something."

"Is this the best time?" Alenko asked, as the adrenaline pouring out of him was leaving him with a splitting migraine to replace the agony of his leg.

"It will only take a moment," she said. "Were you aware that Shepard forged her Category Six five years ago?"

"Yes," Alenko said. Chakwas raised an eyebrow. "It's the worst kept secret in the Alliance. But you don't put the Avatar into a mental health clinic."

"There seem to be a lot of things 'one does not do' to the Avatar. I'm beginning to wonder if people have forgotten that she was a normal, flawed, essentially broken human being long before she was the Avatar."

"She never wasn't the Avatar. We just didn't know it," Alenko said. "Oooh. Okay. That's starting to spread. I think I'm just going to go to sleep for a while."

Chakwas paused only a moment, to consider his answer. Shepard needed leeway the same way that a batarian needed another set of eyes. She had enough as it was, and more would just be detrimental. But it wasn't her place to say. She just had to pick up the pieces when things started to break. That was what she signed on for. She went back to work, extracting a bar of metal from Alenko's thigh, and figuring out how to tell him how long his recovery was going to be.

* * *

The shatter of polymers exploding from high velocity impact with stone – a geth platform launched by a human biotic's ridiculously powerful Throw – signalled the end. The others lay, full of holes, split in half, or partially melted. But Shepard kept looking down her rifle. Because deep down, she was still waiting for Alenko to say those fateful words; no hostiles detected. Alenko wasn't here. She was going to have to make due.

"That was amusing," Wrex said. "Fighting these things is a bit of an odd sensation, though."

"Why? 'Cause they bleed white?" Nilsdottir jibed.

"No, because you can't eat 'em," Wrex said. The other two human women shared a concerned glance, but since the krogan obviously felt no need to elaborate, they all just went forward, following Shepard's lead. The caves weren't exactly extensive, just a series of mining tests until they erupted into the cavern holding the Prothean ruin, and once the ruin began, catwalks reaching over to the point they were level with. It continued a brief distance up, as well as a very long distance down.

"I guess it's a long ride down," Shepard said, glancing toward the cargo lift. She got on without her usual trepidation, her usual gut-level terror. She couldn't have said why. Maybe it was because the sides were open. Maybe it was because it was bigger than just the occupants. Wrex gave her a glance, but didn't say a word. Good for him. The rest piled on without note or complaint. "Everybody's shields still up?"

"Don't use shields," Nilsdottir said proudly.

"Didn't get hit," al'Wahim said.

"This armor might be old, but it still works. Most of the time," Wrex said testily, as they began to descend. "Sterile white. Those Protheans sure knew how to build nice and homey."

"The Protheans did built to last, it seems," al'Wahim said with a note of approval. "That is a solidified magma flow, is it not?"

"How the hell do the ancient space-angel things build a tower which survives a magma bath?" Nilsdottir asked.

"Probably the same way they build Mass Relays tough enough that nothing less than getting a moon run into 'em will do more than scuff the paint," Shepard said with rolling eyes.

"Shush," Wrex said, tilting his head.

"Did you just shush me?" Shepard asked.

"I think I hear something," Wrex said. The women all put hands on guns.

"Geth?"

"No. Not geth," Wrex said, his scarred face contorted in confusion. "Definitely not geth."

Which was about when they all started hearing it.  
"Oooh, I've got a lov-e-ly bunch of changa-grapes, do-do-dee-do; there they are, sitting in a bu-u-u-unch. Round ones; flat ones! Some as big as your eye! Give 'em a twist, a flick of the wrist, they make a love-ly lunch, EVERYBODY! I'VE GOT A LOV-E-LY BUNCH OF CHANGA-GRAPES..."

"...is that... really bad singing?" Nilsdottir asked.

"Do you really need to ask that question?" Shepard asked, as the lift gave a moan, and power died. "Well, where the Protheans build to beat eons, it's obvious the Khaler Mining Corporation builds gambling on whether it'll see next week. Come on."

It was a bit of a drop, but between Shepard subconsciously airbending to break her fall, Nilsdottir just being able to float down at her heart's desire, and Wrex being a krogan, only al'Wahim had to carefully inch her way down the framework, while very bad singing continued below. Not that it was an unpleasant voice; she simply couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.

"Promise me you'll make that stop," Wrex said direly as they started moving again. Shepard shrugged.

The platforms had taken a bit of a tumble, as though something heavy had fallen into them and knocked them off their set. It just meant to Shepard that they were going to have to find another way up. Not that there was a time-limit or anything. The singing came to a head when they turned back through the debris and spotted a dirty clothed, spread eagle asari, belting out music at the top of her lungs, her eyes closed, and otherwise not moving a millimeter.

"What the hell is going on here?" Shepard asked. Blue eyes popped open on a surprised blue face. She didn't look quite like most other asari. For one thing, she had discernable eyebrows. That was a humanizing feature. She also looked at them with a moment of enthusiasm, which dropped into distant annoyance. Those eyes didn't seem exactly focused on Shepard.

"Oh, and here I'd gotten my hopes up," the asari said. "But I suppose my imagination can be commended. I've only ever met three humans, so it's amazing that I'd be able to imagine what their females look like."

"Excuse me?" Shepard asked.

"See, she's just as confused as I am," the asari rolled her eyes. "Stupid, stupid Liara, thinking that the humans would magically come and rescue you. The humans don't come here! Although, I wonder why I thought they could be brown. I've never seen a brown human before..."

All glanced back at al'Wahim, who shrugged. Wrex spoke first, into that confused gap, and summed their thoughts. "She's nuts."

"You're Liara T'Soni," Shepard asked.

"Of course I am! You should know that, being figments of my imagination," she said with a laugh which sounded a bit wild. "I'm simply hallucinating. And talking to myself. Oh, Goddess, my mother would disown me if she saw how stupid I am."

Shepard frowned. "You're aware that your mother is a on the run with a traitor, right?" she asked.

"Oh, now this is an interesting fiction. I suppose it has reached the point where I need to invent interesting stories in order to keep my sanity. Well, perhaps it is too late for that, but still. Let's see. Why would my mother be party to a traitor? Oh no! Mother is a hostage! I will have to save her with my super powers!"

"Hey! Listen to me you crazy bitch!" Shepard snapped. Liara's expression shifted from exaltation to disapproval.

"You're _rude_ for an hallucination," she remarked. Then, she gave what would have likely been a shrug had she been able to move one iota. "But then again, I am likely punishing myself for my own stupidity. I wonder why there is a krogan in this hallucination... maybe it's some sort of signal to my conscious mind that I am some sort of masochist!"

Shepard rolled her eyes. "Fine. Think whatever you want. We're getting you out of there so that we can figure out if you're the helpful kind of crazy or not."

"You're oddly defiant for a manifestation of my inner thoughts. Perhaps it is an indication of some sort of inner schism I am not aware of," Liara mused. "But as I can clearly see, I am trapped here. In this field, which I activated accidentally when the geth tried to murder me. And the greatest irony of all is that the controls are right behind me. The Goddess is surely laughing in her heaven at me. My imaginary krogan certainly is."

Shepard gave a glance to Wrex, who was chuckling lightly. "What? I'm old, and this amuses me."

Shepard sighed, and palmed her forehead. "Look. Just keep your pants on and I'll find a way to get you out of that field-thing."

"I could not take off my pants if I wanted to. And the thought had crossed my mind. I made a mess of the last pair I wore. You know as well as I do how terrifying geth are. Why do they have to make that noise all the time?" there was a silence amongst the humans. "As I suspected, it was a rhetorical question. But what use is a hallucination if it cannot offer false hope?"

"Just... shut up and let us rescue you," Shepard said.

"So this is a rescue after all?" Wrex asked. "Pity. If she was evil, I was gonna eat her."

"Really?" Nilsdottir asked.

"Maybe. I like to... how do you people put it? I like to play it by ear when it comes to what I eat. Keeps people on their toes," Wrex noted, and started descending all the lower down the frames. Shepard heard Liara clear her throat behind her.

"Listen... if you _are_ real, which is a fantastic and absurd thing to believe, find some way to get past the barrier curtain and past the geth. If you're _not_ real... just leave me alone. I'm tired of talking to myself."

"Fair enough," Shepard said with a nod, even managing to emulate Wrex's tone. Then, she was moving down after the rest of her squad. The last thing she heard from the asari was a bemused 'I wonder what all that meant?', which had Shepard rolling her eyes. Down at the bottom, she arrived just in time to see Wrex putting his foot through the flashlight of a geth with molten arms. "Any more of them?" Shepard asked.

"Just this one. It wasn't moving, but I don't like to take stupid chances," Wrex said.

"How are we to bypass the barrier wall? It is every bit as formidable here as it was above," al'Wahim asked.

"Fuck, man, what I wouldn't give for a GARDIAN right about now," Nilsdottir griped, kicking a piece of industrial equipment. Shepard sighed, then took a second glance at the machine the biotic had kicked.

"Who's saying that we don't?" Shepard asked. "A puzzle in logic, soldiers; You have an impenetrable door. Nothing can break it, you've got nothing to unlock it, you can't slip past it by any means possible. How do you get to the other side?"

She then wiped a layer of grime off of the side of the machine. _Serrice Council Mining Aparatus, Narrow Focus_. Nilsdottir began to grin. "You blow up the fucking wall," she answered.

"Gold star to the biotic. Al'Wahim, see me after class, and have a note from your parents for poor performance," Shepard said. She quickly punched in commands into the laser, which had been constructed so that just about any idiot could turn it on, if not use it to its refined and delicate utmost. Shepard was, in this moment, any idiot. With a thrum, the mining laser belched out a beam, invisible to the naked eye, which nonetheless melted its way with respectable quickness through the bone-white frame of the Prothean ruin, and then beyond. Then, there was a 'zorp', and the thing stopped, followed by a groaning sound. A sound which echoed the entire great height of the chamber.

"That didn't sound good," Wrex said flatly.

"You don't say?" Shepard muttered. And then, she started to double-time through the hole she'd just made. The sensors in her suit shouted at her that there was a heat-hazard, and that kinetic barriers were going to overload if she didn't leave. Considering the ominous creaking which slowly made its way up the structure she was entering, she had no desire to gainsay her armor. The sooner through the molten slag, to the building within, the saner. She still had to kick away a toe's worth of molten tower from the barriers on her boot when she reached the inside of the massive white structure.

"That was not pleasant, Shepard. If I wanted to get cooked, I'd shoot myself in the head in front of my brother," Wrex groused.

"You have a brother?" Nilsdottir asked.

"He's an ass. End of story," Wrex said. Shepard, though, had her attention dragged toward a plinth, rising up out of the outcropping they all stood on. She walked toward it, and when she approached, it seemed to unfold a panel of green light, like a haptic display.

"_Avatar Sajuuk! Avatar Sajuuk! Are you still alive?_"

Shepard turned, gun facing behind her. The others quickly followed, but quickly glanced back toward her. "What is it, Commander?" al'Wahim asked.

"Did you hear that?" Shepard asked.

"I heard nothing," the Si Wongi said. "Only the imminent collapse of this building."

Shepard stared. Her eyes slid around the entire structure. Nothing. They were the only things living in this ruin. She reached blindly back behind her, and managed to with her first try and no real effort activate the lift. If she'd not been so distracted, she'd never have pulled it off. The entire outcropping they stood upon began to rise, with a mild electric hum, before twisting slightly and zeroing in on the portion of the curtain directly behind the captured asari.

Shepard put her rifle away, since the asari was making 'mleh, mleh' sounds and still utterly incapable of presenting any sort of threat. Shepard almost reached for another plinth, before the oddity of it caused her to pause. "What are you _doing_?" she asked.

"Hah! Iacsellus was wrong. I _can_ touch my nose with my tongue!" T'Soni declared in victory. Then, there was a pause. "Strange. Now I am hallucinating that the imaginary humans are behind me. My condition must be deteriorating. I though I heard thunder before, and how is thunder ever going to reach all the way down here?"

"Yeah, that was the building preparing to collapse on itself. Mining lasers to support structures tend to do that," Shepard said.

"You bored through the wall? But... that means you're real!" T'Soni exclaimed. Shepard nodded, and idly pressed a few buttons on the fold-out display. The blue hum deepened, then stopped entirely, dropping the asari to the ground. She slumped like a corpse for a moment. The three women and a krogan all exchanged glances. She was... fairly... sure that she'd just turned the field off.

Eighty percent sure, anyway.

Then, the asari sat up, clutching her head, a rictus of pain on her face. "ooooh. My head..." her eyes popped open again, and she gave a gasp of surprise. "Oh! You're really here? You're not figments of my imagination? I am sorry. I seem to have... had some trouble thinking clearly. I believe there might have been some sort of bio-stasis functionality in the field, one which might have had a deleterious effect on my cognitive functions while I was trapped inside it, which makes me wonder why the put such a defense screen in place in the first..."

"Oh, for the love of Agni take a breath," Shepard snapped.

She gave a peep and fell silent. "I'm... sorry. I'm not used to speaking with people. I don't understand why any of this is happening. Why would the geth be interested in me? Why would they try to _kill_ me?"

"I guess that shows which side she's on," Wrex said with a shrug.

"Wait... did you say something about Mother?" Liara asked. "Why would she be involved in this?"

"You're big into the whole Prothean Ruins thing, and Saren's looking for some Prothean Conduit," Nilsdottir said, toying with her shotgun. "Seems like a match made in some shady little hell."

Another groan. "We could cut this short," al'Wahim said. "Especially if we value our continued existence. The Avatar might be an earthbender, but I certainly am not!"

"Oh, stop whining," Wrex chided. "Between me and her, we could probably juggle a mountain."

"Oh, yes," T'Soni agreed. "We should leave quickly. While you might be able to move stone, Thunderwalker, I strongly doubt you will be able to withstand the heat of the magma. This site was overwhelmed by a supervolcano. If you truly did bore through the walls, then it might be preparing to explode."

"That sounds like a plan," Shepard said. She tapped her ear. "Joker? Do you read? I need an emergency pick up at the mine head."

"If I keep stopping back there, I'm going to have to sign up for their frequent visitor bonuses. I hear they give out fancy towels," Joker answered her. "We'll be there in two minutes, Commander."

"We've got a way out," Shepard said, stifling her annoyance at the devil-may-care-ness of her pilot.

"If I die in here, I'll kill him," Wrex promised grimly.

Shepard flicked a virtual switch, causing the elevator to lift all the more swiftly. When she did, she suddenly found herself being held in place. Shepard tensed, and glanced over her shoulder, seeing a blue head pressed against her back. "What in the hell are..."

"...real..." T'Soni said. Then, she looked up, saw that Shepard was glaring at her, and released swiftly, backing away. The other two women had amused expressions on their faces. "I-I am sorry. I just wasn't sure that... I thought I might still be hallucinating and..."

"If you were hallucinating, you might have hallucinated hugging Shepard," Wrex pointed out.

"...oh," Liara said. "I suppose this will be more complex than I had assumed. I merely thought that..."

"Wrex, stop breaking the asari's brain. It seems pretty smashed up as it is," Shepard chastised. Wrex gave a deep chuckle, but didn't seem rebuked.

"How long have you been down here?" Nilsdottir asked.

"I am not sure," Liara said, tensing her fingers nervously. "I seem to have lost track of time. After all, I had not thought to check a clock while fleeing from the geth."

"You outrun a geth?" Wrex asked.

"Well, there was more dodging and screaming and crying involved," Liara admitted. "Oh... drat! My armor is down there somewhere!" she looked over the edge of the lift. They all stared at her. "Mother demanded that I bring a weapon and armor with me on my digs. She was always so protective of me."

"When was the last time you spoke to your mother?" Shepard asked.

"Approximately thirty one years ago," Liara answered simply. The humans all shared glances.

"That's longer than any of us have been alive," al'Wahim pointed out.

"Really? Because that is when I moved to my first dig in the Hercules System. A fascinating site, but even after a decade of trial and error I could not activate the sphere. After that, I spent time living in the Nos Risali University's library, and..."

"You didn't have much of a social life, did you?" Nilsdottir asked. Liara stared at her like an animal caught in the headlights. "Didn't think so."

"You only met three humans?" Shepard recalled.

"Yes. I knew what you looked like; I am not completely out of touch. But the locals here treated me with a fair degree of... mistrust and apprehension."

"How much you wanna bet she brought it on herself?" Wrex stage-whispered.

"Do you always let your mercenaries mock the people you're helping?" Liara asked.

"Most of the time, yes," Shepard answered. The elevator slowed as it reached the top of the structure, which was now starting to hemorrhage dust. She didn't want to think how much time she had before that dust started turning into streams of molten rock. "But the round mocking usually takes place back on the ship. Which is..."

Shepard trailed off because there was a krogan approaching them. Fanning out around that krogan was a squad of geth. Liara let out a squeak of alarm, and started glowing blue. The krogan, though, took it all in with a laugh. "Surrender!" it demanded. "Or don't, that'd be more fun."

"I assume you've failed to notice that the roof is collapsing," Shepard pointed out, as the geth blocked the exit and the krogan stepped forward. His lips twisted up into a grin.

"I know. Exhilarating, isn't it?" the krogan asked. "I have to thank you for bringing down those barriers. I burned through almost a dozen of these tin-men trying from the wrong side. Hate to think what..."

"We don't have time for this idiot," Shepard cut him off. "Charge!"

* * *

Wrex didn't need Shepard's permission, but when she'd given it, it was welcome. With a wordless roar, he pounded feet against metal, eating distance between himself and the other krogan. The crest looked like a Raik, or maybe a Weyrloc, but in the end, it was all irrelevant. As Wrex had said, it wasn't about clan or clutch or creed. They were on Saren's payroll, that meant they had to die. The other krogan didn't give much sign that he was annoyed at being interrupted, but saw that he was being charged, so matched the motion stomp for stomp.

The two collided with a level of force usually restricted to motor-vehicle accidents. Both recoiled back a step, staggered by the blow, but Wrex had probably been doing this two or three centuries longer than his opponent, and recovered faster. Wrex experimentally pounded his foot into the white Prothean metal, and allowed himself a fraction of a second's smirk before twisting it to his will, casting up a thrusting fist of it directly at his enemy's guts, right between where the rib-plate ended and the belly plate began. But the other krogan did something unexpected, and popped up a plate of that white metal to lessen the blow. Not ignore it, though. It still sent the other krogan flying back, bouncing off the corner of the ceiling at an angle to the exit.

"Another Thunderwalker, huh?" Wrex asked. "Been a while since I fought one of my own."

The krogan twisted his feet, and launched himself at Wrex, the metal bounding out as the spring the krogan created returned to a more neutral posture. Wrex, though, wasn't about to be taken aback by such a trick, and just leaned aside, and used the flying krogan's weight to sweep him out of the air, slam him hump first into the pillar which held up the ceiling, and then sent forward a biotically empowered fist, which gave a pleasing crunch as it broke krogan teeth.

"That's obvious. You're getting slow, old man!" the krogan laughed, throwing his fist behind him, and wrapping it in white metal, before smashing it into Wrex's teeth. That threw Wrex back, allowing the other krogan to rise to his feet. He reached behind him, and tore, his mastery bearing much of the pillar first over his head, then down toward Wrex. So this whelp had some power. Wrex reached up, catching the pillar before it smashed him flat, his own legs creaking slightly under the force of the blow. But he held his ground.

"Nice power. Pity about the control, though," Wrex said. He twisted with his hands, and the shape of the pillar warped, twisting its entire length, until a fin of it rotated out and smashed the other krogan in the face. "You've got a lot to learn, and no time to learn it."

Wrex pulled the shotgun from where it sat near the bottom of his hump as he twisted out from under that pillar, and fired a shot, which while not bursting his enemy's shields, drove him back a step. "Bringing guns into an honest fight? I should have expected that kind of cowardice from an Urdnot," the krogan snapped. He gestured up, and the nearby floor rose up toward him, separating into a hundred sharp torpedo like objects. Wrex knew he couldn't possibly dodge them all.

"There's no such thing as an honest fight," Wrex said. He then raised a fist, and pulled down, with all of his will behind it, causing a great chunk of the ceiling to slam downward. The krogan was able to deflect it aside, though. "There's only fights you win, and fights you lose."

"You missed, old man!" the enemy sneered. Wrex just grinned. The krogan scowled at the unexpected reaction. Then, as any flanked krogan should have done, he finally looked up.

As molten rock dropped onto his face.

His scream was quickly silenced by more fluid rock pouring down his throat, slipping past his barriers like they didn't exist. The stream was perhaps as thick as a human arm, but it was relentless, unstoppable, and brutally effective at burning the other krogan from the inside out. "I don't miss. I aim places you don't expect," Wrex said, then twisted his fist again, tearing the metal above to form an ad-hoc plug, slowing the influx of magma to a trickle. It still made the room much hotter than it was before, and the smell of burning krogan rather reminded all present of pig-beef, Wrex excluded. There was another groan, and that plug started to bulge downward.

"We're operating on a time limit, Shepard!" Wrex roared.

* * *

The fire through the air was deafening, enhanced by the entombed nature of the chamber, and the roaring and bellowing of the krogan who were fighting their own private war off to one side. Al'Wahim was pinned down, unable to offer more than blind fire around a pillar as the relentless flurry of fire from the geth, missiles and all, peppered the column and all places near it. Nilsdottir was busy with a trio of Destroyers, bouncing between them like some sort of biotic pinball, her only saving grace being her constant, chaotic movement, as she slowly wore them down. The asari huddled in a small ball in the middle of the room. It was a bloody miracle that nobody had shot her yet.

"I am going to be overrun!" the sniper shouted. "Shepard! Somebody!"

"I've got it," Shepard said, rolling away from her cover to line down a shot at the flickering form which moved purposefully around the edge of the room. She slowed her breathing, then started squeezing the trigger. Clusters of shots, tracking the almost invisible form, every hit making it a little easier as the field which hid the geth from sight got more and more taxed. Then, a burst, and Shepard twisted upward, hurling a grenade near its feet. "Lemon out!"

The Si Wongi flinched at that, ducking lower and away, as the grenade burst into deadly shrapnel, which rebounded around the room. Most of it, though, split the geth which was trying to flank and frag the sniper from groin to armpit. She gave a smirk, which was cut off when there was a grinding sound directly behind her, and she felt herself being slammed by shots into the back of her kinetic barrier. She didn't even bother with her rifle. She twisted low, flicking out the flasks which were pinned to her armor, and sent out a blade of razor sharp and iron hard water at the offending geth. The first blow bashed it aside, its aim drifting and scowering the bulkhead section Shepard had been squatting behind.

"No soul, no bending, no hope," Shepard said to herself as she twisted the blade she formed back, and slammed it home, burying it almost half a meter deep into the thing's chassis. If Samoet had said that the Water Knife would have been so useful, she probably wouldn't have taken three damned years to figure out how to do it. Then again, there were a lot of things which wouldn't have happened if she learned to waterbend sooner. Samoet would be one of them. The krogan part of the fight had turned into a bending brawl, which she decided to stay out of. Nothing but broken bones and internal bleeding came from interrupting a krogan fight.

Shepard started to run, covering the ground which separated her from the only remaining member of her squad from Torfan, her gun slapped haphazardly onto her back. It wouldn't help her against Destroyers. Their plating was too tough for mere Lancer rounds. So when she ran, she dipped her hands low, pulling up with her will as she went, until her arms were coated from wrist to elbow in white, Prothean metal. Then, with a shout more feral than a wild-born vorcha, she hurled herself onto the back of the nearest Destroyer, forming the metal into half-meter long blades which she used to drag herself up the mechanical fighter.

It instantly turned away, its motion flinging Shepard's feet off of purchase, but her deeply embedded blades held her true. The arms began to twist and flex, and she could see the elbow-joint reversing, so she knew she had little time. She needed to get higher. With a heave, and another blade plunged brutally deep, she finally reached the point where she had the leverage. And a three-digited hand clutched onto her foot, squeezing until she was fairly sure her ankle was about to break. No. Not today. With a last scream, she buried her fist-blade deep into the neck-region of the oversized robot, down past its thickest armor plating and into the delicate innards that the machine used to think with. It was like stabbing a man in the base of the brain.

The whole thing dropped without so much as a whine. And unfortunately, because of Shepard's added weight, it did so falling straight back. Shepard tried to kick away, but the fall was so sudden, and gravity working against her, that she couldn't get her killing blow free before the thing was atop her, pressing down with dead weight. She only just managed to get the stars out of her head by the time she saw one of the other Destroyers turning toward her, its glowing eye... practically baleful. She couldn't conceive how an overgrown calculator could hate, but she felt it in the way that thing irised in on her. And that it rose the barrel of that overpowered rifle toward her was another obvious clue.

She heaved, trying to get enough move to hoist the dead Destroyer off of her. Then, realized she was being an idiot, and bent the dead machine aside, sloping it off with a movement of metal. She rolled to her feet, and faced the Destroyer. She was a little surprised it'd given her enough time to escape. Machines wouldn't fight fair, after all.

"We're operating on a time limit, Shepard!" Wrex's voice called, followed by the sound of a shotgun blast hitting geth.

It hadn't moved. It was still staring where she had been. And there was blue light dancing around it. Shepard glanced back. Nilsdottir was now focusing on deconstructing the one Destroyer left, shouting profanities which would rust metal, let alone peel paint. Al'Wahim was systematically gunning down the stragglers of the geth. She then cast a glance toward Liara's huddling-point. She wasn't huddling anymore. At some point, she had, as any krogan would say, 'let her quad drop' and now stood, whisps of azure light drifting away from her as she held a motion which seemed much more brutish and inelegant than bending, but somehow worked to hold the Destroyer locked in place.

"Aim for the face! SHOOT EET IN DEE FAAAAACE!" Liara's shout came through grit teeth and rock-solid concentration, her eyes practically bulging from the effort. Shepard didn't see any reason to deny her. She pulled both the rifle and her pistol from her holsters, and began to let fly, stripping through what remained of its barriers quickly, and then, reducing its 'head' to a ragged stump a few seconds later.

With a final burst of biotic fields exploding, care of the illustrious Nilsdottir, and there was a moment of silence. Which was broken by that former letting out a laugh. "Well, look at the blueberry, finally stepping up to the plate!" she guffawed.

"Blueberry?" Liara asked, slumping a bit. Wrex, though, grabbed her arm and started dragging her forward. "What are you...?"

"Shepard. Magma," he pointed behind him, where there was a pool of it in and around a dead krogan. He pointed down. "Volcano."

"You heard the krogan. Can it and leg it!" Shepard declared, putting both weapons aside. "Anybody hurt?"

"A few scrapes," Nilsdottir shrugged off.

"I think I have taken wounds to the arm and shoulder," al'Wahim said, favoring her left arm.

"I'm fine, and she's not dead," Wrex said, as they started to run. "Your pilot better be up there."

"Joker may be an ass, but he's good at his job. Otherwise, Anderson wouldn't have hired him," Shepard said, keeping her pace at something half-way between break-neck and sustainable. Liara, who'd never had to run any real distance in her life, Shepard wagered, bolted ahead with the sort of speed that only unmanaged terror could produce. There was a crash behind them, and a glance over her shoulder showed Shepard that the roof of the ruin was crumbling inward, and that magma was spilling inside.

She glanced forward, at the mouth of the platform which lead to the exit. There were two layers of geth waiting there, guns at the ready. And Liara was far and away too close for Shepard to intercept. And strangely, the worry was moot. With a harsh wave of her arm, the air rippled toward the machines, and when it struck them, they were all dashed over the edge of the railing, to a long, long plummet. She hadn't even slowed down. "You'd better start earning your keep, Nilsdottir. I think we found somebody as good as you."

"She got lucky. I could have leveled those idiots just as easily," Nilsdottir countered. But Shepard didn't offer a reprimand or jibe, because she was too busy running. As they moved away from the plummet, through the mine shaft, the platforms began to buck and warp, almost throwing the Si Wongi over that edge. She kept her balance, though, until things began to rise.

"Beat feet! The closest landing area to the mine is almost two hundred meters, and I don't know how long until this volcano..." Shepard began, as the asari opened the mine's blast doors ahead of them. And they opened directly into the hold of the Normandy. "...or not."

Shepard wasn't about to look a gift ostrich-horse in the mouth. She kept running, even though her lungs begged her to stop and her legs felt like somebody'd set them on fire. There came a great rumbling in the mountain, and she could feel heat beginning to spike at her back, so she bounded the twenty centimeter gap between the edge of the hold's doors and the mine-shaft's ramp, turning to help the rest of her team into the ship. She quickly thumbed her ear. "Joker, we're aboard! Get us out of here."

"No complaints there, Commander. We're out, nice and quiet," Joker said, as the door quickly swung up and into place, and the lurch of the ship's break-neck turn was muted by the gravity generators, but not removed entirely. Wrex smiled for a moment, showing gaps where blunt teeth had been. "What are you so happy about?"

"It's refreshing to know that I can still beat the orange out of krogan half my age," Wrex said.

"Whatever. Everybody, assemble up in the debriefing room. I want to know who the hell dropped the ball on the geth, here?" Shepard demanded.

* * *

"Are you sure, Saren?" the pawn asked. Saren glared at her, and focused his will, his importance, his goal. The asari shuddered, and her eyes grew blank and glassy. "As you wish..."

Piece by piece, she shed the armor which had marked her existence to this point. She was an asari commando no longer. Now, she was just a portion of something greater than she. She was a step toward a glorious ascension, for all organics. She stepped back against the wall, her eyes practically sightless, and a mass of fibrous flesh reached to push her higher, before surrounding her with some sort of effluent. She was buried to the wall, until only her head stuck out. Behind, the benefactor of this gift retracted.

"_Voice of the Old Machines; we have lost the consensus of Therum_," the clicking and grinding language of the geth spoke to him. Saren scowled, his mandibles fluttering slightly. But he focused a waft of calm into him. He could not fly off the handle at this. This was too important.

"T'Soni is of almost no importance in the greater plan, at this point. Her mother will soon be obsolete as well," Saren answered. He raised up his hands to the asari, who only had her face showing from the pink-jelly filled capsule. "Now, give me the Cypher."

"Embrace Eternity," the asari said emotionlessly, her eyes turning black as the void.

And Saren Knew.

* * *

"You cut it pretty close back there, Commander. Ten more seconds and you'd have had to swim through lava to get on board. I'm just saying that the Normandy isn't rated to land in exploding volcanoes," Joker's voice announced over the speakers in the debriefing room. "They tend to fry the sensors... oh, and melt the hull."

Liara glanced around nervously. "Is it normal for humans to make jokes about near-death experiences?"

"Humans, no. Joker, yes," Shepard said, leaning with her back to the holo-tank which she'd probably have to use, fairly soon. "As I see it, though, he parked the Normandy close enough to the exit that you'd need to go out of your way to miss it, so he's earned some snark and sarcasm."

"I see. My inexperience with your species makes it hard to know what is acceptable or not," Liara admitted. "I must thank you, Commander. You saved my life back there. And not just from the volcano. I shudder to think what those geth would have done to me if they had cornered me."

"Probably dragged you off to Saren," Wrex said idly, taking a rasp to his finger's nails so that they could fit into the trigger guard of a shotgun, "and the galaxy would have never seen you again."

"Why would Saren want you?" Garrus asked from where he sat next to the asari. "Do you know something about the Conduit?"

One chair was still empty, since Alenko remained in surgery. Al'Wahim had been given an arm sling and told to check in with Chakwas when she was done with Alenko, so obviously the wound was more than just a flesh-wound, though not so debilitating as Kaiden's had been. Shepard moved closer to it, but didn't sit. She felt a need to stand, right now.

"The only thing that I know about this Conduit was that it was correlated with the Prothean extinction. Either as a cause or as its effect. The Protheans are my real area of expertise. I have spent the past fifty years of my life trying to understand what has become of them."

Shepard gave an askance look. "How old are you, exactly?" she asked.

"Well, it might seem impressive to you, but I am only a hundred and six. That means that..."

"You are a hundred and six? That I could look so vigorous at that age," al'Wahim rolled her eyes.

"You're not much more than a kid," Wrex pointed out.

"Yes. A century might seem like a lot to you short lived species, but I am still considered barely more than a child. I believe that is why my research is given such short shrift. They claim that my theories towards the Prothean Extinction are child's make-believe. Make believe! I claim that they were wiped out, and they call me mad? And how much 'evidence' to their theories have?" Liara asked with increasing passion and vehemence. "Why, Professor Chandana claims that the Protheans left the galaxy to settle Andromeda. Why would they do that? That's infeasible, unless they had even more technology than they showed with the Mass Relays – which, I might point out, are very likely not even Prothean Technology!"

"Whoa, just hold your lizard-horses," Shepard said. "I've got my own theory to where the Protheans went."

She gave a mildly disdainful snort. "Forgive my disdain, but I have heard every theory out there. 'Ascension to another plane of being', galaxy wide super-plague, cultural and technological singularity, all of them fail to account for one simple fact; there is no evidence. It is almost as though something came along behind the Protheans and erased everything on them that could be found."

Shepard couldn't help but give a chuckle at that.

"Are you mocking my years of learning? I may not have as much evidence for my extermination theory as some would like, but the data-points all show a definite trend if you examine it as a whole rather than a disparate collection of bits."

"How about you stop getting uppity and I'll tell you," Shepard said with an edge to her voice. "They were eradicated fifty thousand years ago by a synthetic race of machines, called the Reapers."

She stared at Shepard for a long moment. "So... somebody _has_ read my theory!" She said with glee and a huge grin.

"No, I came to it through independent study," Shepard shook her head. Liara looked immediately crestfallen.

"Well... Does your independent theory also include that the Protheans were only the most recent denizens of the galaxy before us? That there were others who predated the Protheans, and likely species who predated the predat...ers? I have examined the data for half my life. There are scraps to other cultures, other peoples. Sometimes, little more than a name. Inusannon. Kaisoi. Arthenn. Nazara. I believe that these were also galactic cultures who evolved, expanded, and then were wiped out. It is a cycle which has repeated many times."

She was getting entirely too enthusiastic at this, in Shepard's opinion, but anything which delayed the phone-call was welcome. "If the Protheans weren't the first, who was?"

"I honestly have no idea," Liara said with equal enthusiasm, which slowly ramped up toward mania. "Great civilizations rise up, and are violently thrown down, over and over again! Every advancement that I find which is attributed to the Protheans seems to have underpinnings in species which came before them! Tell me, what independent study lead you to your version of the Reaper Theory?"

"Do... you need a sedative?" Shepard asked warily.

"What? No! No, I... I just get a bit excited talking to people who do not dismiss my theories out of hand because of my age. It is... refreshing," she said, still smiling lightly.

"Rrrrright," Shepard said. She shook her head. "There was a Prothean beacon on Eden Prime, which..."

"I had scheduled time at the Prothean digs there as well. As I understand it, there is a significant facility several miles outside of Constant that bears further exploration..." Liara blurted.

"Doctor T'Soni," Shepard said, face in palm.

"Yes?"

"Please shut up for a second and let somebody else speak," Shepard said with forced patience. She let out an 'eep', and then was silent. "There was a Beacon. It downloaded something into my brain. I had... a vision, maybe. Organics being harvested by machines. It's all pretty indistinct, hard to remember, but I can feel it in there. Waiting."

"You have an intact Prothean message in your mind?" Liara's eyes became very wide.

"Yes. And it doesn't feel like the last artifact the Alliance sat me in front of. That one made me want to _knit_. I don't know _how_ to knit," Shepard muttered. All eyes turned to her. "What?"

"There is a commonality amongst Prothean artifacts that they seem to transmit information directly into the mind. It is a startling technology, which was likely born of an incredible physiology. You're fortunate that you managed to find one which still works."

"...worked. It... exploded after she used it," al'Wahim said.

"Oh. That is unfortunate," the asari said, frowning. "I suppose you should be pleased that you received a vision. The Beacons were intended to be viewed by Protheans. Someone who sees the galaxy the same way they did. Since we do not, and cannot, we have to scrape the surface layer by layer to uncover anything of use or note. It would of course be confusing to have such a depth of information implanted at once. That you made any sense of it at all is a miracle, or at least, a sign that you are remarkably strong-willed."

The other two humans in the room shared a glance which spoke restrained sarcasm and doubt, but neither spoke. Good for them. Wrex, though, leaned forward. "And how exactly does this help us find Saren, or his Conduit?" he demanded.

"What? Oh, right. I have let my scientific curiosity get the better of me. Again. At least this time I didn't end up captured by pirates," Liara said. All eyes turned to her in confusion as she mused. "No, I do not believe I can be of much help in finding Saren, but there will no doubt be a great deal of Prothean technology on the path from you to he. I would be honored if I could be a part of the team which rediscovers it."

"There's no honor involved. You're in protective custody," Shepard said. "I figure if Saren wants you dead, I want you alive."

"_That's why I'm here_," Tali said from her own seat.

"Hmm? Oh, a quarian. I hadn't noticed you."

_"...I'm sitting right beside you_," Tali said with a tone of insult to her accented voice.

"I will be pleased to help you in any way possible. My extensive knowledge of the Protheans will no doubt be of use to you in the future," Liara said, bowing her head slightly.

"Pah, her biotics will be a lot more useful, the way things are going at present," Wrex said.

"Anyway," Shepard said. "Pick a bunk. Your things might have been... volcanoed... but I'm pretty sure somebody like you has more stowed away somewhere."

"Why?" Liara asked. Shepard palmed her face again. "Well... I do have some personal effects on the Citadel, and a bit of money to buy replacements. Do you think we could go there, soon?"

"Fine," Shepard said. "Feels like we just left, though."

"The glories of interstellar travel," Tali said wistfully. "It takes longer to go from a planet to its moon than to go from one side of the galaxy to the other."

"Mass relays. Not the best way to go faster than light. Just the _only_ way," Nilsdottir chuckled.

"Actually, every ship is capable of faster than light travel. Otherwise, it would take days to reach a Mass Relay," Liara corrected.

"Stop ruining jokes, blueberry," Nilsdottir griped as she rose from her seat and moved toward the exit.

"You should probably see the doctor," Tali offered to the asari. "You were down there for quite a while, after all." T'Soni gave a nod, and rose toward the exit. The others followed suit until only the quarian was left lingering at the door.

"_Is there anything else you wanted, Commander_?" Tali asked.

"Hm?" Shepard asked, staring at the still inactive holo-tank. "No. I'm just trying to figure out how to tell the Council that a Prothean dig went boom... why am I talking to you about this?" she asked.

"_Do you need some help_?" Tali asked, failing to be insulted by Shepard's tone.

"No. No, I think this is something I have to do on my own," she said. She gave the quarian a nod, and watched her leave. How old would Shepard's Tali have been? Probably a year or so older than the quarian, if their ages lined up. She shook her head. Tali was long dead. Nothing was bringing her back. She flicked on the tank, and a chime went out. A few seconds later, the figures appeared standing before Shepard. Speratus, Tevos, and Velern.

"We've received your report, Commander. We understand that Doctor T'Soni is aboard the Normandy," Tevos said.

"I assume you're taking adequate security precautions," Speratus said direly.

"Don't tell me how to do my job," Shepard snapped. The three of them just stared at her. Oh, crap. She probably shouldn't have said that.

"Did you hear her?" Speratus asked.

"I think there's something wrong with the audio on her end," Valern said. Shepard sighed, as their visualizations started to flicker and warp.

"Adeks, the communicator is acting up again," Shepard said, thumb to ear.

"Already on my way, Shepard," the gruff voice came. A few seconds later, the sound of krogan footsteps became clearly audible, followed by the krogan himself. Unlike Wrex, who was never out of that pitted red armor, Adeks was wearing sturdy, durable cotton, dark blue and black with gold trim. In a word, it was an Alliance uniform, sized and fitted for a krogan. With a look of annoyance on his face, he idly pushed Shepard aside and moved to the panel under the communicator. The panel itself was chucked aside, and he started to perform surgery on the machine.

"What's the problem?" Shepard asked.

"Is... that a krogan?" Valern asked.

"Don't mention the krogan around the humans. They tend to get... touchy," Speratus's voice came from his frozen form.

"I've found the problem," Adeks said. He rose to his feet, striking the imaginary dust from his hands. Shepard waited, as a smirk grew on his face. Then, he leveled a sturdy kick to the side of the casing, causing a dent in the machine, but making the images snap to clear, and a pop of a speaker coming online filling the room. "If that happens again, just give it another boot. You humans get the wires too close together sometimes. A blow knocks 'em loose."

"Effective as always," Shepard said with a nod to the krogan. Adeks stomped out of the room with just as much ceremony as he'd entered. "Now, where were we?"

"Yes, we've received your preliminary report on Therum. We understand that Doctor T'Soni is aboard the Normandy," Tevos repeated.

"Your fears to her loyalty turned out to be unfounded," Shepard interrupted Speratus as he tried to get his bit in. "The geth wanted her dead pretty badly. They even sent a krogan Thunderwalker to make sure that the job was done properly. Discounting an elaborate double-bluff, I'd say the younger T'Soni is on our side."

"I cannot believe that Benezia would allow her daughter to come to harm," Tevos said.

"Maybe she did not know," Valern pointed out.

"Or maybe we don't know Matriarch T'Soni as well as we think. We didn't expect she would turn traitor, after all," Speratus pointed out. He turned to Shepard, then. "I am curious, though, as to why you thought it necessary to destroy a mostly unexplored Prothean ruin."

And there the penny dropped. She knew that was going to be the focus of this the moment she made her report. "It was either sacrifice a building which was already on the verge of collapse, or lose a key resource in finding Saren. We can't know what was in there. Maybe it was the cure for aging or a tool to undo death. Maybe it was just a Prothean shoe-store. But it doesn't matter. Saren matters."

Speratus gave a shrug. "In that, you're right. Some people," a glance toward Tevos and Valern, "get too attached to the maybes that they lose sight of the definitelies. As long as you keep concrete goals in your sights, Shepard, you'll have the support of the Council. But take care not to become what you hunt. We turians have a saying about those who stare too long into an abyss."

"Good hunting, Commander," Tevos said, and the communication cut off. Shepard stared at the tank for a moment.

"That's it?" She asked. "I really expected a lot worse."

She shook her head, and moved to the door. In the process, she almost tripped over Anderson's Giant Space Hamster. "W...did he really leave his Hamster behind?" she shook her head, and the Hamster stared up at her, tipping itself back on its hind legs as it did when it begged for nuts. "Go away." It blinked. She gave an off hand gesture at it, and moved down the stairs, to the crew deck. Doing so, she almost ran down Alenko, who was walking with a crutch.

"So you're not dead?" Shepard asked, and immediately kicked herself mentally for saying something so idiotic.

"No, but I'm apparently on bed-rest for the next week or three," Alenko said easily. "I assume you had an easy enough time after I was gone?"

"It was a cakewalk. We sang songs and skipped through an abandoned shoe-store," Shepard said sarcastically. "A week laid up? How will you keep your sanity?"

"I've got plenty of diversions, Commander. And even on bed-rest, there's still work I can do," he said, still hobbling toward his bunk. "I saw our newest team-mate. Is she a bit...?"

"Yes," Shepard answered.

"You didn't let me finish."

"You didn't have to," Shepard answered. "Heal that leg. That's an order."

"Aye aye, Commander," Alenko said, and moved into his room. Shepard, though, turned to find al'Wahim standing outside the med bay, still nursing a bullet-shot arm.

"I thought I said..." Shepard began, but the door opened, and a tired looking Chakwas waved al'Wahim inside. She then glanced to Shepard.

"Ah, yes. I've just examined the asari. She is in decent condition, if a bit dehydrated. She also wants to speak with you," she said. Shepard gave the older woman a nod, glancing around, before Chakwas indicated the room at the other end of the med-bay. Really, Liara? Shepard shook her head, and moved through the infirmary, barging into the room at its other end without so much as a knock.

Liara T'Soni was staring at a picture of an asari Shepard didn't recognize. But the instant that Liara was aware of the human, the picture 'flicked off', and became a blank slate. "Ah, yes. I wanted to speak to you."

"I heard," Shepard said. "Why?"

"I think... I might be able to help you with what you saw from the Protheans. I can join our consciousnesses together, and with my knowledge of the Protheans, I might be able to provide you some context, so that your visions make more sense."

"Asari can do that?"

"Some can, yes. All have the basic impulses mastered, as they are both instinctual and necessary for reproduction, but some are somewhat more adept," she said.

"...telepathy is sex for you?" Shepard asked. She glanced into the distance. No wonder Sha'ira was so... No, get away from that you naughty brain!

"It's... slightly more complicated than that," she said. "But if you are willing to try, I am willing to help."

Shepard crossed her arms, and considered. Having more context might be helpful. If the Reapers were powerful enough to knock off the Protheans, they had some incredible weapons. Even knowing simply how the weapons worked would be an immeasurable boon if it ever came to fighting them. Shepard gave the asari a nod, and she rose.

"Alright, Shepard. Relax. Calm your mind," she said. She took a measured breath, closing blue eyes. Opening black ones. "Embrace Eternity."

* * *

**If you know anything about the way I write, you'd know that I always start with characters who end quite differently from their beginnings. I develop my characters slowly and deliberately, so that if nothing else, I can believe the evolution. Shepard, as she begins, is a mediocre leader, a bad human being, and a terrible Avatar. The story will deal with each of those in turn. If I were a more sarcastic person, I would name the three potential 'books' of this story "Book 1: Spirit", "Book 2: I'm done joking Shepard; Spirit!", and "Book 3: Jeez, did I used to be that much of an a'hole?"**


	5. The Dream

Liara had some experience with joining her consciousness to another's. She and Mother had done so many times when Liara was still a little girl. It had become almost a ritual. Where most mothers told their children bedtime stories, Benezia T'Soni helped her daughter live them. Therefore, at an age where most asari could only use their cognitive links to 'have mind-blowing sex', Liara was capable of actually exploring the cognition of others. Usually, asari didn't have enough experience with that until they were in their early Matron years. She had experience not just with Mother's 'stories'. She had even used her expertise to try and help one of her class-mates, a salarian, when she was tutoring. He passed, but she didn't know if it was by her help. After all, the mind-sphere of a salarian was so fast, so fleeting. Everything moving past in a blur. She rather expected that Shepard would be much the same, since humans didn't tend to live very long, and tended to think quite quickly.

Add in the alien images for an alien mind, clunkily shoved into an ill-fitting vessel by a self-destructing machine, and Liara T'Soni expected grinding noises, deafening to the senses. She expected flashes of color and indistinct shapes. She expected the slick glide of wetness, as the Prothean vision included touch and smell into the vision, but they would only be felt as though placing one's fingers into gelatin. She expected confusion, bright lights, loud noise.

What she got was a closet. A dusty, dark, closet.

She glanced around, hands moving along the walls, until she felt cracked leather under her fingertips. Confused, she felt around it, until she started to feel paper. A book? Randomly searching hands finally chanced upon up, and felt a chain dangling down. With a tug, light filled the tiny dirty closet, a bare lightbulb dangling down from its cord. She blinked away the sudden light, and turned to the book. Correction, books. Many books. This wasn't a cupboard. This was a library stacks. She pressed a finger to the book she had touched before.

"Who is Kyoshi?" Liara asked, examining the very thick tome. Others before and after it were smaller. Some, only as thick as pamphlets. She turned, and spotted a door knob. Ah. She gave it a twist, and the door opened into a study, all dark woods and black stone and golden sconces. Gas fire burned in those sconces, adding to the soot high on the walls, but that seemed to be the way this place was designed. Fire, wealth, and power. "Hello?"

There was a shiff of paper being turned, and she turned to a table which sat in the corner of the room. The whole space seemed dominated by books, and the tables, of which there were two, were piled high with them. One, much more so than the other. The other, as it were, had a human reading quietly at it. He was quite slender, his hair starting to go grey, which she took as a sign of relatively advanced age. She gave a look around the room again. And with that second glance, she knew where she was. Not specifically, mind, but generally.

She was in a professor's office.

"What were you doing in my library?" the human asked her.

"I am not sure. Honestly, I have no idea where I am, or how I got here. Goddess, this reminds me of college all over again," she palmed her forehead.

He turned to her, looking her up and down with eyes like burnished gold behind reading glasses. His face was framed by peppery stubble, as though he seldom thought to shave. Then again, given the mussed nature of his short hair, it was likely he honestly didn't. His eyes grew a bit wider. "Ah. You must be an asari. I'd heard that you had this capability."

"Could you tell me where I am?" Liara asked. "I was trying to help Commander Shepard make sense of a Prothean vision, and then I am... well... here."

"You are helping her," the human said, closing a book and setting it aside. That one read 'Korra'. "Is it true, what I keep hearing about your kind? That you can enter other people's souls?"

"No, that is preposterous. We simply join our consciousnesses together. Please, tell me where I am."

The man rose to his feet, tugging at his coat. It was tweed, and the elbows had been worn clear through so that his white shirt was clearly visible through it. "Forgive me for not introducing myself. My name is Hong Fuzoku, Ph.D and Professor of History at the Royal Fire Academy. Welcome to my office... of a sort."

"Am I on Earth?" Liara asked.

"No, you're still standing in front of Shepard on the Normandy," he said. "This place is... a representation. A mirage, if you will. You claim that you can't enter souls, but that is exactly what you did. You are currently inside Avatar Shepard's soul."

"What? That is impossible!"

"It was also impossible to metalbend, bring an Avatar back from the dead, and take away a bender's bending," Hong said pleasantly. "Please, sit. We have a lot to talk about."

"I don't understand what is going on," Liara said.

"Perhaps you know me better as Avatar Hong. I was your Commander Shepard the last time she was alive," he said simply. She sat back, and thankfully, there was a chair to catch her. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Now, I don't know much about the asari, since I died before I could interact with them, and Shepard's policy with regards to everybody is 'if they get in my way, I kill them', I'm somewhat left out of the loop. But the fact that we can talk tells me that Adeks' stories weren't exactly tall tales. And that's good. Very good."

"Why is that?" Liara asked. She still couldn't comprehend that she was not only talking to a dead person, but possibly looking into Shepard's soul. Hong took a calming breath.

"Because, and I've got Aang screaming in my ear on this one, Shepard is _doing it wrong_."

* * *

Eyes opened by pairs, inside and then outside. They blinked furiously, trying to flick away black blood, as he felt himself being dragged along the ground, the grinding of his scarlet and gold armor as it moved along tarmac the only thing entering his ears. He glanced up and back, and was able to see two arms with tri-digit hands heaving him as their source walked backwards. Above those, two more arms were holding a rifle to a shoulder. "I am awake, Kija. You can stop dragging me!" Sajuuk said groggily, waving up.

"So you're not dead? Good. I didn't feel like dragging you all the way to the ship," Kija snarked, unceremoniously dropping the Prothean to the ground and passing the rifle from her upper to her lower set of arms. "I swear. One of these days, you and the Stranger are going to have a pissing contest which ends in both of you drowning."

"Your concern is noted," Sajuuk said, getting slowly to his feet. He cast a glance to Kija. She was not tall for an oravore, but quite broad for a female, her armor actually refitted from a male. Two arms emerged from each side of her torso, the higher ones thicker and stronger, with three digits to a hand, while the lower were more slender and dexterous, and each hand had an additional digit. She smirked, blinking her single pair of dark red eyes. "Where are the others?"

"Hijaam, the professor, and Wex are on the ship. Tunu... I haven't heard from," Kija said, clapping him on the back and pressing a pistol into his hands. She might have been small for an oravore, but she was still quite a bit taller than Sajuuk. "Although, I figure even Reapers must have trouble targeting ditakur."

"I would be surprised if they even appear on their targeting scanners," Sajuuk said with a chuckle. "How many husks? How many Indoctrinated?"

"I don't know. I don't really care. This planet was a shit-hole anyway," Kija gave a shrug. "Get your fleet to glass it and move on."

Sajuuk gave an askance glance at the oravore. "What about the Kingslayers?"

She scowled. "Those things are not like me. Nothing like me!" she declared. "They are abominations. They cannot be saved. Only destroyed as swiftly as possible."

Sajuuk sighed slightly of relief. He had worried that he would have had to convince his oldest companion of that fact. "Then you finally agree that we must stand together?"

"I have always agreed to that," Kija said, then flicked out a hand, catching Sajuuk across the chestplate. There was a moment of relative silence, broken only by the sound of small-arms fire in the distance. She shook her head. "The difficulty comes in that the Combine disagrees with you. They won't just shoot and die where the Prothean Empire directs them," she gave him a significant glance. "We oravore are an independent bunch."

"So you continually prove, to our mutual disadvantage," Sajuuk answered smoothly. "How many wars have we fought?"

"What point is there in counting?" Kija asked. There was a whoosh of air, followed by a blaring of noise, which set Sajuuk's teeth to grinding. Kija wilted just a little bit. "So I suppose glassing the planet will be a bit of a pointless gesture."

"Indeed. The Reapers have landed," Sajuuk said, his eyes picking out the scarlet lightning in the distance. "Come. We don't have the advantage of the ditakur when it comes to hiding from soldiers. We're in the open here."

"Then we'd best get out of it," Kija said. "After all, it's not like we can replace _you_ any time soon."

"The Avatar is infinitely replaceable," Sajuuk corrected, but he shook his angular head. "The only problem is, I do not believe we have enough time, now."

* * *

Floating inside her own mind, Shepard recoiled a bit, from where she was both watching and being. Only three words, spoken inwardly, could encapsulate her confusion.

"What. The. Fuck."

* * *

**Chapter 5**

**The Dream**

* * *

It was a strange feeling, drinking tea inside somebody's soul. Rationally, she didn't want to believe that what was currently happening, was, indeed, happening. She wanted to believe in her disbelief, rebuke the figment and tell him that asari minds did not work that way. That the connections they forged were purely cerebral and cognitive. And yet, there was a man whom she knew to her pale blue toenails was the previous Avatar, calmly drinking some soothing tea as the room grew brighter, and not for any extra presence of light.

"I am not sure what to think about this," Liara said, setting aside her tea. She stared at it for a moment. "What is that? Why was I drinking it?"

"It is tea, and you were drinking it because you seemed tense. There's a reason that Prince Iroh's last masterpiece was entitled '_Tea, Zen, and the Art of Small Unit Tactics_'. That man knew everything about all three," Hong said, sipping at his own cup.

"If I drink that, and have to go to the bathroom, where do I go? Will I be sullying Shepard's mind with my thought-pee?" Liara asked urgently.

Hong stopped, looked up from his cup, and tipped his head. "I hadn't thought about that," he gave a chuckle. "And honestly, I wouldn't worry. The only thing an Avatar really has to worry about is dying while the Avatar State is upon him. Her. Sorry, I've only had about three decades to get used to the idea that I was, in previous lifetimes, female."

"I suppose I can empathize. Most people ascribe certain aspects of 'femininity' to the asari which are odd, if not utterly absurd," Liara agreed, tea back in hand. It did smell divine. She took a sip, and found it tasted as it smelled. She smacked her lips for a moment, then tilted her own head. "What did you mean, Shepard is doing it wrong?"

"That's a long story, and one which presupposes a certain amount of knowledge of what the Avatar is," Hong admitted. He rose to his feet, and offered her a hand. She took it, and the room blinked out of existence. She was now standing on a field. To her left was Hong. To her right was an impressively large human female, dressed in archaic regalia and her face painted white, black, and red. They stared down an army numbering in the tens of thousands.

"What just happened?" Liara asked.

"Perk of being a historian. I know how to access some of the older memories more or less effortlessly," Hong intimated, sipping at his cup.

"This is your last chance, Avatar. Stand aside," a man shouted from the head of that army.

"You're wrong, Chin. This is _your_ last chance. You can either abandon your call to hegemony, or face the consequences," The tall woman answered, in a voice which sounded remarkably similar to Commander Shepard's. But older, more bitter. More certain. "You've united the Earth Kingdoms. That's commendable. But I know you're going to attack the West, to bring the Fire Nations under your heel. That I will not allow. _Nobody_ may disrupt the balance of this world."

"If you are not going to stand with us, Kyoshi, then you stand against us!" the man snapped.

"So be it," the woman whispered, closing her eyes. The whole scene froze in that instant, and Hong stepped before the alien and the strangely dressed human.

"The Avatar is more than just the only human able to simultaneously bend all four of the principle elements. She is the Great Bridge between the Mortal and Spirit Worlds, is and was the guardian of balance on our world," Hong explained. "We were not always four nations, but that's the way that the world seems to want us. We have four parts to us, the Avatars. We have the Fire, which gives us discipline and drive. We have the Earth, which gives us perseverance and resolve. We have water, which gives us unity and community. We have air, which gives us freedom. The world requires all four. When it cannot have them... things get quite unpleasant."

"I do not understand," Liara said. Hong shrugged, and the scene advanced. Kyoshi opened her eyes, and they were not the smokey grey-green they were a moment before, but instead, a blinding and glaring white light, belching from her eyes, as she snapped open a pair of fans and blasted out a gale, which sent the army scattering down the peninsula they had assembled on.

"The Avatar is capable of incredible power, each generation adding to the one before it. They use the knowledge of the previous Avatars in their cycle without conscious thought, and the power of the Avatar Spirit itself is something which, to my knowledge, has never been tested to breaking," Hong continued, speaking academically. As he did. Kyoshi slashed her fans down, first left, then right, cleaving a huge rent in the ground. Before thrusting her arms forward, and the entire landmass she was standing on began to grind and quake, as it separated from the mainland and pushed itself out to sea. The oceans boiled as they fell down into a gap which likely continued all the way to the planetary mantle.

"She is altering the face of the planet!" Liara said incredulously.

"We call the result of this action 'Kyoshi Island'," Hong said, pointing into the distance past the Avatar's back. "If you'll notice, you can see the land mounting up as it's being displaced. That's why the island is backed by mountains, despite there being no tectonic allowance for them."

"This is incredible," Liara said. "Shepard can do this?"

"No," Hong said, as the despot plummeted off of the cliff and into the boiling seas. The world became gray and featureless, only she and Hong left standing in it. "Shepard is... crippled. She denies a portion of herself. She refuses to see that she cannot be Avatar until she is a whole person. She is imbalanced."

"Are you saying that she's too _mean_ to be Avatar?"

"What? Gracious, no," Hong said with a laugh. "You should have seen Yangchen in her day. That Air Nomad was a bitch on wheels. But she was an honest and self-aware bitch. Shepard, on the other hand..." he shook his head. He looked up, and the grey void was replaced by more familiar city streets, albeit obviously still on earth. "Every Avatar has pieces of the one which came before, and is a reaction against the mistakes of the one before," Hong said. "Aang was a peacemaker, who made his mark on history in a time of brutal warfare. His successor, on the other hand..."

Liara looked up and down the street, until she saw a broad-shouldered, dark skinned girl cracking her knuckles as three obvious criminals harassed her. "Who do you think you are," the one in the fine hat asked, threat clear in his voice.

"How about you come and find out?" the girl said with the sort of cockiness usually restricted to asari maidens on their way to their first stint as a mercenary. The leader attacked with a bolt of water, which the girl returned to sender, freezing it into a block around his head, before idly kicking him into the hood of his own car. The next was catapulted into the air by a block of stone, and his landing was less then gentle. The last tried to cast flames at her, but she pushed through with flames of her own, lacing fingers through his panicking hands and heaving him through a window, before standing proud as a first-time krogan father over their fallen bodies.

"That was... impressively brutal," Liara said.

"Better words to describe Avatar Korra were never said," Hong admitted. "She was a thug in a time of peace. Were she and her predecessor swapped, both would have done splendidly, to a point. She would have been the warrior that every Earth Kingdom general was begging for to fight the Fire Lord. He would have been the negotiator that every bureaucrat in Republic City was screaming for. And both would have failed, since she would have solved none of the underlying problems of the World War, and he would have never been able to deal with Amon, let alone what came after him."

"Are you saying that the Avatar is born for the age she lives in?" Liara asked.

"I have often thought that," Hong admitted. "Before me, much of the history of the Avatars was degrading into hearsay and conjecture. I reminded people what the Avatar once was, at a time when it was nearly forgotten. But I was never a warrior. I learned the other elemental martial arts when I learned I could, but honestly, I've never used them in a fight. I learned them because that was part of what being the Avatar meant. I needed that context. It served me well."

"And what about Shepard?"

Hong shook his head, and behind them, the young Avatar fled from being arrested for her reckless vigilantism. The scene turned back to the professor's office, and Hong sat down. "I was no warrior. I've never been in a life-or-death fight; or at least, not until the one which killed me. Shepard is a reaction against that. I was a pacifist, and she is a war-hawk. She's built her entire life around fighting, around killing. And that has me very concerned. Not just for her, but for the age she lives in."

"Are you saying that the universe wants Shepard to be as good a killer as possible?" Liara asked, taking another sip of her tea.

"That is my theory. And if true, I can't help but wonder what exactly is going to come, which is so dangerous that only an Avatar with no value of sapient life will be needed to check. If the threat is relative to the woman, I'd say it would be nothing less than the extinction of life itself," Hong said.

"You are exaggerating."

"I've seen things through her eyes, when she was growing up," Hong said quietly. "She used to be the kind of person that anybody would have wanted to be the Avatar. Kind. Caring. Understanding. But then..."

Blackness. She could feel heat, hear crying. Smell blood.

"What is this?" Liara asked.

"A memory she refuses to let go. Something she's built her entire life around. Something which is crippling her," Hong's voice came in the darkness. Then, the grey once more. "She needs to be more. And you are her sole and solitary chance of that."

* * *

The flashing beams and tracer shells were clear even against the afternoon sky, trying desperately to swat down the abominations which claimed that sky as their own. The first blare of Reaper arrival had been echoed by first a handful, then dozens more. "What do you think the chances of holding Agneyagiri are?" Kija asked.

"Low," Sajuuk responded. There was a pounding sound in the distance which was more familiar to both. An orbital firebase drop. "That doesn't mean that the Empire is going to give up without a fight."

"You people and your hopeless causes," Kija said. She pressed a thumb to her ear. "Lampha! Can you hear me out there?"

"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over all the incoming Reaper fire that I'm avoiding," the woman's voice came through. "Could you please leave a message and we'll get back to you after the galaxy stops burning?"

"This is not the time, Lampha! Where are you?" Sajuuk said harshly.

"Far away," the pilot of the Avatar's ship said direly. "We can't approach until you shut down those anti-aircraft platforms. So if you want to see space again in this incarnation, do me a favor and burst those insects!"

"It seems we have a goal," Kija said. "The weaponry we'll need will be at the firebase. And, probably, a better gun for you. You're looking a little flimsy with that."

"By all means, try me, oravore," Sajuuk offered, but only half-seriously. Kija was an irreverent example of an irreverent species. It came with having no benders amongst them.

The path through the nearly white plantlife which flourished under the hot, bright star was littered with destroyed bits of crashing ships. Their hopes, their dreams. All dying right here. Unless they got it to safety. Sajuuk prayed, against all hope, that they had moved it away from this place. That was essentially their only remaining hope. Sajuuk gave a hiss, though, as he walked, and leaned down, running his fingers along the ground.

Husks. Kingslayers. Hundreds of years of farmers, toiling for the good of something greater than they. Soldiers pounding boots against Protheans, against metacon, against synril slaves. Then, reapers. Most recently, Husks and Kingslayers.

"We are not alone," Sajuuk announced. His four eyes scanned along the rubble and ruins, and he could see... movement. It was brown, mottled, and barely Prothean. It had no face, as such. No mouth. No nostrils. Its body moved with all the grace of a self-destructing metacon drone. In an instant, Sajuuk had his pistol up, and it belched bolts of super-heated plasma out, which burst across the kinetic barriers, and quickly shut them down. His next few shots tore holes through the Husk's head.

Kija, better armed, did likewise, but better. As the Husks advanced, the strange wings on their back – something never seen in the Prothean race – folding into carapace, as they brought up weapons which looked at least partially alive. They sent out shards of something which shattered against the machine parts, and sparked off of Kija's barriers. She gave back more, a brilliant yellow-green beam of deadly heat and flying shards of sub-relativistic metal. While the plasma bolts of Sajuuk's pistol made short work of the shields of the abominations, Kija's rifle cut through them like they weren't there, often splitting the Husks in half as she swept the beam along them. They didn't bleed, as they fell apart. There was no blood left in them to spill.

"Kingslayers, from the left!" Sajuuk called, and started belting out bolts toward that target. There were two of them. They had a superficial similarity to Kija, but only at its most basic. While they were nude, they were also unsexed and depersonalized. There was nothing left of them but that which let them kill. Two additional pairs of eyes marched up their faces, like some sort of twisted spider-fly, a notion reinforced by their oversized and tube-laden arms. Only one set of those arms ended in hands, though.

The two still able to think, still free of the Reapers, had to bolt in opposite directions as both of the Kingslayers levied their arm-cannons toward them, and began to belt out a barrage of explosive blasts of heat and force. The Kingslayers had been a harsh surprise when they first landed on Takur, and one the diminutive denizens were ill prepared to deal with. Military doctrine demanded separate the Kingslayers, approach them from at least three different angles, and tear them apart with biotics, anti-materiel weaponry, artillery, or best yet, an orbital bombardment. None of those were viable, here.

Sajuuk didn't care. "Kija! Concentrate on the closer one!"

Kija gave a nod, and popped out from behind the chunk of cruiser bulkhead she was hiding behind to paint a red line across the body of the Kingslayer. It was a terrible testiment to the resilience of the Reapers that they could weaponize the oravore so effectively, to have something so hard to kill. He leaned aside, firing a few bolts at it, but had to duck back, as it swung both arms toward him, and began to pelt the ruined fightercraft he used for cover. The thing rocked and sputtered, cracked and groaned under that fire. Kingslayers could keep up that level of fire almost indefinitely.

Unless...

Sajuuk hurled himself aside from the ruined fighter, and held out a hand. The bolts were just biotic fields surrounding charged particles. Charged particles were close enough that this might work. The Kingslayer was unable to express a look of triumph. Its face was a plane, interrupted by burning yellow holes. So when it launched two blasts at Sajuuk, it did so as cold as ice. The two shots sparked and jolted between them as they flew, zeroing in on him. He let them.

And then, he reached out, and touched them. The raw power of the bolts tore up his arm, and then, he forcefully pressed it down, below his heart, almost to the point where it descended into his genitals, before allowing the crackling energy to return upward. And when it did, it was under Sajuuk's control. With a howl of angry effort, he cast out his other hand, one finger leading, and a corkscrew of terrible scarlet lightning tore away from him, digging into the Kingslayer and causing it to burst like a louse on a hot-plate. It also left him panting for breath, feeling like he'd set his entire body on fire. He only just managed to twist the fire into an ad-hoc shield to allow the impact of the other Kingslayer's assault to throw him aside, rather then reduce him to a fine red mist.

Sajuuk rolled to a stop near a half-destroyed cryopod, and quickly ducked behind it. He opened the flasks built into his armor, and ran it over his hands, where it started to glow a soothing blue, before spreading up his arms to his battered body. That was a foolish risk he'd taken. But it had evened the odds.

It had also cost Sajuuk his pistol. "Can you deal with that one, Kija?"

"Sure, and I expect you'll be punching a Reaper in the face for the follow up?" Kija snapped from where the Kingslayer turned its attention back to her, pinning her down. Sajuuk glanced to her. The bulkhead was coming apart. A few seconds more, and she'd be exposed. There was nowhere useful for her to run, and the assault was withering. Sajuuk pressed his eyes closed, and offered a prayer.

"May you find your way safely to the Sea of Souls, old friend," he offered. Then, he opened his eyes. He would watch his friend die. She deserved no less of him.

Only, it didn't happen.

One second, the Kingslayer was tearing through the bulkhead, and the next, it had stopped. And started to tip forward. It landed on its face, showing an overloading speeder bike impaling its back. One which exploded, tearing out the abomination's spine and causing the unnatural glow of its eyes to fade. Sajuuk gave a scowl, and rose to his feet, hobbling to Kija. "What madness is this?"

"Madness? Is that what we're calling me now?" the high voice came from somewhere nearby. Sajuuk glanced around, trying to find its source. Then, he looked down. She had come to a halt, sitting, at the bottom of the gentle slope the Kingslayer had dominated. Of course the ditakur had survived. She flashed a grin full of sharp teeth. "I heard you were having some trouble. I figured you could use a firebase, so..."

"You manually launched a firebase from one of my ships?" Sajuuk said without humor.

"Yup. Rode it down, too," Tunu said proudly. Her species was the smallest sapient in the galaxy, never breaching a meter in height. Their green blood meant that their complexions were either dark, pale, or yellowed of that same hue, but they had the same rounded heads and curvaceous proportions of the primitive species. It was a common joke amongst the Prothean Empire that the ditakur had defied the will of the galaxy itself by evolving toward space-travel, despite their many disadvantages. Most notable amongst them was their near-insanity when it came toward anything technological.

"You are a madwoman," Kija said, but proudly, pulling the tiny alien into a hug. "I couldn't have asked for better help."

"I could have," Sajuuk said direly.

"You lack imagination, Avatar," Tunu said, squirming her way free of Kija, then pulling a rifle almost as big as she was from the back of her armor and hurling it toward him. "I figured you might need one of these, too."

Sajuuk's lips pulled into a smile, showing his own fangs in doing so, as he ran his hands over his favorite rifle. "My opinion of you improves, small green fly."

She scratched at the ears which made up roughly a third the size of her head, and gave a fawning expression. "Aw, I knew you cared about me. I'll have to tell my parents to expect creepy hybrid offspring."

"Avatars are celibate," Sajuuk reminded her.

"Also, lacking imagination," Tunu pressed. "Come on. The _fun_ weapons are in the firebase."

"Why do I imagine that you did not include our usual anti-materiel devices before you stole our dropship?" Sajuuk asked. Tunu only grinned as an answer, before pelting up that hill, past the dead Kingslayer, as fast as her little legs would take her. Sajuuk palmed his face.

"Look at it this way, Avatar. Would you rather have her working for the _Reapers_?"

"_Almost_," Sajuuk said gravely.

* * *

"How much do you know about bending, miss T'Soni?" Hong asked her, as they walked through a bamboo forest which struggled to reach up a towering mountain. Once again, there was no logical reason for this being here. One moment, they were in darkness and the stink of death, the next clear and open skies, sun, and the calls of birds.

"I do not know much. I had heard that it was just a specialized and misunderstood form of biotics. I assume that is incorrect," Liara said.

"You assume correctly," Hong said. "One of our ancient philosophers once said that bending was the surest sign of the presence of a soul. Many people have taken that out of context, it seems. Humans, despite our rampant overpopulation, catastrophic unemployment, and occasional but disruptive incursions from the Spirit World, claim to be the greatest that the galaxy has to offer. Just because we had the Avatar, and they didn't. Worse, because they didn't even know that the Avatar existed, or why."

As they walked, they approached a stone walled hut, which a white-haired woman sat in front of. She looked ancient by human standards. Liara could hear other footsteps approaching behind her, and saw a woman, black of hair and golden of eye, approaching that woman. "You. You're the woman who learned to move the stone, from the badgermoles themselves?"

"I am Oma. Who are you, Westerner?" the old woman asked, her voice strong for its age.

"I believe you have much to teach me," the younger woman answered, bowing down.

"The First Avatar," Hong explained. "Earthbending was the youngest of the elemental martial arts, since it wasn't until Oma discovered it that the Avatar could exist. Balance is paramount. That's what bending is. It is an expression of balance, between Man and the world. Or, as the case may be, between life and the galaxy. Those who are imbalanced lose control. Instead of directing their bending, their bending directs them. Such has happened before," Hong continued, as the mountain turned into a great brown wall, and fireballs hurled up and toward it.

"Why are you showing me all of this?" Liara asked, as a section of that massive wall came crumbling down, undercut from below, and a cry of triumph came from the red-and-black armored soldiers which were arrayed around her. This scene felt... wrong, though. And when she leaned back, she could tell it was because it was projected onto a screen, a vid played by an overweight woman.

"Because you can make Shepard understand that she is out of balance. Without it, she can't be an effective Avatar. Worse, she can't be a decent human being," Hong stressed.

"It is refreshing that you prioritize them in that order," Liara admitted. Hong shrugged with a crack of grin.

"I like to believe the best in people. Like you, for example."

"Oh, please. There is little about me that should be lauded," Liara said, blushing a slightly darker shade of blue.

"That's where you're wrong. Avatars of every generation, in every age of humanity, have always assembled of the best of humanity around them," the scene turned to the stone of a city, where a group of teenagers were drinking tea and talking quietly. Hong smiled at it. "Aang, for example. He was accompanied by the world's first metalbender. The first waterbender to bring somebody back from the dead. The man who would be Fire Lord – and not anything the spoiled ponce we had in there when I was alive. Fire Lord Zuko might have been divisive, but he at least had the best in mind in what he did," Hong gave a chuckle and leaned in, "There's some irony in that the _current_ Fire Lord is more closely related to Zuko's sister than to him. Better ruler, too, I'm taken to believe. But that's beside the point. I dare say the most important was _him_," Hong pointed at one of them. Liara leaned over the dark skinned youth, who was drawing on a piece of paper. Very, very badly.

"Who was he? Some sort of bending prodigy? A master warrior? A future politician?" Liara asked.

"No, sort of, and yes but not the point," Hong answered. "Sokka was a normal person. No bending, no powers, no clout. But he got things done, with nothing but his wits and his personal strengths. It was a lesson, that non-benders have every bit as much right to live their lives as benders do, and deserve every bit as much respect. A lesson which would be lost by the time of his death, sadly. Korra... learned that lesson a bit too late for some," Hong shook his head sadly. He turned to her again. "Every Avatar gathers the best to himself, or herself. They aren't always the people you'd expect. It could be a couple of streetrats living in an attic over a sports arena. It could be a villain's right-minded child. In fact, it frequently is," he rubbed at his chin.

"Are you saying that Shepard is doing the same thing?" Liara asked. "That does not make sense."

"Why not?" Hong asked.

"Because I am a very young, unaccomplished scientist who holds a fringe theory in a discipline which most don't care about. Mister Vakerian is a disgraced police officer. Miss... Tali is a quarian teenager!"

"And Wrex is an old krogan who's given up on his people," Hong finished for her. She gaped at him. "What? I can pay attention through Shepard's eyes. She leaves the door open."

"Creepy," Liara noted.

"What? I leave when she's getting intimate. Which she should do much more often than she does, I should point out," Hong mentioned.

"You think so too, do you?" Liara asked.

"That kind of stress will kill you faster than Qiao's congested cardiac arteries," Hong said with a nod. Liara stared at him. "The 'Avatar' before me was named Qiao. She never found out. Most people don't try bending beyond what they start with."

"I find it hard to believe that somebody who was historically as important as the Avatar could ever 'not get found'," Liara said.

"Sometimes they die young," Hong said with a shrug. "Arsuk was fourteen when he died, and he hadn't even mastered waterbending when he got gunned down in the slums of Republic City. Some just never have the impetus to try. And it's gotten frightfully hard to find them, nowadays. Kids in Roku's day had it easy," he rolled his eyes.

"How did you find out you were Avatar?"

"I talked to Avatar Sato," Hong said. She frowned. "Yeah, he was dead for almost a century years by the time I did, and I was as surprised as you'd think. But that's not the point. My point was, you are in a unique position, miss T'Soni. You can help Shepard become a better Avatar. And you know what, I think you need to. She needs you to. I've seen what she does without somebody to steer her away from that cliff. It's bloody and dark and I think everybody dies at the end."

"You have very little faith in Shepard."

Hong sighed. "I know what the Avatar is. I know what it needs. Shepard isn't doing it. Have you ever seen her airbend? Do you wonder why she doesn't?"

"No, but I am not sure I'd know it if I saw it," Liara admitted. She pondered a moment. "Why do humans bend?"

"We learned it from the animals, or from Tui and La. The krogan did something similar, and I'm fairly sure the batarians did as well. May be why nobody else figured it out. Have you tried?"

"You must have given this some thought," she said, dismissing the question, as the scene became Hong's office again, and Liara sat, tea in hand. "Do all dead Avatars spend their time critiquing the living?"

"Usually? No," Hong said. "Shepard left some doors open. The rest... they're... resting. They usually stay down in the murk, until the Avatar State calls them up. That's another problem. She can't go into it at all, let alone at will," Hong pointed out. He leaned toward her, his fingers clasped together but his eyes earnest. "If somebody doesn't get her past what's holding her back, she's not going to survive whatever wants her the way she is. She needs to be better. And sadly, Liara, despite your lack of faith in yourself, you're the only real way that that can happen."

Liara raised a hand, as she set the tea down.

"Question?" he asked.

"You didn't answer my query about thought-pee," Liara pointed out.

"Because I didn't think it was relevant," Hong answered.

"...because I think I drank too much tea and I need to use a washroom," Liara said with growing urgency.

"What."

"Where is the bathroom, Avatar Hong?" Liara asked, starting to pull her knees together.

"How is... Why would that..." Hong rubbed his temple. "How is that even possible? It wasn't..." then, he sighed. "Just through there. You can't miss it."

Liara thanked him profusely, as she ran through the doorway. The hallway beyond the door was a corridor three paces long, which ended in a woman's lavatory. The sign on the door said 'see, can't miss it'. She pushed through, not even thinking about what that meant, nor how ridiculous it was to need to use a bathroom inside somebody else's soul.

* * *

The tiny alien's grin drooped slightly when the trio beheld that the firebase, which was supposed to carry all of the weapons they needed to burst the Reaper Hades Cannons, was on fire. Sajuuk just palmed his inward eyes, rubbing them between his finger and thumb as he muttered what would be the darkest profanity on his homeworld, if his homeworld still existed. "So, a minor setback?" Kija offered the ditakur.

"What? It was safe when I left it there! It's not my fault that they knew where I parked!" Tunu complained.

Sajuuk sighed. "Anything without cost is without worth. We all knew what the Reapers were capable of when they took the Citadel," he said, limbering his particle rifle. "Everything in its time, and we will drown them in our blood if need be to send them all into whatever they consider hell. And the first step toward the glorious victory, is taking back a foolishly lost firebase," he said, leveling a glare at the ditakur. It rolled off her like water off a Prothean's head.

Tunu gave a shrug, then pulled out a pistol which would have been appropriately sized for an oravore, but the way she held it spoke to her years of use with it. Nothing about the ditakur was reasonable, after all. It even explained how they managed to enslave the synril. Without another word needing spoken, they all descended down the hill, as the stink of rotting eggs filled the air. The volcano for whom the planet was named was slowly rousing itself again, after centuries of slumber. It would only be a matter of time before the had to move or be engulfed. If it survived. It's great white mass thrust into the heavens ahead, but that would stand or fall without them.

The Avatar was but one man, or one woman, and the Avatar could not do everything.

"Husks!" Sajuuk snapped as they came into view, their skin a horrid, fecal brown instead of a proper grey-green. Their heads swiveled like poorly controlled dolls, and they started to fire at the three living creatures in their midst. Sajuuk ignored the pinging of green light as his shields slowly buckled. He just had to get into the right position.

And when he did, he cast out a hand, and the land cast out in a wave, throwing them off of their footing and smashing them enough that the kinetic barriers which had been built into them ruptured and broke. Tunu, vexingly, was the first to make a kill, firing a bullet which may have qualified for anti-materiel status from a handgun and splitting a Husk in two. The other five fell quickly to the green beams of particle rifles held in the hands of two veterans of many wars.

There was a moment of silence. Then, a pounding of feet. "Into the walls!" Sajuuk demanded, and the three of them sprinted forward, right to the dug-in base of the off-white walls, where the Avatar twisted his arm upward, and caused the stone to catapult them up over its edge. They landed on the raised lip overlooking the center of the dropship/mobile operation center. And it was overrun. Sajuuk gave a glance to Kija. Kija nodded, and pulled Tunu toward one of the 'defensive towers'. Against such numbers, they were meat. But Sajuuk? Sajuuk was still the Avatar.

He waited an appropriate period. At least, he waited, until he started to hear tick-tick-ticking on the metal walkway around the corner. He leaned carefully, trying to catch a glance of what was coming. He could see nothing over the raised rail. But the sound of approaching still came, and he had a growing anticipation of what it was. There was a sound of a grenade going off in the tower, which caused Husks to swivel their heads toward it. And the tick-tick-ticking picked up pace, and then number. Sajuuk glanced around that corner just in time to see first one, then a half dozen. They were tiny, a meter tall at most, and their skins were either grey or glowing blue. Their eyes were a dull, red glow, and while naked, they shared none of the even primitively aesthetic proportion of their ditakur source. The Gremlins were forty kilograms of rampant electromagnetism, built around a fusion torch which ran from their distended bellies. And they let out a howl, as they sprinted toward Sajuuk.

"Not today, abominations," Sajuuk said with a grim smirk, before twisting his arm and lashing out with a bolt of lighting, directly into that dangling belly. The lightning itself would ordinarily have done severe damage to one target, before grounding itself. But the belly of the Gremlin was a fusion power plant, replacing an entire life's worth of internal organs. One which, when overpowered, burst with blue flame, melting the walkway ten meters from the Avatar.

"I hope you did that on purpose!" Kija's voice announced over the intercomms. "We've got incoming. Tunu! Get to the guns!"

Sajuuk didn't give her a response. He instead bounded over the edge, pulling the metal of the railing down with him, metalbending as he moved. With a twist, he began to almost dance amongst the Husks which tried to spray him with fire, binding them all with restrictive metal. They would pry their way free quickly enough, but that wasn't the point. As he reached as far as that metal railing would allow him, he hurled himself aside a box of rifles identical to the one he was carrying, and then twisted his arms around once more, before sending a bolt of lightning up the metal. He poured the energy of his soul into it, letting the bolt continue... and continue... and continue. Smoke began to rise from the bodies of the Husks. A fitting end for them.

Such, he didn't hear the tick-tick-tick of tiny, metal-embued feet flanking him. He just felt a hand clutch onto his knee, and looked down, to see sharp, sparking teeth grinning up at him. Then, Sajuuk had a wholly different experience of lightning, as it was sent through _him_. With a strength he wasn't aware he had, the Avatar managed to punt the Gremlin aside, bring around his rifle and put a hole through it. But he could hear others. The howl of their plasma cutters coming online, flames hovering above their clawed hands in a grotesque mockery of firebending, reminded Sajuuk that he was still in poor shape from his gambit against the Kingslayer, and now, his shields were down.

With a twist of his arms, he peeled up the floor plating of the base and sent it sweeping toward the Gremlins. They avoided it as easily as any ditakur would have. Then, with a low, throaty moan, they were advancing in loping strides, which ate ground quickly despite their small size. Sajuuk simply didn't have another bolt of lightning in him. But he had other things.

Sajuuk glanced aside, and noted the tubes which ran down along all of the support structures. They were built there for he, and his kind, specifically. They didn't take the water anywhere. Just where it was needed. So Sajuuk shot the pipe open, and with his other tridactyl hand, he started to bend it, sending it toward them without any of the grace and precision that his old masters would have demanded, but serving well enough to smash the little insects aside while he regained his wind, and his vigor. As his focus returned, he started attacking more precisely. Gremlins were essentially fireproof, but nothing was proof against a water knife. Sajuuk compressed the water into an edge which could have split diamonds like paper, and began to whip it through the Gremlins, one after another, as more rifle-fire sounded to his back. Finally, he took a moment to catch his breath, as the last Gremlin, devoid even of blood, tried to roll onto its belly and claw its way toward him, bereft of its legs and lower torso. Sajuuk favored it with a plasma bolt to the skull.

"Have you taken the tower, yet?" Sajuuk demanded. "Where are the weapons?"

"Kinda busy!" Kija's voice had an edge of panic to it over the speakers, so Sajuuk took a purging breath, and threw aside his rifle for a fresh one. That one would take precious seconds he may well lack to cool itself down. He ran to the door at the base of the tower, and with a heave, tore it off of its hinges in a fit of metalbending. Inside, he could see what was giving Kija such trouble. Staring up the spiral at her, filling the way with deadly, rebounding flachettes, was a variant on the Kingslayer. It turned toward him, spreading its six dead eyes wide, and snarled. Sajuuk just heaved the metal under its feet, and caused it to be cast past him, into the center of the partially melted Husks. The rifle-fire continued above, likely now directed at other, more immediate targets. But that also meant that Sajuuk had to take out this Kingslayer on his own.

And he was in a lot of pain.

It slowly got to its feet, again moving like a poorly maneuvered puppet, and lowly lowered its arms toward Sajuuk. He slapped the emergency charge on his shields, and they crackled to green life around him, as he raised his rifle to his shoulder.

The Kingslayer belched out a swarm of what looked like evil, biotic bees, which bent in the air to hit him more directly as he dodged and wove through the fallen and the boxes of things which _wouldn't_ explode if they were shot. Sajuuk's shot reflected entirely off of some sort of white shield, something which caused the Kingslayer's eyes to glow that same shade, and it emit from its mouth when it howled at Sajuuk. He fired, holding the beam on it, trying to find some purchase, some break in its field.

And then, the gun stopped, the heat-sink popping out the side and landing on the metal. That wasn't good. The Kingslayer rolled its upper, cannon shoulders, and then started firing that seeker swarm again, and he could practically feel his shields starting to buckle completely.

And then, the Kingslayer was recoiling. The Thuck-Thuck-Thuck of heavy machinegun fire filled the air as tracer rounds illuminated a path from above, down, and through the Kingslayer. Sajuuk looked up, and beheld a tiny green ditakur in the seat of the anti-aircraft guns, which were doing a fine enough job of shredding a Reaper soldier, until it's body couldn't withstand the damage anymore, the white shield crumbled, and it was torn to fine grey chunks.

"That's two Kingslayers I saved your teal-ass from in one day! You're gettin' rusty, Avatar!" Tunu declared from her place. She got out from behind the controls, and pointed to a box fairly nearby. "That's the one I keep my baby in. Be a dear, and pass her up to me?"

Sajuuk raised a plane of eyebrow at her terminology, but cracked open the crate anyway. Unlike the others, this one contained only one weapon. It was just shy of a meter long, and likely weighed twenty kilos or more. Its barrel had a bore thick enough that Sajuuk's fist could fit inside, and it was colored a threatful yellow and red. There were even extendable electromagnet plates which would fold out before the shot went live, likely giving this thing the equivalent punch of a small tactical nuclear bomb. And the kicker? Its firing mechanism was specifically designed for a user which would only rise to Sajuuk's waist.

"You have an ugly child, small green fly," Sajuuk pointed out, picking up the brute of a weapon and casting it up toward its 'mother'. Her eyes shot wide and she practically jumped over the edge of the tower to catch it, having to haul herself back in by her feet.

"Hey! Watch it! Are you alright, Cain? Did the bad man hurt you?" Tunu mothered the weapon, rubbing it tenderly. Sajuuk rolled his eyes. He pressed a finger to the implant that reached into his cochlea.

"Kija. Contact the Coming Of Daylight. Tell them that the Cannon will be disposed of soon."

"Is that a hint?" Tunu asked, still cradling the weapon. Sajuuk just stared up at her, and she gave a laugh. She heaved herself up onto the rail, balancing easily despite the narrowness of the perch, and moved to where she, and all, could see the two hundred meter tall form of the Hades Cannon, lumbering through the landscape, and sending beams of destructive red energy into the sky. She braced herself, brought the weapon to her chest – for there was no fitting that behemoth to her shoulder, however it was designed for a ditakur in mind – and waited.

"...it's broken, isn't it?" Sajuuk said flatly.

"Just... give it a second," she said. And then, she smacked it, aiming once more. This time, there was a whining sound, before a crack of thunder. Not lightning. No, this was something far more dire. This was the sound of air igniting as something forced it aside so that it could travel at a small but not insignificant fraction of the speed of light, forcing a kilogram of metal to land with a force which could reshape mountains. Or, in this case, cause part of its mass to convert directly to energy, and cause the Hades Cannon to be torn in half at the joint of the thorax by the explosion.

"Hoooyeah! Cain's my baby girl!" Tunu hollared proudly.

"Whatever that was, Avatar, the Reaper is defunct. I'll be landing in two minutes," Lampha's voice came in over the comms.

"Well, that was fun. Let's get out of here," Tunu said with finality, before dropping down into the walkway and vanishing from sight, save for the end of her portable non-nuclear ordnance which she'd slung upon her shoulder, and marked her passage bobbing above the rail as she headed into the tower. Kija emerged first, and she looked a bit battered from her time within. Whatever fight she had, she would likely regale him with later, whether he wanted to hear it or not.

"You shouldn't make a habit of being saved by a ditakur. People might start to think that the Prothean Empire is going soft," Kija chuckled.

"Anyone who says as much, will be shown how hard the Empire truly is," Sajuuk said, which drew a chortle from the oravore, but for reasons that he didn't entirely understand. Celibacy was a double-edged sword, after all. "How many did you kill?"

"Ten Gremlins, two Husks, and a Kingslayer," Kija said, sliding her rifle back onto her armor. "Although, I think Tunu's got us all beat by scrapping the Cannon."

"How her race survived the discovery of the nuclear bomb, I shall never understand," Sajuuk said, shaking his head. Tunu had to run to keep up with them, but Sajuuk didn't care. The shuttle was already dropping to pick them up.

"Uh... guys! Heads up!" Tunu's voice came from their backs. Sajuuk glanced back, and beheld that there was something descending from orbit toward them. He heaved the stone up over he and Kija, but what he had assumed was an orbital bombardment didn't materialize. Instead, a moment of silence. He let the stone drop. Another slammed into the earth nearby.

His eyes all went wide as he beheld the pod. It had writing on its side, mostly illegible, because it was scoured and concealed by Reaper Tech. And when it cracked open, it did so with a shriek. The three backed away from it, and the hiss became a crunch of metal as long fingers wormed through the breach, then heaved the pipe away, causing it to shatter and warp away. What rose from that tube was... something Sajuuk had never seen before.

It reached three and a half meters tall, but it wasn't the same brutal wall of techno-organic savagery that the Kingslayer was. It was almost slender, but its gut and its sagging grey breasts made a mockery of figure. It seemed like everything about it came to points, except for grey, blunt teeth. Its eyes were black pearls, and its movements made it clear that it could only mock grace, not emulate it. Sajuuk had no idea what this thing used to be.

And then, it screamed again, and a crackling blue biotic barrier erupted to life before its wailing maw. Instantly, Sajuuk and Kija were pulling their rifles and painting that thing with fire. Heat, flying metal, all that they had readily upon them, as they retreated. The shrieking thing ignored the fire, turning to slam its hand into the armor of the tiny ditakur, heaving her screaming form up as easily as something else would a stuffed doll. It twisted its head, letting out another wail, then turned, hurling Tunu past them with contemptuous ease, a spray of green blood spattering off of two sets of kinetic barriers.

"We're not getting through the shields!" Kija shouted.

"That is obvious!" Sajuuk said. Tunu, where she landed, was still moving, though. She looked in terrible shape, but was not dead. Sajuuk could see the shuttle, nearby. The thing was forty meters away, and from the way it walked, it could never keep up with them.

And then, with a thud and a flash of blue light, it was thirty meters away. Another thud, twenty. Another, ten, and all the while, those lifeless black eyes were locked on Sajuuk. The Avatar cast a hand to Kija. "Get the small green fly onto the shuttle. I will deal with this one!"

To her credit, Kija didn't question him. So Sajuuk closed his eyes, crossing his fists before his chest. He waited for another thud, his mind focusing into perfect concentration, perfect purpose. Perfect awareness.

When the thud came, Sajuuk threw his arms wide. As he did, green fire erupted behind him, forming into an ornate green ring the shade of burning jade briefly behind his back, and his arms, thrust out to his sides, were joined by four other, spectral limbs, thrust out in sympathy. And when the four eyes of the Avatar opened, they opened with blazing blue-white light.

It was a strange feeling, to have the Avatars long past sharing the same form. Their whispers in his mind. He felt himself being hoist upward by an arm, and the unknown, loud Reaper spawn was pulling its other back, no doubt to impale him where he hung in its grasp. But with a flick of his hand, he unleashed a bolt of air so powerful that it hurled the beast backward. It was never known why such a feat could only ever be done in the Avatar State. He didn't care why.

With a deep thud, the screaming thing was on its feet, and starting to biotically charge toward him again. This time, he didn't feel the bone-weariness of his body. He didn't feel the injuries of such impermanent flesh. All he felt was The Purpose, and heard the things he would need to do to achieve it. With a twist of his arms, both swinging up and past his head, then forward, a finger from each tridactyl hand leading, he blasted forward with a pair of lightning bolts, which bathed the flickering field the thing surrounded itself with, until finally a fork of it slipped past, raking redly across the grey flesh of the hideous, feminine thing.

It cast out a hand in a sweep, and that barrier moved away from it, searing toward Avatar Sajuuk. He ducked under and around it as easily as a leaf slipping through the wind. As he did, he launched himself up and twirled 'round, gaining extra momentum for his fist, which now glowed with the green energy of the Avatar State Manifest, before driving it into the distended gut of the thing, and then, igniting.

Earth. Fire. Water. All of three of the elements, bent at once, and empowered by the might of the Avatar behind it. A punch, which exploded where it struck. The force was a fraction as powerful as Tunu's precious 'Cain' had been, but even so, it was a force to behold, rupturing the creature and sending it flying apart in two pieces. Then, the blazing mandala at his back started to fade and dissolve. Finally, the light left his eyes, and he almost fell flat on his face.

Sajuuk caught himself with a hand, and shook his head, trying to throw off the light-headedness. The Avatar State was never a kindly process. Behind him, he could hear a hiss, and then a whine of metal being forced aside. A glance back showed the other pod was slowly coming open. And then, another horrid wail from within. He forced himself to his feet, and started to run, since the shuttle was directly to his rear. He hurled himself through the doors, ignoring for a moment the rest of the frigate to his back, then pounded on the door to the pilot.

"That is all of us. Take me to my ship," Sajuuk said.

"Sorry, Avatar, but for the time being, _this_ is your ship," Lampha's voice came from the doorway as it opened. The Prothean beyond gave a glance back, but no more than that, a smirk on her lips. "Don't worry, I'll find something more fitting to 'your glowingness'. Just give me a bit of time to escape the Reapers which are trying to murder us."

"You speak with a flippant tongue," Sajuuk snapped.

"Would you like to fly this thing?" Lampha asked, pointing at her controls. Sajuuk remained silent, and she chuckled. "I didn't think so."

"Avatar," Kija said, sitting beside where Tunu was in obvious pain on the floor of the inner airlock, but not obvious serious condition. Medigel worked on small green flies just as well as Protheans, it seemed. "What was that thing?"

"I do not know," Sajuuk said, lowering himself against a wall and cupping his chin in his palms.

"Yes, but what did it used to be?" Kija then tried to clarify.  
"I said, I do not know," Sajuuk repeated. "It did not look like a Vaal, nor a Zha. It must be something new."

"That sound... it reminded me of the Ban Sidhe," Kija said, shivering slightly.

"Then you have your answer. Until someone says otherwise, it was Ban Sidhe," Avatar Sajuuk declared. He looked down at the planet below, once a rich mine for the minerals the Prothean Empire demanded. Now, a failing battleground. Betrayed by the Stranger. Of course they'd been betrayed. Any Prothean who will not reveal his name is a traitor waiting for his moment. He quietly swore vengeance, not just upon the Stranger, nor the Reapers, but upon an unjust galaxy for daring to humble the Prothean Empire.

* * *

"I fear our time is coming to a close, Liara," Hong said, as the room started to fade. "Please, promise me you will give her a guiding light. She needs one more than she will ever admit."

"Wait, there's still so much more I need to know," Liara said, taking his hand. It slowly felt less and less substantial as she clutched it, though. "I don't understand how I'm supposed to help her."

"You'll find a way," Hong said.

"What about that darkness, the memory she doesn't talk about?"

"You'll find a way," Hong repeated more sternly. "I can't do this for you. This is in your hands now, Doctor T'Soni. I'm sure you'll make me proud."

"But... but..." Liara stammered.

"Ah ah, no buts," the hand vanished from Liara's grasp. Only the faintest outlines of the former Avatar were still visible, as though something invisible had been dashed with a flick of flour. "You are stronger than you know. You'll be strong enough. And you'll guide her where she needs to go."

"Will I see you again?" Liara asked.

"Probably," he said, with what she assumed was a shrug. "If you cozy up to her soul, just ring the bell. I'm here most of the time. There might not be papers to grade anymore, but I've got plenty of reading to do."

And with that, there was a snap of perception which struck Liara in the freckles like a rubber band. She recoiled a bit, which became she recoiled a lot, which became she found herself falling backward into her chair. She was a great deal more light-headed than she thought she'd be. Also, a lot more tired. She blinked at the confusion and bafflement of what had just happened, which stood as clear to her mind as any memory of her lifetime.

Shepard shook her head, then looked down at her, an eyebrow raised. "What was that?"

"That was..." Liara shook her head, then tried to rise, but couldn't really get out of her seat. It was comfortable, and she was very tired. "Did you find anything else out about the Prothean Vision?"

Shepard scowled, rubbing at her temple. "I've got... bits and flashes. A few names. It's like there are things just on the tip of my tongue, but I can't form the words. And a gun. I remember the gun."

"Of course you'd remember the gun," Liara said with a roll of the eyes.

"It was a _very nice_ gun," Shepard said. She shook her head. "No, it's all indistinct. Damn it, it's like trying to remember a dream."

"Maybe, when I'm less tired, we can try again, and perhaps be more successful," Liara pointed out. "But for the moment – look at the time! You should get some rest. I certainly need to. I think... I'll just... turn in right here."

Shepard rolled her eyes and shrugged. "Whatever you say, Doctor," she shook her head in bemusement at the situation, and moved toward the door. Before she left, though, she buckled her knees a bit, even as Liara lowered her face into her hands to sleep at the table. "Oooh, gotta _pee_."

That got Liara's eyes to shoot open in shock, just as the Avatar departed the doors. But since the moment was past, and Liara was bone tired, she was quickly drifting to sleep at her desk, as she had hundreds if not thousands of times before in her life, dreaming of a planet she'd never been to, and tea with people who were already dead.

* * *

Shepard rose from the toilet, pants hiking up, with a scowl of confusion on her face. When she'd sat down, she was certain that if she waited an instant longer, her bladder was going to explode. And the feeling went away without so much as a trickle. She'd have to have Chakwas take a look at her at some point. Since their lay-over on the Citadel was going to be brief, she figured then was as good a time as any. She wandered out of the bathroom, and her eyebrows rose when she beheld the mess-table was not vacant as she had left it.

Present and accounted for were Alenko, whom she somewhat expected, Nilsdottir, whom she rather suspected, Tali, whom she didn't expect, and Joker, who confused her thoroughly. "What's going on here? Are you gambling on my boat when you should be on shift?"

"Our shifts ended hours ago, Commander," Joker said, flicking a card away. "Tall is Plum, ante stands at twelve."

"Damn it, I've got thirteens coming out my stitches," Alenko muttered.

"I get why Nilsdottir's here. What about the rest of you?" Shepard asked.

"_What_?" the quarian asked. "_I don't understand_."

"I don't sleep very well," Nilsdottir said very privately, her eyes locked on her cards.

"That's putting it lightly. You woke me up with your screaming. And everybody else, I wager. Well, damn, this Peach is an albatross-cat on my back," Alenko slapped down his cards and pulled another, expanding an already losing hand.

"Nilsdottir's got night terrors," Joker said, scratching at his nose with a thumb as he surveyed his hand. "You'd have to ask the Commander on how long she has."

"Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you, and Tali you haven't pissed me off so you don't get a fuck you yet," Nilsdottir said, giving each one a middle finger in turn, the quarian excluded. She leaned back, after slapping down three elevens, which made Joker groan. "I've had these nightmares for as long as I can remember. Them, and this time bomb in my head," she turned to show the crusty edge of a biotic amp just peeking out from under her hair, "are the only things I have from my childhood. Those and the scars, so I figure it can't have been a good one."

"_Time bomb?_" Tali asked, quietly sliding a ten, three nines, and then an eight, before laying a Cherry atop the Plum, almost emptying her hand.

"Whoever put in her amp put in a self destruct," Shepard said with a shrug. "Obviously, they didn't want it being taken out. Why aren't you with Murtock, then?"

"Please, if I spend all my waking hours around him, we'll get sick of each other, then the fun sex ends," Nilsdottir waved away the comment. She sighed, looking at her hand but probably not seeing it. "Besides... this is something I don't know how to tell him about."

"Tall is Cherry, ante stands at nine," Joker said, sliding down cards of his own. "And now, ante has reached seven."

"Have you tried?" Alenko asked.

"What, and be all girly with him? Are you fucking retarded?" She asked.

"You _are_ a woman," Alenko pointed out, rubbing at his temple. "For what it's worth, I know what it's like having a bomb wired into your brain. A lot of the old L2 subjects got a lot worse than migraines out of their Amp Architecture. I'm one of the lucky ones, in that it only _occasionally_ feels like my head's going to explode."

"So that explains why you're up," Shepard said. Ordinarily, she would have walked right past them without even stopping to wonder why. The... urge... to be social seemed to strike her at the moment, though. And she hadn't a clue that the sleeping blue scientist was inadvertently the cause of it. She then turned to Joker. "And what about you? I thought you never left your pilot's seat."

"I try not to, or at least, do so as little as possible," Joker offered. Alenko finally laid down a card, which made Tali release what Shepard had to assume was quarian profanity, which fortunately for Shepard and unfortunately for Nilsdottir's greater vocabulary, wasn't translated. "Hell, I've even got taking a leak down on a schedule."

"What? Why?" Shepard asked.

"...you read my file, didn't you?" Joker asked.

"Anderson brought you aboard. He didn't feel any need to explain his choices," Shepard pointed out, pulling a chair and sitting at the next table over.

"Well, for the record, you _want_ me. You _need_ me," Joker said. "I'm not _good_. I'm not even _great_. I'm the best damned pilot in the Alliance, if not the entire galaxy! Top of my class? I _earned_ that. All those commendations in my flight-book? I earned _every single one_ of them! And I _didn't_ get this posting out of charity for my creaky legs."

"...creaky?" Shepard asked.

He nodded. "I've got osteogenesis imperfecta. Brittle Bone Disease," he gave a shrug. "I've been breaking bones since I was born, came out with soup for feet. My case is considered moderate-to-severe, in that I can still break a bone by sneezing, but at least that bone isn't my skull. I put weight on the wrong one without thinking about it and SNAP! Very dramatic. But I've got ways around the illness, and since I don't need to fly with my feet, I can be a 'useful member of society'," he finished with snippy sarcasm.

"How did you get to be a pilot with that disease? Why didn't you just see a healer?" Shepard asked.

"Everybody knows that waterbenders can't do squat for genetic illnesses. 'Sides, this is what I'm great at. I earned this spot by being _better_ than anybody else, despite the notable handicap that a baby hanar could beat me up. NOT because of my disease. I'm _not_ a sympathy case. I might have been a sour bastard in flight school, but when I limped up onto that stage at the top of my class, you'd better believe that 'flight lieutenant Jet Moro' had a grin on his face," Joker gave a chuckle.

"So... when you didn't get up, it was because you didn't want to break a leg. And I'm an idiot," Shepard shook her head.

"A little bit," Nilsdottir said, slapping down a card.

"What about you?" Shepard asked the quarian.

"_I couldn't sleep. Your engine is too quiet,_" she said, finally emptying her hand and then folding hers primly in her lap, to the explosion of expletives from the biotic and a weary shake of the head from the Sentinel. Shepard leaned back in confusion.

"How is that a problem? Most people beg for a quiet ship to sleep in," Shepard pointed out.

She shrugged uncomfortably. "_Back on the flotilla, if a ship becomes quiet, that means that its air circulation has gone dead, or that its engine has failed, or any number of other catastrophes has taken place... I guess you might not need to worry about that here, but old habits die hard._"

"If you want, I can find some place noisier for you to sleep," Shepard pointed out. All eyes turned to her, and she growled as she realized her double entendre. "Not like that, you perverts."

"_It's more than that_," Tali continued. "_This ship feels so... empty. There's almost nobody here. On the Rayya, there were always quarians around. Privacy just didn't exist. I was so eager to get away from the crowds, to have some time to myself, to hear myself think. But..._"

"It isn't what you thought it'd be," Alenko said, gathering the cards which Joker dealt to him.

"_I kind of miss them, you know?_" Tali said. She turned toward Shepard. "_What about you? Do you ever miss your home, since you're away from it so much?_"

Nilsdottir hissed lightly at that, pulling back from the table, and Alenko rubbed his brow, having given up trying to motion for the quarian to not pursue that line of conversation. But their fears were somewhat unfounded, because the thought didn't inspire burning rage. No, it felt old, cold, and hollow. A gaping wound in who she was.

"I don't have a home anymore. I haven't for a long time," Shepard said. Joker was shaking his head slowly, likely in agreement with her. "How long until we reach the Citadel?"

"Another nine hours. We were on the other side of the galaxy, after all," he pointed out. "You do know how long you were in there, don't you?"

"Haven't a clue," Shepard admitted. She glanced around. "Is Adeks asleep?"

"_No, he was down in the engine room when I left,_" she said.

"You sleep in the engine room?" Shepard asked.

"_Remember what I said about old habits?_" Tali admitted, shoulders drawing in almost as though in shame.

"Hrm. Well, I should talk to him before turning in. I've got an idea burning a hole in my brain that I'll never forgive myself if I forget," Shepard said rising from her seat.

"What?" Nilsdottir asked, instantly scowling at her hand.

"A meter-long gun which can bust bunkers," Shepard answered, walking toward the ladders which ran beside the elevator.

"Bad. Ass." Nilsdottir summed.

She started to descend, the fatigue of her body a pressure on her, but as she said, this had to be done. She would have more than enough time to sleep when she was dead.

* * *

"Tall is Peach, ante stands at fifteen," Joker said, still dealing.

"...so, do you think Shepard and the asari are fuckin', or what?" Nilsdottir asked. Tali turned a glance toward her which, even though her face was hidden behind translucent glass, was clearly a 'what the hell is wrong with you?' look. "Fine, be that way."

* * *

**Slightly shorter chapter. Had fun writing it, except for the last bit. That took a few revisions. Remember to tune into the Spacebattles thread for answers to any pressing questions about the background of the fic, as well as context which might otherwise be lacking.**

**And the name Normandy will be explained next chapter. I promise.**

_Leave a review._


	6. The Ghost in the Machine

It could never be said that Cabbage Corp would ever fail due to overspecialization. Once the brain child of a single human produce dealer, it expanded in a fraction of a century to being one of the primary producers of any number of affordable household products. Many derided them from being 'cheap knockoffs of superior products' but the fact was, where a house could afford one Qin-Sozu radio set, they could afford three Cabbage Corp sets, and if they had to replace one every five to ten years, well, they still came out ahead. They sought to be the second best at everything, so they would never have to pay the most at anything, and their interests were vast. So vast, that even being accused of terrorism couldn't deflate their sales; there was simply too much that they produced that people were willing to buy.

Including pets.

The krogan had almost walked past the store on his way to Korra's Den from where Shepard had parked her ship. The truth was, he wasn't entirely comfortable up on the Presidium. Too many people looked at him like they were afraid he was going to try to kill them. And about a quarter of them were right to. Wrex wasn't an idiot, and he refused to be ill-informed. He knew the name of just about everything in that store, as he'd seen them from time to time in the three decades that humanity had been a part of galactic civilization. One animal, in particular, was new to him. Nestled in amongst the pygmy Ostrich Horses, the coppery fire-ferrets, the lemurs and the fish – and there were more fish than any other animal by a long margin – one stared balefully from where it was tethered to a perch.

Wrex halted in his step, and stomped his way into the store. The green thing turned toward him, regarding him with reflective yellow eyes. He could almost swear that it hated him the moment that he walked into the door. It bore the avian characteristics of a turian parrot, but also had the lizard-like qualities of an eel-hound. It was dark green, but the tips of its wings were closer to purple, and its beak was cruelly curved and probably sharp enough to tear skin. Wrex leaned toward it, regarding it with one big, red eye.

It glared back at him with two beady, sharp, yellow ones.

He tilted his gaze, taking a measure of the creature. And one could be forgiven for thinking the creature was doing much the same with the krogan. Finally, he grumbled in the back of his throat, preparing to turn away. The instant he did, the lizard bird hurled itself at his face, trying to rake at him with its claws, squawking and releasing a remarkably well-voiced stream of human profanity. Wrex turned back to it, and offered a bellow of wrath at it.

"KREE!" the bird screamed.

"MRRRAAAAH!" the krogan answered.

"KREEEEE!"

"MRRAAAAAAH!"

"KREEEEEEEE!

"MRRAAAAHAHAHA!"

"KREEE! YOU'VE GOT A FACE LIKE A BISON'S ANUS!"

Wrex stopped, and stared at the creature, ignoring the fact that the rest of the store was in an outright uproar, its many animals slamming against cages, squawking to the utmost of their throats. The human at the counter, who had been flinching in terror since the krogan entered, finally got a voice. He was an older man, with a tuft of grey beard running straight down from the center of is chin. "Please don't antagonize the lizard bird! I've had enough trouble trying to offload that thing since they dumped him here!" he pleaded.

Wrex stared at the lizard bird. It stared back, in mutual antagonism. Then, with two fingers, Wrex reached up and snapped the binds which held the lizard bird onto its perch loose, letting the tether dangle down. He stared at the lizard bird. It stared back.

"Kree! Better than a poke in the eye with a stick!" it declared, hopping up and clinging onto the side of Wrex's hump with its clawed wingtips.

The krogan let out a deep, gravely chuckle, then turned to the owner, who was standing amidst a sea of animal din and panic. With a thumb, he pointed up to the animal who had now taken its new place. "I'm buying this," he said simply.

* * *

**Chapter 6**

**The Ghost in the Machine**

* * *

Most people looked like hell if they'd only had two hours of sleep. Shepard wasn't most people. While she did look a bit weary, it was no more than somebody just coming off their shift. She'd driven herself murderously hard in order to get onto the 466th, in order to have a definitive crack at the batarians. It delivered in spades, in the form of the brutal slaughter at Torfan. But right now, her mind was not dwelling on the gleeful murder of four-eyed slaver bastards. No, right now, it was about trying not to look like a complete idiot as she awkwardly exited the airlock, lugging a none-too-compliant Giant Space Hamster with her.

"You know, I could carry that," the krogan at her side, clad in his dark blues, noted.

"It's Anderson's pet, and right now I'm using Anderson's ship. It's my responsibility," Shepard said. Kind of insane troll logic, but honestly, she had some questions to ask that man. About Saren. About his time in the Spectres. She'd only made it to the end of the airlock tunnel when she saw something blocking her way. He was broad shouldered and dark complected, his blue eyes cold and angry. In truth, he had the same sort of perpetual scowl that Udina favored. And most damning of all, he had the emblem of blades and a pair of stars on his shoulder.

"Commander Shepard?" the rear-admiral said, as Shepard instantly fobbed Aki off onto Adeks, and gave a salute. The rear-admiral turned to Adeks, who was wearing the blues, but neglected to salute.

"Forgive me, but I'm holding a giant rodent right now," Adeks said easily. The rear-admiral gave the krogan a stink-eye, but turned his attention back to Shepard more fully.

"Rear Admiral Mika'oviq, fifth fleet," the Tribesman introduced himself. Shepard's brow knitted.

"We weren't told to expect an inspection," Shepard noted.

"Rather the point. I'm here to see what you're doing with my ship," Mika'oviq said bluntly. Shepard leaned back. "That ship was slated to join my sixty-third scout flotilla after its shakedown. Instead, the Council got their claws – paws, tentacles; whatever! – on our ship... and you."

"I'm still an Alliance Marine, Admiral," she pointed out, still standing at rigid attention. "Spectre is not mutually exclusive with that. In fact, they complement each other in useful ways."

"Spare me your political jargon," Mika'oviq dismissed. "I don't begrudge the politicians' decision to throw you at the Council. The Avatar is supposed to be a person of importance in political affairs. But when they took Alliance equipment from Alliance hands, they crossed a line. Even if the equipment is an overdesigned chunk of tin..."

Shepard raised an eyebrow at that. "You don't approve of the Normandy's design?"

"There are many things I don't approve of," he said direly. "This experiment diverted billions from our appropriations bills, money which could have been spent to build an entire taskforce of light cruisers, or a carrier with a full compliment. Instead we decided to throw money at a turian designed boondoggle. I'm here for an inspection," he declared.

She gave a glance toward Adeks. "You are aware that the Normandy is on loan to the Citadel. That means it's outside of your chain of command."

That scowl deepened, if such a thing was possible. "I'm sorry, I must be having trouble with my ears. Did you just say I couldn't inspect an Alliance ship as an Alliance admiral?"

She gave a shrug. "Just pointing out the tricky legal position we find ourselves in. You can come aboard, but because of the chain of command issues, this can't be a formal inspection," she pointed out. Mika'oviq looked like he was about to burst a gasket somewhere.

"Very well. This will be a courtesy tour, off the record. Now please, stand aside," the rear-admiral said, his tones very, very tight. As he departed, Shepard turned to Adeks.

"And I thought the turians had sticks up their asses," the krogan noted. He turned an eye toward her. "Where'd you learn that legalese, anyway?"

"Prince Iroh's book. I'd recommend it to anybody," she said. "He was dealing with mercenaries, but if you squint, the same things apply to pan-galactic civilizations," she rolled her shoulders a bit. "I guess it's lucky I happened down in the engine rooms, then?"

"Well, you'll be able to defend your ship to this Ostrich-Horses' ass," the krogan said amiably.

"What do you think about him?"

"He's looking for something to complain about," the krogan answered.

"What will he find?"

"Nothing that the turians, asari, or salarians wouldn't do worse," Adeks answered. He then dropped Aki, muttering to himself. "If I have to carry that thing any longer, I'm going to eat it."

"Aki, don't you dare run off," Shepard demanded of the rodent, which just blinked a big dark eye at her, and went immediately to grooming itself. "What do you think about that gun?"

"You didn't exactly give me a lot to work with," Adeks admitted. "But I know some people who could take the bases that you've provided and develop something. Of course, that _will_ mean I have to talk to a few people from the old days. Some folks I'd honestly rather stab in the throat."

"How long do you think it'll take to mock up a prototype?" she asked.

"You're asking me how long it'll take to build a gun which came to you in a dream," Adeks pointed out. "'Ever' is a hopeful prediction. At least a year or two, and that's even if I can get that idiot onto my spec-team."

"Duly noted," Shepard said. The rest of their chat was mostly continuation of what they'd already talked about below, between trying to hash out a gun from a vision. The Normandy. What it could do. What set it apart. So much so, that they were still mid-sentence when Mika'oviq came storming back out.

"Commander Shepard, I am not happy," Mika'oviq declared. Shepard felt a smirk hit her face.

"I have a feeling that's a frequent occurrence," she said, before her brain caught up with her mouth and told her to shut the hell up. Honestly, she had no idea why she did that.

"You've got a smart mouth. Be thankful that you're outside my chain of command at the moment," Mika'oviq snapped. The smirk fled, lost behind a furrow of brow at why she felt a need to do that. But that was something better considered at another time. "First of all, who designed that CIC? It's inefficient putting it so far toward the back. What if the CO needs to talk to operators near the bow?"

"There are no amateurs on this crew, Admiral. They know to keep idle chatter to a minimum during combat. And besides, I can bellow with the best DI's," Shepard said. "And to the point, having the CIC so far back means that if somebody's shooting at it, it has the entire structure of the ship between oncoming fire and the most vital members of the ship. Might be a turian design philosophy, but there's no reason why it won't work given the amount of automation even in an outdated ship class, like the Roanapur."

"I see your point," Mika'oviq said. "And at least there's no chance of that configuration becoming standard. No point in an entire generation of naval officers learning things bass-ackwards. But I had to shake my head at that drive core of yours. A hundred and twenty billion credits of Eezo, flushed away on a ship which can sink its heat for a few hours. What's the point in that? We could have had drive cores for twelve thousand fighters with that much eezo. What point is there to hiding in a battle, anyway? Worthless!"

She fought the urge to roll her eyes. "Men of limited vision said the same things about the first submarines and heavier-than-air fightercraft. Both might have been unsuccessful in their initial offerings, but they had entire militaries back-footed, because they usurped the paradigm of the enemy knowing where the attack was coming from. And let's not even mention the advent of the mechanical millipede..."

"There's two ways I can take that, Commander," Mika'oviq pointed out.

"The Normandy was slated for a reconnaissance flotilla, and has an unprecedented ability to linger in enemy systems completely undetected. To claim that capacity is worthless is ignoring some important lessons from history," she continued neutrally.

"You raise a fair point, again," Mika'oviq stated. "And what about that name? Normandy? That's not even a human word!"

"Now I know you're not paying attention to history," Shepard said, her eyes hardening. "Which is a bit unforgivable since you might have been there. The turians were beating us back at every engagement we had, all the way to Shanxi. It wasn't until we engaged them in the Normandy System of the Apien Crest where we finally dug in, pushed back, and started getting victories that didn't cost us more than they cost the turians. Normandy was the battle which saw us finally prove that we could throw down with the galactic big-boys and win. It showed that we weren't just idiots who developed guns from the krogan."

Mika'oviq sighed, and nodded. "I suppose it is... appropriate that we name a testbed ship using alien technology for the battle where we finally managed an unqualified victory against them... but now the most damning point of them all. Your crew: Asari? Quarians? TURIANS? What are you thinking, Commander? You can't allow alien nationals access to such sensitive technology!"

"I'm the commanding officer of the Normandy," Shepard said sternly. "The Regs state that I have first and final say on who's permitted on my ship. Tali'Zorah is under protective custody in my care. Liara T'Soni may well have unknown insight into Saren's other allies. And Garrus Vakarian is an able marksman and is strongly dedicated against Saren. If you've got such a problem with them present, then send a complaint up the chain."

"Don't quote regs at me, Shepard," Mika'oviq snapped. "If you want them on your ship so badly, then so be it. But if it all goes wrong – when, it all goes wrong – this will fall onto no other shoulders than your own. Do you have anything else to add?"

"We already showed the Council something unexpected with our fighter-carriers. The Normandy is just another way that we're out-thinking them. Besides, isolating ourselves from the galactic community is a terrible idea, since Humanity has developed by leaps and bounds even since its discovery of the krogan. That we can work together with the turians, despite the war we fought, proves that we can build bridges as well as burn them," she said, and was frankly a little amazed that it came so easily to her. Usually, she'd just let somebody else do the talking. But it was almost like she had a voice whispering in her ear the things she already knew, but wasn't sure how to say.

"I'm still not convinced that this ship isn't a massive waste of money, but it's obvious that you are," Mika'oviq stated, his tones becoming much more... amenable. "I'm sure you'll be using it to the best of its abilities. I will also be submitting a report to the joint military council..."

"This was off the books, remember?" Shepard prodded.

"As I said, informal. But... it will be less negative than I expected it would be," Mika'oviq pointed out. He snapped a brief salute, which the human and krogan before him returned. "Commander. Good hunting."

"Aye, sir," Shepard said, and the man turned, heading back into the elevator which descended into C-Sec. She gave a glance toward Adeks.

"That could have gone a lot worse," the krogan pointed out.

"Just grab that thing and bring for me so I can it to Anderson," Shepard said with a tone of annoyance. Bad enough that she'd just given lip to what would have been her direct commanding officer, but the way she'd talked to him... That was just a little bit spooky.

* * *

"Oh shit shit shit shit..." The soldier muttered to himself as he threw himself behind a stack of boxes filled with computer parts. He rolled his back against it, flinching every time a particularly heavy shell slammed into a box. It was stopped by overlapping layers of silicon and aluminum, but the box wouldn't last long against that kind of firepower. He reached up, pulling off the helmet which was, at this point, only obscuring his vision. Considering the blood he felt trickling past his ear, from where it snapped under a glancing blow, it wouldn't stand up to much more.

He was a very widely built young man, but none of that was fat. In fact, he was about as muscular as a human could be before dipping hard into anabolic steroids. That meant he had the strength to get the hell out of dodge when things went crazy. "Is anybody still on this channel?" he shouted, a thumb to his ear. His dark eyes narrowed as a rocket burst against the box, causing its contents to spill out. "Damn it, is anybody there?"

There was no answer, and he had no time. So he pulled his rifle, and the instant his shields gave that crackle showing they'd hit full charge, he was moving again. He wasn't an elegant mover, like the firebender soldiers who'd come out of the West, nor fluid like the Tribesmen. Then again, Tribesmen tended to head for Naval Command, after very short stints in the marines. He, on the other hand, was an earthbender. His armor was about as heavy as could be strapped onto anything smaller than a krogan. Between his build and his capacity with shifting tin, it stood as light as air to him. And because of that, the multiple, redundant shield generators were able to withstand the absolutely withering fire which came from the assault drones which clung to the walls, ceiling, and floor.

He backed away, firing a stream from his Avenger into a drone, tearing down its shields, then snapping its body in half. One down, about five hundred to go. And their fire never wavered. He could tell from instinct that his shields were coming to a nadir once again – though he was never the sort of person who would use a word like nadir – so he turned and booked feet. With a twist and a tear, the floor buckled up behind him, causing some of the fire directed at his back to be interrcepted by a floor-plate. That plate didn't stand long, and with a sound of electronics popping, the fire started chiselling into his back, impacting ablative plates.

And sometimes getting through.

He hurled himself through the hexagonal door, lashing out with a burst from his rifle, before kicking the panel as he flew. He landed hard on his back, painful for the wounds which dug into his shoulder blades and the muscle of his back, but he couldn't let that stop him. The doors slammed shut, muting the sounds of fire from a horrible wail to a staccato drone. He pushed himself up again, a groan of pain escaping his lips, before he set his rifle aside. With a deep breath, he closed his eyes, then lashed forward with his fists, grabbing the metal of the doors, then twisting one hand up, the other down. The metal bent under his hands, deforming the door such that it would never open again under its own power. He had no doubts, though, that it would be only a temporary barricade.

With his life no longer in immediate threat, he took a moment to roll his beefy shoulders, feeling how the pain ebbed as the medigel began to seep into the wounds, numbing the pain and killing any infections present. Even bridging the holes in muscle, so he could, to some extent, continue fighting with damaged musculature. Once again, facts he didn't know; all he knew was that medigel let him fight longer. He rubbed a hand along the trimmed beard which framed only his jaw before connecting back up with short hair, and thumbed his ear again.

"Sergeant Rupali? Are you still on this channel? Doctor Choi? Sparky?" he growled. "Come on, somebody's gotta be out there. Iceman! _Bucket_!"

He let out a growl of frustration and kicked one of the lower supports of the roof, his bending subconsciously warping the structure to keep his foot from breaking. After a moment of self-doubt and weakness, he reigned it in. Uncle wouldn't want him falling apart like this. He wanted to do Uncle proud. Not like he had any other family worth talking about. He closed his eyes, and thought through his problem. It was a big one. And it took longer than would most.

When he opened those eyes, he looked around. There had to be a landline somewhere. That crazy computer couldn't have grabbed 'em all, otherwise, it would have just vented the air. It took a long moment, which he used to slap his rifle to his back. It immediately fell off, since the holster on that side was damaged, so he reached back with his other arm, and pulled his sniper rifle off. "Not like I use it anyway," he noted, tossing the Equalizer to the ground and putting his Avenger in its place. Then, he found what he was looking for. It was built into the back of the door panel which lead toward the outermost chamber, before the external airlocks. He started to flick through the panel's screens, until he'd reached the one he was looking for.

"Alright, Sparky, let's see if you taught me something worth knowing," he muttered to himself, while carefully, slowly, getting behind the OS and into the subroutines behind it. Elementary work, as Sparky would have said, but he had a bit of trouble with it. Still, he managed to get into the external communications beacon. He cleared his voice, turning on the external channel, and assigning it Black Ribbon priority.

"This is Private James Vega, on Yue Base Sea-of-Serenity," Vega said, his voice instantly bombarding the command networks of the planet below. "LONG FENG has gone rogue! It's killing everybody, and I think I'm the only one left! We need help _now_!"

* * *

The path toward the Wards Access was about as crowded as she expected it would be. And no few of the people she passed gave her confused looks as she hefted a lightly-squirming twenty kilogram rodent with her. If Anderson had just asked to meet her at Korra's Den... well, that would have only taken about five minutes less, since the air-cars refused to let on pets. Instead, she was going to some asari dance club in the upper Wards Access. She'd heard from Wrex that they had terrible music and almost as much sex as a Shin Akiba brothel. Honestly, she was a little curious.

She'd just reached the bottom of a stairwell when she got a sinking feeling. That sinking feeling turned to outright dread when the voice reached her.

"Commander Shepard! There are rumors on the extranet that you've been made the first human Spectre. Is that true?" that fanboy blurted as soon as she saw him, thus, too late for her to flee.

"Right... Conrad is it? They're true. Now could you get out of..." Shepard said, still moving toward her destination. Gods and spirits, it was like he was staking her out or something, to get her when she was only two doors away...

"You remember my name?" he asked, managing to get in front of her again, and obviously not out of malevolent intent. "Wow! I bet all kinds of guys talk to a woman like you, but you remembered _me_? That really means something!"

"...not really," Shepard contended, but Verner was already continuing.

"Look, can I get your picture? I promise, it won't take more than a second," Verner pleaded. Shepard's face screwed up in confusion, and she hefted the rodent one handed, rubbing her brow.

"Verner, I've got more important things to do than..." Then, as she gave the most archetypal 'what the hell is wrong with you' expression not delivered by a quarian, there was a flash of light emitting from Verner's omnitool, capturing her in her annoyance for all eternity.

"Perfect! I'm going to hang this in my living room. My wife will _love_ it!" he said, foaming a little bit at the mouth as he pelted away as quickly as he'd appeared. Shepard stood, paralyzed by 'what.' in that expression of confused disbelief, before Aki squirmed again and broke her from her catatonia.

"How much you wanna bet he's working for Saren and trying some ridiculously roundabout frame-up?" Shepard asked the Giant Space Hamster. Aki just looked up at her, blinked, and then started grooming its whiskers. "That's what I thought."

She turned a corner and entered the corridor which lead to Flux, but had to step aside as a salarian was hurled down the stairs, rolling down to the bottom as she stepped aside. With a glance up, she saw a volus waddling his way back into the club, a human who had done the hurling giving her a nod as she ascended. "Avatar, fancy seeing you here."

"I'm not going to cause trouble," Shepard said.

"Didn't think you were. We run a classier joint than Fist did. Gotta stick together, humans do," he said. "Don't pick any fights, and there'll be no problems."

She made a note of it. The fact that they didn't lock out the Giant Space Hamster pinged her as something a bit strange. Then again, an asari dance club might have any number of strange and bizarre practices going on in the back room. For once, her expectations weren't _completely_ dashed upon entry. There were mostly-naked asari cavorting on poles, but they were a small attraction, as the dance-floor was open to all species. Mostly, it was taken up by humans and much-more-clothed asari, with a few turians and salarians thrown into the mix. As well, there were some which Shepard took a moment to place. They were lithe and slender, their faces somewhere between a lizard and a fish, eyes black as night. It wasn't until her mind drifted to the hanar that she remembered the drell. Huh. Didn't see many of those. Mostly because there weren't a lot of them at all.

She found Anderson sitting in civilian attire, reading quietly in the loud, crowded club. He looked up at her as she approached, setting the pad down. "I see you've managed to find me. I thought staying in a place full of happy people might keep you at bay," Anderson said, his authoritative voice not really showing the sarcasm which his words espoused. "Come, child. Sit down. Stay a while and listen to the music."

"Can't. As soon as T'Soni gets her gear, we're heading back out," Shepard said, casting a thumb over her shoulder. She then set Aki down on the table. "Mostly, I just wanted this thing off my ship before it chewed a cable and left us without FTL with a geth fleet on our tail."

"Aki wouldn't cause any trouble. But still, I thank you for bringing her back," Anderson scritched its ears, then shepherded it into the seat beside his. "But I have a feeling that you're using my pet as an excuse. What is on your mind, Commander?"

Shepard sighed, glancing around. The music was pulsing and loud, as the asari tended to make it. Say what you would, she preferred turian music, with its regimented, even tones and beats. She was, apparently, quite unusual in that preference. She took a seat beside a rodent, and steepled her fingers. "I think I need the whole story. About Saren, and your Spectre candidacy."

Anderson sighed, and glanced aside. "That's an old wound you're digging into, Commander. But honestly, you deserve the truth. It was twenty years ago. We'd just burst onto the galactic stage in the most disruptive way possible, with two wars in as many decades. Most in the Council were fed up with the batarians, and were willing to give us enough rope to hang ourselves with. I wasn't always this washed up soldier..."

"Sir, you're one of the most legendary warriors who's ever lived. I'm sure you deserved the chance more than anybody," Shepard contended.

"You're kind to say so, child," Anderson said with a small smile. "But there was a problem. When they picked a mentor, an adviser Spectre to show me the ropes, I ended up getting Saren. He was always a bigot, and an anti-human activist. He despised humanity for even the tiny blot we dealt to his people. I always felt like it might have been a bit deeper, a bit more personal, but that's a file I've never had access to. Our first mission went well enough, but on the second, there was a hitch. We were trying to emancipate a refinery which had been taken over. As I'm trying to reach the target, to neutralize the threat he represented, the refinery explodes and burns. There were dozens of workers inside, and he let them burn," Anderson said grimly.

"That doesn't surprise me, given what he's doing now," Shepard pointed out.

"It got worse. The byproducts of the refinery dropped onto the camp where they were keeping the worker's families, leverage against them every stopping working or begging for a livable wage. The death-toll ended up being over four hundred, mostly civilians, quite a few of them children and unarmed spouses," Anderson's face pulled into a look of outrage. "Saren didn't care. Because he blew the refinery, he'd managed to get the target first. And then, to top it off, he shifted all the blame to me. Claimed that I'd blown his cover, and that in my impatience, I caused the explosion trying to make good. And the Council believed him, since he was one of their best agents. They gave me the rope, but Saren tied it into a noose. I never stood a chance. I'm not bitter, Commander, but I didn't know what I was dealing with, then. Once I walked out of there, having seen all those dead innocents, I knew. The Turian Hierarchy might not be the monsters we thought them to be, but even a single turian monster could cause untold damage. I hate to be the neglectful precursor in this, Shepard, but this is a problem which came in my time, and now, I have no power to solve. It falls to you to make up for my mistakes."

"It wasn't a mistake. You weren't given a fair chance, nor an honest one. You deserved better."

"We don't always get what we deserve, Commander. I'm not going to bemoan my fate. The fact is, you stand to do a lot more good with the office than I did. The Avatar as the first human Spectre is a boon beyond measure, even I can see that. But you'll have to make sure you don't trip the same pitfalls that I did. That's more important than you realize."

"I'm sure," Shepard said suspiciously. "How much did you know about Saren, really?"

"I know he's a cold bastard, and that he's got a mind like a whip. While I can't touch anything on him, I read up on Matriarch T'Soni. She's public domain. A powerful biotic, a canny leader in her youth, and a provocative thinker in her later years. She's well loved, even now. People still don't know she's on Saren's side. And the fact that somebody like her, somebody who, by anything I can find," he said, shaking the pad he was reading, "should be on _our_ side, not Saren's... It tells me that he's got charisma. Not just the kind politicians use to win elections. This is the kind of man who can turn you against your own beliefs. Your own identity. Be careful around him, Shepard. I don't want him getting inside your head."

"He won't like what he finds if he tries going in there, sir," Shepard said with a chuckle.

"Don't call me 'sir'. I'm not a captain today. Just a man having a drink, listening to music, and reading about an old asari," Anderson said. He glanced back toward her. "You don't look at your best. Have you been missing sleep?"

"Strange dreams," she said. "Probably Prothean related. I can handle it."

"You'd better. If Saren's plan to bring back the Reapers bears fruit, you won't want to face it with anything less than your utmost."

"I'll make a note of it, sir," she said, ignoring his request. As far as she was concerned, Captain Anderson would be Captain even if they shuffled him out the door with a gold watch and a kick in the ass. There was only one other human she respected so much. She rose to leave, but Anderson forestalled her.

"One more thing," he said. He gave a nod toward the bartender. "I've been listening to the word on the street. Some of them have fallen in with a bad crowd. Next time you swing by Korra's Den, talk to a waitress named Jin. She's in some things over her head. Call it a personal favor to get her out of them."

"I don't have the time right now, but if we get back to the Citadel, I can look into it then."

"See that you do," Anderson said, reading quietly once more amongst the cavorting and the thumping music. He couldn't look more out of place if he tried.

She turned and left, giving a nod to the bouncer as she did. He was a bit spindly for her taste, so she rolled her eyes and continued onward, down the stairs. When she reached the bottom, she noticed that the hurled salarian was still there, rubbing his hands nervously. "Ah! You must still be welcome inside. Could I interest you in a business arrangement..."

"Not interested," Shepard said. He skirted in front of her, despite her trying to round him.

"Please, it wouldn't take but a minute of your time. I'm developing a machine which helps even the odds at Quasar, and all I need is to..."

"So you got thrown out for cheating? Be thankful the volus didn't have you shot," Shepard said.

"I can pay you a respectable amount if you..."

Shepard grabbed the salarian by the throat and slammed him against the wall, puffing out a snort of fire as she locked green eyes onto his own black-brown. "Listen, you annoying little toad. I don't care. I don't care if you cheat, I don't care that you want me to work for you. If you keep pressuring me, I'll _start_ to care, and not in any way you'd like. So get out of my way, _before I start to care_."

"Kchght... can't... breathe..."

She dropped him, and he slumped to the floor, wheezing. His already large eyes almost bugged out of his head. "You're insane!" he blurted.

"I have better things to do than help a two bit hacker cheat a casino," Shepard dismissed, and walked out, leaving the spindly salarian cowering on the floor.

* * *

"Please enter the password to enact withdrawl, Doctor T'Soni," the VI, which was as most were on the Citadel, shaped vaguely like an asari, prompted. Liara was still gaping at the figure in her bank account. She had figured that after paying off a catastrophic amount of student debt – done automatically with the money she earned in her digs, never reaching her hands at all – and with the tiny amount that she actually made net after expenses, she might have enough to afford some low-end equipment, if only so she wouldn't be a complete liability to Shepard in the field. After all, the dead man inside Shepard's mind told her in no uncertain terms that the fate of the galaxy might well rest upon her blue shoulders. She expected to find a pittance in her account.

Not seven figures.

She stared at it, and then she shook her head, as though it was a figment of her vision. "Avina, can you confirm my current balance?"

"Of course. Current balance for Doctor Liara T'Soni stands at eleven million, one hundred and eight thousand, four hundred fifty nine credits. Do you have any other banking to do today?"

She blinked, baffled. Why, that was probably a not insignificant amount of every cent which Mother had gathered in her entire life. It was no secret that most asari matriarchs, by the time they were approaching a four digit age, were spectacularly wealthy. A long time to follow low risk investments meant that even a terribly unlucky asari could, with minimal effort or forethought, reap massive financial dividends in centuries' time. Considering how few matriarchs there were, it was easy to understand how the mean wealth for one was hovering around a million. But what was all this doing _here_? "Avina, who transferred this money into my account?" Liara asked.

"Funds transferred from **ERROR NO CARRIER**, on the date of **NO DATA AVAILABLE**. Would you like to request an audit?"

"No... No, I would like..." she felt a very giddy giggle in her throat, one she tried to force down. After all, she was a hundred and six now. She couldn't go larking about like some sixty-year-old, who'd just matured into her mother's trust. "Avina, is this a trust deposit?"

"No data available," Avina answered unhelpfully.

"Well... Please transfer the funds to my direct account," Liara said.

"Please enter the password to enact withdrawl, Doctor T'Soni," Avina repeated.

"Little Wing," Liara said. As she watched, the savings account she had set up with little hope of it ever breaking a thousand credits emptied completely. Avina smiled distantly, as it always did.

"Do you have any other banking to do today?" the virtual intelligence asked. Liara, though, was already turning away. As the proximity sensors registered her exodus, the display chimed in "Logging you out of your banking information, for your own security. Thank you for using Barla Banking. Have a wonderful day."

Eleven million. She could buy a ship with that much. But what would be the point of that, she countered herself. She didn't know how to fly a ship. She was already a terrible driver with anything larger than an air-car. And ships needed things like crew, weapons, shields, permits... She shook her head. And she thought of he mother. She didn't understand how she could possibly have ended up in the employ of somebody so apparently heinous as Saren. There had to be some explanation, something he was doing to her. Some unspeakable leverage he had over her. Of course, Liara couldn't think of what it might be, since Liara was Mother's only daughter, and Mother didn't keep any high-profile lovers as far as Liara was aware. Then again... Mother might have been discrete. Goddess, was Mother doing this to protect somebody she loved?

How terrible. The only way it would have been worse would have been if Shepard hadn't intervened and saved her from those geth. Then, Mother would be totally pincered, between her hypothetical maybe-lover, and the daughter she'd done so much for. Even as she moved toward the Presidium's Emporium, she remembered.

Mother had always been the big one of the two of them. Even when Liara grew to the height she was now, she always felt smaller than Mother, shorter, less than. But it wasn't because Mother browbeat or belittled. No, it was just that Mother _was_ bigger, taller, more. She was kind, that was what Liara remembered most vividly. When she was tiny, her scalp tendrils still barely settled in place, she often crawled into bed with the matriarch who'd borne her, trying to make the monsters under her bed stay back. And every time, Mother would give her a squeeze, and tell her that there were no monsters under the bed. That she'd gone into that darkness a long time ago, and she punched the monsters right in the nose so hard that they promised they'd never come back out again. And then, let Liara stay in her bed, anyway. It was a comfort which Liara savored.

And now, looking back, she couldn't help but wonder if maybe there was something she could have seen, something she could have known, that would have prevented all of this. Kept Mother from walking down this path, or rather, being forced down it. Chances were, even if there were, she would have been to young, too stupid, and too focused on the Protheans to have seen it. There was a definite drawback to the longevity of the Asari; one could accrue quite a few regrets.

"Hello. Do you require the assistance of this one?" an evanescent voice rippled toward her. She looked up, and noticed she'd almost walked face first into the gelatinous pink body of a hanar.

"Oh, I am sorry. I was not paying attention," Liara said.

"You seem to have some difficulties on your mind. Can this one be of any aid?" the hanar asked, its voice coming out a split second after biolumninescent flashes which rippled along its body. Since they didn't have faces, as such, nor voices, as such, they had to tie their omnitool's translator software directly into their brain's center for light control. It was much of the reason for the 'odd tone of voice' they had, and their excessive politeness.

"I was just thinking about my mother. I... I don't know if I can help her."

"This one has had difficulties with this one's precursors. This one feels empathy for you," the hanar said endearingly. "As a show of courtesy, please accept a modest discount on the wares of this fine establishment."

Liara's eyes widened, and she looked past the hanar, to the storefront he represented. She'd wandered right into the Emporium without even realizing it. "Do you sell combat equipment?"

"This one has many wares. Combat equipment for drell, turians, asari, humans, krogan, quarians, and batarians, although that last remains in only limited stock. There is little custom for such pieces. Would you like to make a purchase?" the hanar asked.

"What is your face-name?" Liara asked.

"You may call this one Delanynder," the hanar said with a dip of its frontal neck-thing. It was sort of like a nod.

"Delanynder, I would like to buy the most high-priced, effective suit of armor you have in stock," she said with confidence and a small smile on her face. She didn't understand Mother's motivations, but she swore upon the Goddess Athame that she would find some way to save her from that evil turian. She deserved nothing less. And this way, she could even help Shepard with that avatar business.

"Very well. Please follow this one into the back, where the secure goods are stored," the hanar said, before lazily drifting away.

* * *

"This is getting out of hand. Nobody is listening to me!" the man said, pounding a fist into the desk, which caused Udina to palm his forehead.

"Which might well be because you are constantly giving outbursts like this. The Council already has a shady enough opinion of humanity. We can't have..." he trailed off when he looked past the admiral in his blues and blacks, to see a woman in black armor standing in the threshold. "This will have to wait, Admiral Kahoku."

Shepard's eyes went a little wide at the mention of the man. She'd served under him before. At Torfan. "I was told to report to you before I left the Citadel," Shepard told the ambassador. "Could you make this brief? I expect to be dusting off in a matter of an hour or so."

"Shepard, you don't make my job very easy," Udina said concisely. "I am aware that military types have to deal with situations on a second to second basis, but the decisions you make have far reaching consequences. You must be made aware of what your actions cause on a galactic scale."

"I did what I had to do, ambassador," Shepard said, standing at stern attention.

"What you had to do is irrelevant, Shepard," Udina said with a firm tone. "It does not justify what you do, nor excuse it. It does not even explain it! Because of your wanton destruction of a mostly untapped Prothean dig on a human world, the Council has seen fit to revoke the pending colonization concerns on three other planets throughout the counterspinward Traverse, each rife with minerals, because 'humans might damage existing infrastructure'."

Shepard stared at the man. "...is that all, ambassador?" she asked.

"No, it is not. Your antics in the Wards the last time you were in the Citadel are currently passing through civilian courts, and we expect that there will be a significant pay out at our expense for the harm, damage to property, and lives lost in the carnage."

"Those people were trying to kill me. I was justified in my use of force," Shepard said forcefully. Udina raised a pad.

"And were you justified in breaking a salarian civilian's jaw in Korra's Den? Or how about the complaint filed with C-Sec just this hour from another salarian outside of Flux who claims that you assaulted him?"

"He was a criminal and he was trying to entrap me," Shepard said.

"You are painting a poor portrait for your species, Shepard," Udina said simply. "Since I am not a military man, I have no real power to chastise you, and since you are the Avatar, I rightly fear what would come of me if I did. But you must be made aware that your actions have consequences beyond what you see. 'What you had to do' is going to be very thin of an excuse for you, from now on. You will find much less leeway from the aliens then you would in the Alliance."

Shepard glared at the ambassador, and wanted very hard to shoot him, but she knew that a) that was an act of treason, b) that was a definite overreaction on her part, and c) he was only pointing out something that she should by rights have already known. "I understand, ambassador," Shepard answered simply.

"Far be it for me to interfere with military affairs, let alone those of the Avatar; simply exercise restraint in your destruction. Explosions cause a like weight in paperwork on my desk," Udina said. He then turned to Kahoku. "As for you, there is little I can do to help you with your problem."

"What problem?" Shepard asked, not noticing the minute twitch up of the lips from the ambassador. He was a wily one, and knew how to get things done, even if it meant tricking people into doing his work for him.

"Shepard, it has been some time," Kahoku said.

"Indeed it has," neutrally, of course. Both shared a look.

"You have heard what happened to Major Keil," Kahoku said. Shepard furrowed her brow. "He failed a Cat Six after Torfan. After that, he vanished from our radar into the edge of the Terminus systems. He's not the first soldier I've lost track of," Kahoku's face grew dark and fell. "I have been trying to authorize a search party for a group of my scouts which went dark some time ago. The Alliance is stonewalling me, and the Council refuses to hear my pleas. All I request is to find out the whereabouts and location of my men; they last checked in in the Argos Rho cluster, Phoenix system. The only planet which could have supported their mission was Tuntau."

"If we enter that system, I'll make a point of seeking them out," Shepard said non-committally. Kahoku nodded at that.

"Thank you, Commander. That's more than anybody else has offered."

"Is there anything else?" Shepard asked.

"One more. There has been a request sent to my office, for you, from an asari delegate from Illium. She promised her issue would be brief."

"So I'm working for the asari now?" Shepard asked.

"For an asari who is willing to give a military contract on the cheap for high-grade omnitools and biotic amps; yes you are, Shepard," Udina said. "Welcome to galactic politics."

She stared at Udina for a long moment, then turned. "I should go."

Nobody forestalled her, which was for the best. She exited the embassies intending to beat a hasty retreat to the Normandy, but as fate would have it, the asari in question was already waiting for her. "You must be the Avatar," the asari said, her tones very crisp and professional. "And first human Spectre, more to the point. Shepard, if I may call you Shepard..."

"Commander," Shepard countered.

"Very well. I am Nassana Dantius. Commander, I have a delicate situation. A family situation..." she began.

"You're being blackmailed by your mother. Or maybe sister," Shepard instantly guessed. Nassana leaned back, a look of confusion on her face.

"What? No! My sister, Dahlia, she was a passenger on a luxury freighter which was hijacked recently. Most of the crew and passengers were killed, but I only recently got a message which confirmed she wasn't. I believe that the pirates learned of her identity, and are using her as a means to leverage money out of my family."

"So? Talk to the police. C-Sec deals with this nonsense all the time," Shepard said.

"It is more difficult than that. I have already wired the money," she said. Shepard shrugged. Nassana palmed her face. "Due to my position, I am legally denied to negotiate with criminals and terrorists. It would be a grievous security risk. I could lose my position over this! But... I can't abandon my family. So I did what they asked, and they didn't deliver. Commander, please, find my sister and bring her back safely. I just want this all to be over."

Shepard wanted very hard to say no.

But she knew what it was like to lose a sister.

"I'll do it," she said. "Just send the coordinates to my XO and I'll deal with it as soon as it's feasible."

"Bless you, Commander. It's all that I could have asked."

"Yes, it is," Shepard said, and started to walk away. That memory still burned like an infected wound in her soul, no matter how much time passed.

* * *

The elevator rising up toward the ship was mercifully free of muzak, which was a joy to Wrex's ears. The others in the elevator kept shooting glances up toward his hump, or more aptly, the passenger upon it, but he didn't bear them any mind. Since nobody else was talking, Wrex figured his voice was as good as any to break a silence.

"You handled yourself well out there, Asha. It's surprising," he said. The Si Wongi human turned to give him a raised brow. "Most krogan females never leave Tuchanka, and spend their lives trying to breed.

"I offer no apologies. I am not, nor have ever been, any domestic kind," the riflewoman said tersely.

"I didn't say I was disappointed," Wrex clarified. "I could get used to killing with women around. Gives the fight a different flavor."

"You know, you don't talk about fighting nearly as much as most krogan I've met," Alenko pointed out. Wrex turned an eye on him. "You're not what I expected from them."

Wrex chuckled. "Right. Because _humans_ have a wide range of cultures and attitudes, while _every single alien_ think and act _exactly_ alike," Wrex said with his usual rolling sarcasm.

"Look, I... I didn't..." Alenko stammered. "Just forget I said anything."

"Done."

Two humans and a krogan in an elevator. Sounds like the start of a bad joke. The only other person in the elevator was blue, grinning, and looked entirely too happy for an old krogan's liking. She didn't speak, and he had no real desire to talk to her either. Not out of any sense of hatred or antagonism. She was just young. A lot younger than he was. Hell, comparatively, she was younger than that human biotic who could at least talk shop when it came to the subject of killing. Sadly, somebody else broke that silence.

"I understand that your people can use biotics without implants. But if that's the case, why aren't more of your people adept at it?" Alenko asked.

"Not all of my species wants to specialize themselves in biotics, much the same way that not all humans specialize themselves to be endurance runners," she pointed out chirpily.

"I can kind of see your point, but I still can't believe that they'd let that kind of potential just sit there. I would positively _kill_ to be able to do what any average asari could, without the death-trap in my skull. I guess I just don't get how the asari race thinks."

Liara continued rocking back and forth on her feet, until the other human turned to her. "That's new armor, is it not?"

"Oh yes! It cost more than two million credits, and it's a prototype armor from the armor works in Serrice, and they say that it can even deflect low grade rocket munitions and HEAT rounds – whatever those are, since I didn't stop to ask – and they made it such a lovely shade of blue just for me and..." Liara rambled gushingly.

"Two million credits, huh?" Wrex asked, as the others stood agape at the cost.

The asari turned to him, grinning broadly, and proudly, and nodded.

"Do you have it turned on?"

"I don't ever want to turn it off! I feel so safe and snuggly in here! It is like it was built especially for me!"

"Good," Wrex said. And then he pulled his side-arm, held it five centimeters from her forehead, and pulled the trigger. All of the aliens in the lift with him gave a scream of confusion and terror, and then there was a crack of a round slamming into the metal of the lift, followed by an alarm claxon sounding. Liara was now pressed with her back to the front door, trembling, her shields crackling blue. The bullet hole was over Wrex's shoulder. "Yup. You got your money's worth."

"Kree! Right to the face!" the lizard parrot squawked.

"Couldn't you have come up with a better way of testing it?" Alenko asked incredulously.

"Nope."

"I think I peed myself," Liara said, her voice quivering.

"Good. Get it out of your system now, while you're safe," Wrex said, calmly putting his gun away. "Next time somebody's shooting at you, it won't be to test your armor. Bear that in mind, and don't let your fear weaken your knees again. That's the best way to get yourself killed."

"You're insane," al'Wahim said.

"No, I've just seen enough to know that there's no easy way into a job like this one," he said with a shrug. The door opened, and Liara toppled backward as it slid away from behind her. The lift opened to reveal several C-Sec officers holding rifles into the lift. The one at the front looked a little bit exasperated when he beheld who was the culprit.

"Damn it, Wrex, are we going to have to go over this again? Stop shooting the elevator speakers!" Chellik complained.

"Then stop feeding terrible music through them," Wrex answered. "Take the fine out of my escrow. I've got more important things to do."

* * *

"Are we ready to dust off? I'm already sick of the Citadel and I've just got here," Shepard said as she stomped into the airlock.

"Bad day in the offices, huh?" Joker asked, leaning behind him. She just glared at him. "Well, I've had a message beeping at me for the last five minutes. From the SSV Pillars of Heaven."

Shepard's eyes instantly went wide and her back straightened a bit. "Admiral Hackett? And you just _kept him on the line_? Patch him through!"

"Aye, Commander," Joker said with a note of amusement that she was annoyed she wouldn't be able to smack him for.

With a flick of his wrists, there was a crackle in the speakers which overlooked the pilot. "This is Commander Shepard of the SSV Normandy."

"Shepard. Good," the raspy voice of the man instrumental for the largest victories against the Batarian Hegemony said. "We have a problem, and I think you're the person to deal with it."

"I'm not sure I understand, sir," Shepard said, standing at attention, even though the transmission was audio-only. Hackett had that effect on people.

"Seventy six minutes ago, we lost contact with one of our research bases on Yue. Four minutes later, we received a burst transmission from the site, on the Black Ribbon priority band. The message was static, but nobody with a brain uses that band unless something very important is going on," Hackett pointed out. Shepard could see where he was going with this. "We don't have any other intel on the situation, other than that the doors on the outside are locked down. We're hesitant to blow them, since we don't know what we're looking at on the inside. There are valuable personnel and important experiments which are in humanity's best interest on that base, and they must be preserved if at all possible."

"Normandy is currently at the Citadel. Couldn't you send some marines from South Point?" Shepard asked.

"There's another wrinkle," Hackett said, almost hesitantly. "The external AA defenses have come online, and are engaging active sensors. I don't want to say that the base has been taken over by extremists or radicals, but..."

"But this is something which needs to be done quick and quiet," Shepard finished.

"You see my point. You are commanding the only stealth ship in the galaxy. Consider it a formal request by the Alliance to put it to use on our sovereign soil."

"We can be on Yue in eight hours," Shepard said.

"I knew I could count on you. Hackett, out."

"So..." Joker began.

"Don't just sit there, set a course; Local Cluster, Agni system, Earth orbit," Shepard barked at him. He gave a good-natured shrug, but immediately set to work. Shepard, on the other hand, departed down the length of the ship. The 'trenches', as they were called by the operators, were currently only partially filled. Since they hadn't even left docks, it was understandable, but she was going to have to crack a whip around here to make sure that the state changed quickly. The clamps unlocked with an audible but insensate thud, releasing the frigate to slip into the Widow Nebula, and then, away from the Citadel.

Shepard moved down into the bowels of the ship, and almost immediately bowled over Alenko, who was still standing with a crutch in his off-duty uniform. "Oh. Well, that answers my first question," she said.

"Commander?" Alenko asked.

"You're still in bedrest, right?" Shepard asked. Alenko nodded. "Then you're sitting this one out."

"This one, Comander?" Alenko asked. "Are you saying that the message from the Pillars of Heaven was a mission?"

"Hot damn!" Nilsdottir exclaimed.

"Don't get excited. We're heading home to make sure some Chikyu Noboru crazies didn't get ahold of one of our bases on the Moon," Shepard said.

"Nobody would be so daring," al'Wahim said. "Each base is stocked with hundreds of defensive, VI-driven drones. It would take an genius to subvert enough of them to... Oh."

"Somebody brought it down from the inside," Garrus said. Shepard then stopped, and actually looked at the group. Only Wrex was absent from the group, and most of them were clustered around Liara. She was wearing armor, obviously, but this was the kind of armor, which, once Shepard paid a moment's attention, made her eyes bulge in their sockets.

The shape of it was typical for a human female, which made sense given the similarities in structure between humans and asari, but everything about that armor seemed to glean. It was a very pale blue, almost as though it sported a candy-coat, and its lines were the kind of precise which only masterful worksmanship could provide. Not like the bulky plates and inelegance of her own Onyx type suit. She really needed to hit up her stockpile on Earth when she went home. If only to get her good gear. Shepard leaned to and fro, and Liara got the notice that she was being inspected.

"Do you like it? I asked for the best, and while it cost quite a bit, I am certain that it will ensure that I do not slow down your team if I am brought on missions," she said. She started pointing at various things which adorned her back. "It has an over-shield which bubbles over usual defenses rather then layering amidst them, sector seals to prevent vacuum damage, environmental dampeners to guard against both extremes of heat and cold, internal slow-drip medigel dispensors as well as the Trauma/Shock Mitigators. It even came with a motorized exoskeleton. I believe with this armor, I might be able to lift Wrex above my head!"

"How much did that cost?" Shepard asked.

"Two. Million," Garrus said. He gave a chuckle. "I wish I had that kind of money to throw at _my_ armor. This suit seems so... fragile... some days. Why, I imagine that Liara could take a missile to the _face_ without any lasting harm."

"Right," Shepard said. The time for armor envy was not now. "I need an engineer to get into that base. Since Alenko is down, that means we're short handed."

"_Um... I have some experience with combat drones_," the voice of the quarian came from the back of the group. Shepard leaned toward her, and then thumbed her brow. Of course, she'd forgotten Tali.

"I suppose it's a stupid question to ask if you know your way around VI's," Shepard said.

"_My people designed the __geth__. Your drones are less complicated than the toys my friends built in school,_" Tali said with a note of pride, which was odd to hear from her.

"If it's all the same, I'd like to be a part of this one," Garrus said. Shepard raised a brow. "I know, this is human technology and a human base, but I've got a few tricks up my sleeve as well. If you want us to get in there quietly, you need somebody trained in infiltration. I've got five years out of Basic as a Turian Army Ranger before I went into C-Sec. I could help you in this one."

Shepard glanced between the two aliens, and shrugged. "Alright, get your gear on. Armor up and meet us in the cargo bay at twenty-four hundred."

"Shepard... we don't have a Mako to hot drop in. You left the last one in a volcano on Therum," Nilsdottir pointed out.  
"No hot drop. We're going out there on foot, Storm King style," She said. "Everybody else, rack up. As soon as we're done dealing with extremists or simple stupid bad wiring, we're moving on. Saren isn't waiting for us, after all."

"Aye, Commander," Alenko said. The others moved off, and he remained where he was, leaning on his crutch. "A word, Commander?"

"Hm?" she asked.

"Essentially, permission to speak freely," Alenko clarified.

"You're not that much below my rank. Free the tongue," she said.

"I may not be, but it's still safer to follow the regs. Keeps things cleaner," he said, moving aside. "It's just, I've been giving some thought to Saren. I mean, the writing's been on the wall for a long time, but nobody seems to want to read it. He's searching for something which might well cause galactic extinction, but nobody in the Council wants to give it more than a passing thought."

"What do you want me to say? The Council's full of idiots who don't want to believe anything exists outside of their own little status quo. I'd call it human nature, but..." she trailed off with a roll of her eyes. Alenko shrugged.

"I know what you're saying. It's just that a group which is as old, and as vast, as the Council should see something like this coming. They had the forethought to create the Spectres, but are completely blindsided when one goes bad. They've had thousands of years to perfect their bureaucracy, but it's still sloppy. I'm still amazed that we finally pushed into the new frontier, only to find that it'd been settled centuries ago," he gave a shake of his head. "And they don't even appreciate the view!"

She turned to him, a chuckle in her throat. "Why Alenko, I see at last that you're a romantic. Did you sign on to 'protect humanity from the big bad aliens', or do you really believe that garbage the brass hands out about holding hands with the Council?"

"Not really. I might have been before Brain Camp," he caught himself. "Well, Biotic Acclimation And Temperance," she could practically see the air-quotes around that, "but the truth is, I'm not out here for 'the dream'. I just want to do some good. See what's out there."

She gave him an askance glance. "You hold a very naïve view of things," Shepard said.

"Sorry if I got too informal, but that's the way I feel. If it's naïve, then so be it," Alenko said. "Protocol wasn't a big part of BAAT. Though to be honest, naivety wasn't either."

"What is BAAT, anyway? I've heard that word before," Shepard said.

"Remember that station out at the Termination Shock?" he asked. "Naraka Station, where we worked on the goose-hare chase FTL while the brains cracked the Prothean Inspiration Stones. After we found the Mass Relay, it was pretty much abandoned, until ALMA took it over as part of their Biotic Training program."

"ALMA?" she asked. "Didn't that end with a massive bloodbath?"

"That was later, when the corporation turned into a cult," Alenko said with a nod. "But until then, pretty much anything they did was gold. They were the first to tie Element Zero to biotics, instead of thinking that it was just a new form of airbending. All the high minded speech didn't last past the airlock with the kids ALMA hauled in, though," once again, he seemed to catch himself with a smirk. "I'm sorry, 'hauled in' is a bit harsh. We were 'encouraged to undertake testing and training so that an understanding of biotics could be compiled'."

"I'm sorry, I couldn't quite hear that. I must have bullshit in my ear," Shepard said.

"You weren't on Earth during the big push by ALMA to find the biotics. People were just glad that their children, the ones who didn't grow up with brain tumors, might be a part of something new and unique. That they weren't freaks."

"How much do you wanna bet that ALMA popped some Eezo into the air over some nurseries to make sure that the supply was nice and high?" Shepard asked.

"That's a bold statement. And given how ALMA ended, not unjustified. My mother was down wind of a transport crash while I was a blastula, though. I came by my biotics honestly," Alenko said with a laugh. Much the same had happened to Shepard. But she would never, ever say so. Biotics _can't_ bend. The Avatar _can't_ be a biotic. End of story. "It only got suspicious around fifty three, after the first-gen subjects started getting scarce. The men in suits would come to your door, and the next thing you knew, you were on a shuttle to Brain Camp," he gave a chuckle. "My parents might have been accidentals, but they still won a class action against ALMA. Obviously somebody didn't notice that twelve minus sixty doesn't equal fifty three."

"You're thirty five?" she asked, as she worked the numbers through her head.

"I'm well preserved," Alenko said with a smirk. "Besides, I've seen your file. You've hit the big three-oh yourself."

"Say another word on that subject and I'll shoot you in your other leg," Shepard said grimly.

"We both know you wouldn't," Alenko said with a shrug as he shifted his weight on his crutch. "Besides, while nobody could definitively say that ALMA was behind some of the later exposures, they were _damned_ quick on the scene after them," he pointed out.

"What was Jump Zero like, anyway?" she asked.

"Cold, lonely, off the grid," Alenko said. "The kind of place where somebody who didn't want a lot of oversight could get away with just about anything. I think we had it lucky, though. Some of the _real_ first-gen subjects got put through the ringer trying to figure out what made biotics work. Us, we just got pushed. Hard. Not that it was all bad. I wasn't the only one there, after all. There were a couple of us who used to get together at lights-out. Some kids who were all in the same boat."

Shepard smirked. "No oversight, nothing to do? I bet you kids were on each other like Fire Ferrets," she offered.

He gave her a glance which spoke a bit of distaste. "No, it wasn't like that. I'm not the kind of person who does that sort of thing. Not lightly, anyway," his gaze moved away from her, and seemed to stare through the ship and into space. "There was one girl I spent a lot of time with. Clothes on, of course. Rana. She was one of the outlying Beifongs. Had the money, but not the name. Smart. Pretty. Sweet, too," a small smile came to his face. "Sort of like a nicer you, ma'am."

"I'm not sure whether I should be insulted," Shepard said.

"It was a compliment. You'd know if you'd ever met her," Alenko said. "She was special to me. It might have been mutual but... things didn't fall together. Training, you know..." he shook his head. "Look at me, turning this into a bull-session about things which happened decades ago. This was supposed to be a casual chat."

"I like knowing the men who serve under me," Shepard said, and then, realized the double entendre. This time, though, she felt no need to retract it. Alenko was an edge case, but strong enough to be appealing.

"Be that as it may. You make a habit of getting this personal with the people you serve with?" Alenko asked.

"No I don't, Alenko. We'll talk again later," she said, pushing off. Shades of Tanoak still flitted through her mind, but she knew that that'd never happen again. How she'd managed to keep a relationship going that long was a wonder to her; only the calamitous explosion of it at the end had gone according to how she would have predicted. Hell, she still wasn't sure she was over it.

She still missed him, from time to time.

"Kaiden, ma'am," Alenko said.

"We're on a first name basis, now?" Shepard asked.

"I won't be offended," Alenko gave a shrug. "I'll even return the favor some day."

Shepard stared at him. "...do you even know my first name?"

"I left some things from your file unread. I don't want to seem like a voyeur, after all," Alenko said, limping back to the crew quarters.

Shepard watched him leave. "You know my age but not my _name_?" she asked, but he was already through the doors, which closed behind him. Seven hours to the Moon. Great. _Now_ what was she supposed to do?

* * *

The sound of gunfire had ceased, as Vega quickly twisted the metal back down from the port-hole he'd created, just in time for the door to absorb another rocket, which caused the metal to buck outward a bit, before he pressed it flat again. He stared down at his gun, trying to figure out why it stopped working. He scratched his head for a minute, experimentally pulling the trigger with it pointed toward the exposed rock. Not even a click. It was only moderately warm in his hands, and the heat sinks were intact. Felt a bit light, though.

"Huh," Vega said, as he pulled the body of the rifle apart, and showed that there was a suspicious hollow in its center. "Well, that doesn't happen very often."

Mass Effect small-arms didn't have ammunition, usually, preferring to strip automated slivers of metal off of a block housed inside the weapon, and firing that sliver – usually only the size of a grain of sand – at spectacular speeds. Because of the tiny size of the projectile, ammunition was usually a non-concern. Vega, on the other hand, had run out. Of the block of metal which had been worn down, one grain of sand at a time. He quickly peeled up a chunk of the floor paneling, squeezed it roughly into shape, and tried cramming it in. But a little display popped up on the side of the gun.

Unsuitable mass detected. Service weapon promptly.

"Well, damn," Vega muttered. He'd been getting better at plugging drones, too. Given he'd been at this for three hours, it was sort of taken for granted. He sighed, then looked down at his abandoned Equalizer. Then up at his Avenger once again. Then, back to his Equalizer. It took a long moment for the notion to form in his head, but when it did, he chuckled to himself, a little amused it didn't occur to him sooner. He pulled the sniper rifle apart and extracted its block of metal, twisting off the end to make it fit for size, then sliding it into place. A few bolts and such later, the Avenger was back intact. A squeeze of the trigger sent another ballistic grain into the forgiving dirt.

"Sorry about that, Yue," he said to either himself or the lunar surface he was standing on. "I'm sure you understand."

If the moon had any opinion about being shot, it remained mum. For the best, though, since Vega immediately opened the panel which he'd closed to protect himself, and started shooting through it again, at the drones which tried to fill him with murder.

"Who needs ammo, you worthless chunks of tin! Eat it, ya bunch of Mike Foxtrots!"

* * *

The Normandy came to a near halt, its snout level with the edge of a crater, the blue marble of Earth hanging in the 'sky' overhead near the horizon. It had been almost two hundred years since humanity first landed on the moon. They'd pretty much been there ever since. So while the first step might have been a doozy, it was no great leap for mankind.

This time, Shepard elected to take only three. A smaller squad, more focused, made for lower chances of being detected, and a smaller mission-footprint as a result. She was the first to jump from the lowered bay door, and thus, the first to land. Her airbending, stunted as it was, was essentially worthless here, so she landed with the full force of one sixth her weight. Tali was next, landing with a squawk and almost face planting into the powdery surface. Garrus landed without incident, even managing a somewhat heroic pose as he did so.

"Welcome to Yue, the largest moon of Earth – and the only one as far as I'm concerned, 'cause the other's about the size of the Normandy – population four hundred thousand. Don't piss it off, you won't like that," Shepard said over the helmet comms.

"'Piss it off'?" Tali's voice was actually clearer when it didn't have to transmit into the air.

"Apparently, Earth's moon is a gigantic fish," Garrus said easily, a chuckle clear in his tone.

"_Was_ a gigantic fish. Now, the moon is a sixteen year old Water Tribe girl," Shepard clarified deadpan. The quarian stared at the turian and the human as if they'd both elected to spontaneously and simultaneously go insane.

"...what."

"It's a spirit thing," Garrus said by way of explanation, which didn't seem to mollify Tali very much. Shepard didn't pay attention though, as she activated the line to Joker.

"Joker, get the Normandy out of our skies for a bit. We don't want them looking out a window and seeing you up there."

"Alright, making myself scarce. Reminds me of high-school," the pilot said brightly. "Just give me a ring when you need a mercy-date to the prom, and remember, I bruise easily."

"Shepard, out," she said humorlessly. She then turned to the other two, and beckoned them to follow. "We don't know what we're looking at here. Keep the helmets on point-to-point only. If the structure's intact, we go helmets off and voice communication only. We can't give away our positions or tactics electronically..."

"I could just mask them," Tali pointed out, as she managed to keep up with the other aliens kipping up the scree of the crater. It was rough going, since they had to go against any sense of bodily mass. Tali alone seemed outright comfortable in it, though even Garrus was more proficient. Probably because Yue was a vacuum-body. No air. That messed with airbenders.

"No offense, but nobody can mask comms in real-time," Garrus pointed out.

Tali's hands flicked to her omnitool, which glowed orange as she ascended the crater. Then, she flicked it toward Garrus.

"I have to say, Shepard, you have a very fine bum. The kind of bum that the krogan would fight a war over," Garrus' voice came. Then, a crackle. "Tali, that wasn't funny."

While Tali was silent in the wake of her little ploy, even Shepard could tell she was giggling inside her helmet. "What is this, high-school? Knock off the pranks or I'm sending you back to the ship," Shepard pointed out.

"I just want to point out that we don't need all these techniques, since we've got engineers to handle it," Tali said.

"She might be on to something, Commander," Garrus piped up. They crested the crater, and entered into a long, white valley. About a kilometer away was a blip on that valley, an underground structure dug into the surface.

"Well, there it is," Shepard said. "Keep quiet, and keep moving."

The 'sprint' such as it was, to the structure was fairly uneventful, if tiring. The bounding leaps they took to cross the distance took it out of them, since it was such an unnatural way of moving, but at least, it didn't take long. As they got closer, they could see that the AA towers poking up from the top of the structure did indeed look not only active but armed and ready to fire. Shepard pointed up at them, then to Garrus, and then raised a hand with the sign for 'explosive'. Without a word needing saying, he bounced up behind the detector dish, and slapped down a wad of explosives and a remote detonator.

"Commander Shepard to all involved. If Yue Base Sea-of-Serenity opens fire, activate on this frequency," Shepard recorded, before sending a burst transmission back to the Normandy. When she did, the sensor dish actually flicked in her direction a bit, as though it had caught that, but only barely. Whoever that hacker was, had almost superhuman skill. Definitely somebody whom the Alliance would want brought in, preferably alive.

Shepard moved to the door, and found it locked. She nodded toward it, and Tali quickly started hacking, which would, under most circumstances, had Shepard wondering if she was making the right call. After all, the quarians weren't exactly allies with humanity. They weren't really _anything_ with humanity. She didn't fear for a few security schematics from this girl, though. If mostly because Shepard was confident that if she had to, she could crush the kid like a bug, even were she not pressganged onto Normandy by a looming threat of death by Saren.

After less than a minute, the door's panel flashed from red to green, and all piled into the airlock, almost instantly settling into their boots as they transitioned from Yue's one sixth to the base's two thirds normal gravity. Shepard stared incredulously at the quarian though, as the atmosphere hissed in, and their suits told them that exterior pressure was equalizing to their suits. She took off her helmet when it did. "That door is rated as a nine-hour lock. Do you have access codes to our bases?" Shepard demanded of her.

Tali flinched. "_What? I don't... I just..._"

"Shepard, quarians are some of the best engineers in the galaxy. They have to be," the turian interjected. "She's just good at what she does."

"_...thank you, Garrus_," the quarian said. Shepard wasn't sure what he meant by that, but he seemed pretty sure of himself, so she decided to drop the issue.

"Right. Well, let's see what we've got ahead of us."

"_Probably attack drones. They'd have any in stock lined up in the inner foyer to repel invaders,_" Tali said, pulling a shotgun from her back. Shepard had to raise a brow at that. She wouldn't have pegged the girl as the 'shotgun' type.

"That's what I'd do, if I took over a place like this," Garrus agreed.

"You've given thought on how to invade an Alliance base?" Shepard asked.

"Please, on Palaven, we've even got _mock-ups_. Since all your bases are prefab, it's as easy as just memorizing where you put all your turns," Garrus said with what she was starting to recognize as a turian smirk. The door finally hissed, and he pointed his rifle through the gap as it opened, preparing for an onslaught of hypersonic metal. Instead, thick, grey smoke. Tali looked the most befuddled of them, and Garrus quickly slapped his helmet back on.

Shepard, though, recognized the smell. It wasn't tear-gas, nor stink-gas, nor knockout-gas. It was tobacco. Lots and lots of burnt tobacco.

She waved her arms to clear the worst of the cloud, and found that it had gathered in this part of the entry hall because of the venting systems. There was another door, which she opened, causing the smoke to swirl and eddy, but giving her a view of what was in the next room. And what she saw surprised her.

_It_ was almost two meters tall and a hundred kilos of thick man-meat, feet kicked up on a box, a cigar between his teeth, and an opened up rifle on the ground before him. This was, every inch of him, the kind of man whom Shepard preferred in every capacity. It was almost like somebody had read her mind, distilled all of her physical preferences – tall, muscular, strong jaw, modest facial hair – and built her her perfect lust-object. Shepard pointed her gun at him, sort of regretting that she might have to shoot him. He was _very_ good looking. "Identify yourself!" Shepard shouted.

"Whoa! I'm not a machine! I'm human!" the man said, bolting to his feet, cigar still in his mouth.

"That wasn't in question. Identify yourself or I will open fire!" Shepard pressed.

"Oh shit... Private James Vega, of the one zero three," he said, pulling his tags from inside the neck of his armor and holding them out. Shepard stepped forward and viewed them even with a rifle pressed to the man's chest. They were genuine. Her own had been fairly similar before she swapped them out for the N7 version. She hefted her rifle.

"What's going on here, Private?" Shepard asked.

"Ran out of ammo trying to kill the AI, so I figured this was a 'smoke 'em if you got 'em' kind of situation," Vega said.

"_Wait, did he just say you have an AI here?_" Tali asked, appearing out of the grey cloud which was still roiling out in the hallway.

"Whoa, what the hell is that?" Vega said, fists forward and stance low. It certainly explained his build that he'd be an earthbender.

"_That_ is a quarian. I take it you don't get out very much," Garrus said, entering the room. He looked down at the rifle. "Out of ammo. That doesn't happen very often."

"Yeah, that's what I said," Vega offered with a chuckle, rising to his feet. "I ended up using all the metal from my sniper and my side-arm, too. But there's just too many drones out there."

"Who took over this base?" Shepard demanded.

He turned to face her, confusion on his features. His sexy, sexy features. "What? Brass didn't tell you?"

"There was nothing to tell. Whatever you sent out got scrambled to hell," Shepard pointed out.

"Well, that makes sense. Like I said, there's a rogue AI in the computer core, and it tried... well, pretty much succeeded... in killing everybody. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one left."

"_AI? Why do you have AI?_" Tali asked, her voice sparking with outrage. "_Why would __anybody__ have an AI? Don't you know how __dangerous__ those things are?_"

"Hey, you're preaching to the converted, Sparks," Vega said. "All I know is that they had some sort of specialized VI running combat exersizes in there. I was just getting on my shift, testing against drones with dummy rounds, when one started freaking out, and then a whole bunch of others started swarming in and dumped live-fire on us. I can't believe they called a VI LONG FENG. The tech might have flown over my head, but I could have told you that with a name like that, it was going to try to murder you."

Garrus tilted his head, still clad in helmet. "Sparks?"

"Yeah, 'cause of her eyes... you know, _sparks_?" Vega said with a laugh. Nobody else did, and the silence was broken by Garrus coughing lightly. "Right. Maybe later. Well, we should get out of here and blow this place. LONG FENG has the detonation codes, but I figure even a bit of ortillery can sort this out."

"I've got orders to bring the facility back in one piece. Orders I'm sticking to."

"Wait, you're going in there?" Vega asked. "That's... crazy. You're Feng Nu, you know that?"

"...she's what?" Tali asked.

"She's a crazy woman, isn't she?" Vega asked.

"Excuse me?" Shepard asked.

"A little bit," Garrus agreed.

"Alright, everybody can it. Who's got a spare for Vega?" she asked.

"We're seriously going to walk into the center of a base taken over by an insane computer?" Vega asked.

"_Sounds like the best way to kill an AI_," Tali said with obvious dreadful glee.

* * *

Tali was in a fight.

That was the thought which kept bouncing inside her mind as she flicked her omnitool toward a brighly painted rocket drone, before bringing up the shotgun and turning its synthetic innards into slag out-ards. Tali as in a fight against a horde of synthetic killers, controlled by a psychopathic, murderous AI, and she wasn't terrified. She wasn't stuttering or screaming. Keelah, she wasn't even that scared! In fact, she'd muted the comms from her to the others, when Garrus gave her a very suspicious look when she hurled a string of Khelish profanity which Father would have been ashamed to know she'd learned. Understandably. It was quite vile, and she felt this was the perfect opportunity to use it.

Whatever fear Tali lacked, the human they'd met made up for it. Even though he was larger than she believed quarians could become, he fought almost tentatively. Not that he was afraid of death. He fired in tiny bursts, using Garrus' rifle, only ever targeting those whom Tali or Garrus had dropped the shields of. It was obvious, every time they cleared a new room, and found more dead humans, that it was hitting him the hardest. These were _his_ people. Every nightmare that a right-minded quarian had was of the geth finding the Flotilla, and having to make that same walk through _their_ friends, _their_ family.

Contrasting Vega's nerves and focus was Garrus. As the fight drew on, he started getting more and more chatty, laughing as he managed to pick off rocket drones right as they cycled to fire, so they would explode all the larger. Even now, he was overloading the shields on a pesky one which was trying to flank around them, bouncing from floor to wall and firing streams of bullets all the while. He tracked it easily, and with a crack, it split in half, vomiting sparks and 'dying' as much as a synthetic device ever could. "Scoped and dropped!" Garrus said happily, before snapping another shot practically from the hip which burst the shields of another drone and caused it to crash to the floor. With what those in the know would recognize as a turian grin, he turned to where Tali was waiting for her shotgun to cool off. "I _love_ this rifle."

As the suit registered that the shotgun would be able to fire without melting, Tali started moving again. A flick of fingers in her left hand, and one of the drones stopped firing at her, and started firing at another one. Another flick, and that victim's shields dropped, allowing it to be torn apart by its subverted brother. Then, with a high-pitched roar, Tali leveled the drone she'd just hacked with two barking blasts.

"How many is that, Feng Nu?" Vega asked, ducking back as his rifle glowed faintly orange.

Whatever answer was going to come only did so after a lightning bolt surged out of an armored human woman, raking across a line of disorganized drones and causing them to burst under its undiluted current. "I stopped counting at two hundred. And don't call me that!" Shepard answered. The room was clear, for the moment. But the next would be a fresh story, of that Tali had no doubts.

"You're handling yourself pretty well, Sparks. Didn't know quarians could survive a stand up fight," Vega said, rising to his feet.

"We're tougher than we look," Tali said, her chest heaving. Much as she never thought she'd be in an honest fight, it was mostly because she never trained for it. Some knew they were going to be marines from the day that they got their first suit. Tali knew that she never would. And yet...

"I've got a bad feeling, though," Garrus said. He glanced behind him. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Vega asked.

"Give it a second," Shepard cut him off, her eyes closed, trying to hear. "I think you're hearing thi–"

She was cut off by a rocket flying into the room. From the room behind them.

"I knew this was going too well!" Garrus shouted as he just barely managed to avoid taking a rocket to the face. "They must have some sort of deployment system from the repair bays! They've probably got us surrounded."

"Shepard, we have to flash the core," Tali urged, rising up to fire a snap-shot at the rocket drone. She kinda hit it. It didn't drop, but her hit made its next attack miss by a wide margin. "Until we do, that AI will keep sending these things after us!"

"Vega, you and Garrus guard the door," Shepard agreed. Vega groaned, but dropped to his task without question. Garrus looked a little enthusiastic at the thought of a never-ending target gallery. "Tali, you're with me."

"How far is the core?" Tali asked as Shepard pounded on the green panel to the door.

Only to have the panel turn red, and then let out a horrid, mechanical clicking sound through the speakers. For a split second, it almost sounded geth. But Tali shook that terror from her mind, and instantly set to work, routing the door's command subroutines through her omnitool, and then burning out all the existing programming, before plugging in one command. Open the door. It slid open slowly, showing layers of different metals in a bulkhead almost a quarter meter thick.

"What is that about?" Tali asked about as they moved past the still-opening bulkhead.

"We layer the important doors with lead and uranium so that metalbenders can't open them. The denser the metal, the harder it is to bend, and once you reach uranium, it's essentially why am I telling you about this? You're not even an earthbender."

"I was just curious," Tali said, her adrenaline starting to ebb, and her confidence fleeing with it. "I didn't understand why it was so overengineered."

"Funny, we finally leave the Earth, expecting to find a galaxy just like what we had at home, and nobody even knows to call bending what it is," Shepard muttered. "Even the krogan can't work with anything but earth!"

"Um, Commander Shepard, what are you talking about?" Tali asked. Shepard turned to her, took a breath, and then shook her head.

"It doesn't matter. The core will be just through there," Shepard said. Tali quickly checked her own shields again. Unlike the others, hers had never fallen during the long slog inward. That was fortunate, because unlike the others, _any_ rupture of her suit would probably kill her.

Tali started working on the next door, since she knew that the base's AI would try to subvert her when they tried to use it, but turned a glance back toward the human who stood like she expected imminent attack. Given the gunfire down that hallway, not entirely out of place, but as far as Tali knew, the human always stood like that. Always had that expression on her face. "Can I ask you something?" Tali asked.

"Is this the right time?"

"This one's well firewalled. It'll take me a minute," Tali said. "Why do you dislike me so much?"

"What?" Shepard asked, turning to face her.

"You go out of your way to talk to everybody on the Normandy except me. Is it because my people created the geth?" she asked, still watching her work.

"I don't go out of my way to talk to anybody," Shepard said. "I just... I'm not even sure why I do. I mean, I never did before," she almost seemed to be talking to herself. "Unless they looked like Vega, but mostly that was so I could DAMN IT WHY AM I SAYING THIS?"

Shepard shook her head, as though trying to cast out something which was infecting her thoughts. "So... you're just unfriendly to everybody?" Tali asked.

"...to put it bluntly."

"Why?" she asked. "Oh, Bosh'tet of a computer, I'll have you yet..."

"I just am," Shepard said.

"Doesn't it get lonely?" she asked.

"I don't need friends. I just have my mission," Shepard said. But even Tali could tell that the human didn't seem to believe it.

"If you say so," Tali made it clear in her tone, even through the translation software and her 'accent' that she didn't believe that for a second. She was then saved from the human's glare by the door groaning, and starting to open. "There we go."

Shepard had a rifle forward, and was moving into darkness. "Lamps?" she said. Tali turned on her omnitool's lamp, and drew her side-arm. The room was vast, the central brain of a computer system. She could tell from the information racing along screens that it was running battle scenarios by the thousands. Making predictions, simulating, then refining those predictions. This was an AI with a singular purpose of slaughter.

"We need to find the bluebox," Tali said.

"The what?"

"It's the core of its hardware. Without it, the AI is just a group of programs."

"I don't know what a bluebox looks like," Shepard pointed out.

"It could be just about anything. This thing was a VI which bootstrapped itself to sapience," Tali said. Shepard gave her a confused look. Fitting, this was where Shepard and Tali swapped places, as it were. "Nobody wants to admit it, but a VI is just a really dumb AI without enough processor power. That was our problem with the geth. We built them as VIs to handle repetitive tasks and physical labor. But when we started trying to get them to perform more complex tasks, we hit bottlenecks in processor power. So we had them start to use other local platforms as server farms. We thought we'd hit the perfect solution. Instead, we had a crop-collector ask its overseer if it had a soul."

"Can the geth bend?"

Tali glanced to Shepard, shining her light that way. "How should I know? They're machines! And we didn't even know what bending _was_ until the last few decades!"

Shepard shrugged. "I was taught that bending is making your soul project into the world. Or something like it, I wasn't paying close attention. No soul, no bending. End of story for the tin-men."

"If only," Tali said, still inspecting the room. It was a room made of crazy and filled with the dead. She was glad she couldn't smell it. She imagined the blood of humans didn't exactly smell fragrant. "We knew what was happening. So we tried to shut them down before the entire workforce became sapient. But we weren't fast enough, and their counter attack... well... there hasn't been a quarian on Rannoch in three hundred years. From eight billion to seventeen million in a matter of _months_. That's what happens when you try to make an AI. It turns on you. Every time."

"You don't need to tell me," Shepard said. She stared up at the holographic tank, which showed worlds and battle scenarios on it at almost lightning speed. "Wait, is that Ba Sing Se?" she asked, pointing up at the globe. Come to think of it, it did look like the world this moon was orbiting. "Son of a bitch, this thing's planning how to invade Earth!"

"We need to stop it before it can," Tali agreed.

She turned, to see if she could spot the bluebox amongst the server stacks, but was slammed into by something traveling at immense speeds. She shook the stars from her eyes and saw that it had caught Shepard across the breastplate and was pinning her to a wall. Tali pulled up her shotgun and started firing at the drone, but the shots didn't just fizzle against its shields, they utterly bounced off. She kept firing as she got closer, though, each one doing no appreciable harm. How was this thing shrugging off point-blank shotgun fire? _That didn't seem possible_!

"GET THIS THING OFF OF ME!" Shepard bellowed, trying to flash it with fire, to get her gun against its hull. But the thing started to let out a whine, and then started to shudder even as it pinned the human to the bulkhead. Tali's eyes widened. It was overloading.

Tali threw her shotgun to the ground and pulled the knife from her calf. She only had one shot at this. She pressed a hand against the shield, feeling the smooth resistance of it, and turned on her omnitool's shield overload function. It started to bulge down under her slow, steady pressure. It shouldn't have held her back at all, yet did. Finally, with a worry of the knife, she managed to get it inside the kinetic barrier of the drone, and then work the tip into the superstructure of the now glowing machine. She probably had a matter of seconds before that thing exploded and painted the bulkheads with the both of them.

There.

Her hand twisted, and the whining sound which had been rising steadily for the last twenty seconds died, the quaking stopped. It still glowed, but the intensity no longer ramped, just standing still. She could see a gun gimble swiveling toward her, so she released the knife, and then dug in with her fingers, before ripping up and out a circuit board from inside the housing she'd teased open. With a low whistle, the drone fell dead onto the plating at Shepard's feet. Tali was breathing heavily, but smiling inside her helmet.

"...and how'd you know to do _that_?" Shepard asked. Tali's smile withered.

"Quarians have to learn fast what makes something work. Otherwise we could miss out on vital salvage," Tali said. She looked around, and then back to the tank. It wasn't showing Earth anymore. It was blank. Like it was waiting.

"Oh," Shepard said. "Then that was some impressive engineering."

Tali turned, and activated her scanner, allowing the compliment to reach her unanswered. The servers all had a lot of power going into them. But this one was drawing the most. She opened her omnitool and tried to hack in. But with a grunt, she found that the AI was reinforcing about ten thousand times faster than she could break in. "Bosh'tet! I'm locked out! Shepard, I think we've found what it's using as its bluebox. This entire server block is its brain."

"So how do we pull the plug?" Shepard asked.

Tali reached down and picked up her shotgun. "Manually."

Shepard raised an eyebrow. "Manually?"

"With extreme prejudice," the quarian said. At that, the Commander grinned.

"I think you and I are finally talking the same language," Shepard said, aiming her rifle at one of the other server banks. Unlikely, since Shepard wasn't talking Khelish.

But it was absolutely cathartic to unload into the machines. When the two women did, the machine gave out a blast of static. Her omnitool activated itself, and Tali's eyes grew wide. "Shepard! Flash your omnitool!"

"What? How?" she asked, as her own was glowing bright orange as well. Tali quickly ran a system reset on her tool, dumping out everything she'd put in since Father gave it to her, and rebooting it with exactly the files and system configuration she'd had back then. Then, she took Shepard's hand and just erased _everything_. Shepard could probably replace hers a lot more easily than Tali would. "...did the AI just try to get inside my armor?"

"I think it did."

Shepard stared at Tali, then the server banks, then the now blank holo tank. "I feel slightly sullied and unusual," she muttered.

"Shepard, whatever you did in there did the trick. The drones are powering down. Pity. I was having a blast," Garrus' voice came over the comms.

"You guys are all crazy!" Vega said, but with a laugh under his voice.

Shepard looked around, as Tali brought up the lights and showed the devastation which had been wrought here. So many bullet holes. So many dead humans. Tali just stood in shock, but Shepard... it was almost like she was haunted. "I think we're done here," she said, her voice distant. Then, she started walking away, almost pointedly ignoring the dead.

* * *

There were a few cities on the face of Earth which could claim pedigrees thousands of years long. Ba Sing Se was one such, the last remnant of a once ubiquitous earthbender empire. Another which had lasted through the uncounted ages was Omashu. The city of Omashu had been founded in the days just before the appearance of the First Avatar, an eternal testiment to both the woman who brought earthbending to humanity, and the man she loved, whom had been lost to a senseless war. Well, honestly, the city of Omashu was younger than Ba Sing Se, and the city calling itself Omashu now was younger still. It was a city which had a habit of getting blown up.

The first? Buried under a mountain as part of a last-ditch counter attack. The second? The site of humanity's one and only use of a nuclear weapon against a populated target. Ironically, the devastation of that attack galvanized the rest of the world against the hand which had dealt it. Still, Omashu, or New Omashu as it was more properly called, was a modern city with all of the modern amenities. Unlike Ba Sing Se, which was designed for nothing larger than an Ostrich-Horse cart, New Omashu was built for Satomobiles and wider. It was laid out cleanly, openly, and beautifully.

It was also the home of the Alliance on Earth, even though the Parliament sat in Republic City. Anybody who knew military, knew that New Omashu was its beating heart. The Normandy had landed in one of the great courtyards, initially set aside for the airships and aeroplanes of its day, now converted easily into a spaceport. First of its kind, actually. Shepard herself was standing in a room which overlooked a training yard, before a holotank, with a few others at her back. The holo-tank showed the figure whom she'd willingly follow into the grey depths of the Sea of Souls.

Admiral Hackett was the very definition of grizzled. His hair was grey where it wasn't white, his beard cut very close to his jaw. There was a scar running up one cheek where a batarian ballistic blade almost killed him in his youth during a boarding party. He wore it well. His eyes were the most striking part of him, even through a holographic display. They were the kind of blue which nailed your feet to the floor and stared right into your soul, and you knew that if he didn't like what he saw, things would go from bad to worse in your immediate future. Her back was very straight, under that gaze.

"Welcome back to Earth, Avatar Shepard. I understand you were able to recover our facility," Hackett said. He shook his head. "Intelligence dropped the ball on the AI. There shouldn't have been any way that thing could have gotten in there. That you managed to shut it down with just what you had was a miracle."

"I had a good team," Shepard said.

"A turian and a quarian, and a private on his first duty rotation," Hackett summed up. "Anderson was right about you. You've got more talent at leading others than most would expect."

"Thank you, Sir," Shepard said, her jaw still tight from the precision she was trying to show. This man was a legend. He deserved nothing less of her.

"I'm recommending access to some training programs usually restricted to N7 veterans, as well as access to some upgraded combat gear. You're a valuable commodity, Shepard. Humanity needs you at your best."

"With all due respect, sir, I don't have time for training. And all I want is the gear I had before I joined the shakedown of the Normandy," Shepard pointed out.

"It will be delivered in a matter of hours," Hackett nodded. "If you're willing to wait, we can even get some of the technicians to retrofit it to the Mark Seven variant. Also, the men in the motor pool are loading the Normandy with a new Mako. But they have a single request in its use."

"What is it, Sir?" Shepard asked.

"That you never, _under any circumstances_, drive it."

Shepard leaned back, and then nodded. "Good," Hackett said. "I'll have it released into your TO&E effective immediately. Good job, Commander. Show the same skill and tenacity in your hunt for Saren, and I know you'll have him by the neck in no time. Hackett, out."

"Man. First I get into a firefight with the Avatar, then I get an indirect compliment from the big-guy," Vega said. "I shoulda joined the marines sooner."

"Why didn't you?" Garrus asked, from the side of the room, where he now leaned.

"...That's not something I feel like goin' into," Vega said uncomfortably. "Still, wait till Uncle hears about this!"

"You know, I could use people like you on my team. You showed a level head out there. Doubly so when everything was falling apart," Shepard pointed out.

"What?" Vega asked.

"How'd you like to be reassigned to the Normandy?" Shepard asked. The bonus to ship-borne eye-candy was just another added benefit.

Vega looked at her, agape, before hanging his head, and shaking it, slowly. "Look, I appreciate everything that you've done. I mean, saving my ass, bringing me back to Earth, and all but... Let's face it. The world gets crazy around the Avatar. I just don't think I can keep up with that kind of crazy."

"The world's crazy everywhere. Out there, you could do something about it," Shepard teased.

"All due respect, Feng Nu, I busted my ass to get where I am today. More than you would ever know. And I don't want to seem disrespectful, but when I signed on to the Alliance Marines, it was to do good for humanity, not for whatever the aliens want."

Shepard's gaze darkened. "Did you just call me a tool for the Council?" she asked, her tone becoming dire.

"What? No, it wasn't like that," he said. He sighed. "Uncle's proud that I've made something of myself here. I've got a future for the first time in my life. Much as I'd like to tear-ass across the galaxy... I wanna do Uncle proud, you know? I can't go. My place is here, with the Alliance."

Shepard sighed, and shook her head. "I'm sorry you feel that way."

"Hey, if the galaxy is as crazy as you say it is, then I'll probably bump into you, years from now, and we'll all have a laugh as you drink whiskey from a mug made out of Saren's skull," Vega said with a laugh.

"That was a bit grim. I can see her doing it, though," Garrus opined.

"Cram it," Shepard said. She gave the private a salute, which he instantly returned. "It's been a pleasure, Private James Vega."

"It's been an honor, Commander Shepard," Vega answered. Then, with a click of his heels, he turned and left. Garrus watched him leave.

"He's a good kid," Garrus said. "I remember being a lot more brash when I was his age."

"How old are you, anyway?" Shepard asked.

"Probably about as old as you are. Turians and humans have about the same life span," he gave a shrug. "You know, we saw a lot of Earth back on Palaven when I was a child. It doesn't quite measure up to being here."

"What do you mean?" Shepard asked. Garrus nodded toward the window, which overlooked the space-port, where Shepard could see a new Mako being loaded into her ship, as Tali guided them along. Garrus, though, was looking down immediately below the window, where a turian and an asari were facing each other. The turian launched himself forward, and as he punched, bolts of flame lit from his fists and seared toward the blue woman, who kipped away, weaving under and around them, until the turian swept a wave of fire low, and the asari bounced up, balancing on her fingertip... on a ball of solidified air.

"We knew for centuries that the batarians could control fire. We didn't know how; they would die before giving the secret, wouldn't release it for any price we could offer, wouldn't share it with their closest buddies. But you use it almost like technology. And you give it away for almost nothing," he shook his head. Below, the asari swept down, scootering around the turian before twisting around with a corkscrewing motion and blasting the alien who outweighed her at least by twice as much off of the training platform and into a decorative shrub. "The Primarch called humanity 'a sleeping giant' when he fought you. Easy to see why."

"So? The Krogan have been earthbending longer than _we_ have," Shepard said.

"And besides one matriarch on Illium, nobody but the krogan – and the batarians again – has ever been able to replicate it," Garrus pointed out. He stared down, to where a human was trying to train a salarian to waterbend. "I just don't understand why you bother. You could have practically owned the galaxy, given enough generations, enough time, with this kind of power. Instead, you spread it around."

Shepard shrugged. "It was my predecessor's idea. I can't speak for him," she said. Her brow knitted. "So what brought this on?"

"I'm not sure," Garrus admitted. "I've just been thinking about all the things I've seen on my job. All the mistakes. All the missed chances," he shook his head, his mandibles flicking slightly. Tightly controlled anger, that. "In my time, I've seen things which would give you nightmares. I just wonder if I had something like this, I could have stopped it."

Shepard felt, in that moment, two urges. One, to let an old wound lie. And another, whispering into the back of her mind, to see what he meant by that. She surprised even herself with her choice. "What gets at you the worst?" Shepard asked.

"Saleon," Garrus answered. He stared down to where the other turian was pulling himself out of the bush, and returning to a firebending stance opposite his blue airbender opponent. "I shouldn't have let him get out of my grasp in the first place. I was tracking a spike in black market organs in Teyseri Ward. I thought it might be like when that elcor diplomat lost his mind and started cutting up aliens and selling them to buy silence."

"An elcor serial killer? Now I've heard everything."

"Shepard, I've personally ventilated a cannibal _hanar_ who was trying to be a suicide bomber. C-Sec gets the strangest of the strange. The Citadel's the only place where every kind of sapient shares office space, after all," Garrus pointed out. Shepard had to see the logic in that. "But this one was different. There weren't any missing people, just a whole lot of organs. I caught a break when I got my hands on some of them, and tracked them to their source."

"A victim?"

"No, he's a bartender," Garrus corrected. "Is being the operative word. The turian had no idea that his liver was sitting in C-Sec cold storage. And before you ask, no, turians can't live without a liver. Thus the name."

"I may not know what dextro is all about, but I'm not an idiot," Shepard said flatly. "So they cloned the guy's liver?"

Garrus looked at her. "You just spoiled the good part. Yes, they cloned his liver. But not just his. There were hundreds of different body parts, from every species. Even human, quarian, and vorcha. And why vorcha would need organs, ones they don't grow inside themselves, I couldn't tell you. Sort of like krogan testicle implants. A waste of time and money to no good purpose. We tracked from that turian and a few others we identified to a salarian doctor. Doctor Saleon."

"So you arrested him?"

"I wanted to, but my hands were tied," he said. "It's not illegal to clone organs. Just to sell them. I knew that Saleon was up to something darker, though. So I grabbed one of his lab assistants and had a chat with him."

"I'm assuming the chat involved a car battery, Thresher Maw spittle and a bowl of mice?" Shepard asked.

"It didn't get very far," Garrus pointed out, still giving her a glance for her suggestion. "Not long into the interview, he started bleeding profusely. Turns out, he was covered in cuts. Surgical incisions. He'd been opened up and closed dozens of times, all over his body. They weren't just cloning organs; they were growing them inside these people."

"What?" Shepard asked.

"He'd get homeless, poor, and desperate people to incubate the organs as they developed. If the organs were good, he'd pull them out and give the sap a percentage of the organ's worth. But the organs weren't always good. There are probably still a few unfortunate souls out there who are just festooned with worthless tissue, like a chest full of tumors, which he wouldn't pull out and forced them to live with. But he didn't care. As long as he made some money off them, he couldn't care less!"

"That's disgusting," Shepard said. Garrus agreed with her, a distant, grim look in his blue and black eyes.

"We heard rumors about his other... habits... with some of his other victims, but I'd heard enough. I moved to arrest Saleon immediately, warrant or no warrant. But by the time I arrived at his clinic, there was nothing left. Not one krogan testicle," Garrus' voice was getting a throaty reverberation to it. Rage, Shepard guessed, and rightly. "I track him through the Citadel, and find him just as he's dusting off in a freighter, a few of his 'coworkers' on the ship with him. I tell the Executor that he has to shoot that ship down. He won't, because it'll kill 'innocent bystanders'. I tell him that those people are already dead, and at least that way we'll know Saleon didn't get away with this... this atrocity. But I got overruled. Saleon got out, went through the Widow Relay, and vanished. That's what I regret, Shepard. Because I got tied up with some of his hired goons for two minutes – two minutes, Shepard – I had to let that freak walk free."

"I know what it feels like," Shepard said, pulling her arms close to her chest, as she leaned out that window. "And I know how angry it makes you. If we ever find that Saleon, I promise you, he won't get away again. The galaxy doesn't need monsters like him in it."

"Really?" Garrus asked. "You're not just saying that to cheer me up, are you?"

"Why, is it working?" Shepard asked sardonically.

"A bit. As long as I get the satisfaction of looking that monster in the eye when he dies, then I can die a happy turian. And if you put me in the same room as him... I'll remember that. I don't know what I'll be able to give you for it, but I'll remember it."

Shepard nodded. "You're not much like other turians, are you?"

"Not even a little," Garrus admitted. The two of them stared into the courtyard, where the turian had turned the tables on the asari, and blasted her into a fountain on the wings of a firebent explosion. She got up laughing. "We should get back to the ship."

* * *

Shepard had barely gotten back into her ship when the speakers came online, pausing her ascent up the ladder beside the elevator. "Commander Shepard?" Joker said. "I've got Councilor Valern looking to contact you. I've patched him through to the main comms room."

She raised her brows with a moment of confusion, then kipped up the ladder. At the top, she turned to the left, and immediately walked into a tonne of armored krogan leaning against a wall. Understandably, she was the one who bounced off. She shook her head, staring in confusion at the newest place Wrex had taken to leaning.

"Shepard," the krogan said. A lizard bird squawked at her in the wake of the krogan's acknowledgment. Shepard ignored it.

"Wrex."

She shook her head. More time to deal with that later. She turned the corner at the top of the stairs and went back into the comms room, with its holographic projectors, and pressed the big flickering button. Lucky it was that the Alliance decided to make its ships idiotproof. The robed salarian appeared before her, standing as though waiting impatiently. Then again, since it was salarian, it very likely was.

"Excellent. Agent Shepard. We thought we should apprise you of recent developments in the Traverse," Valern said.

"Has there been word of Saren?" she asked.

"No, but his geth have landed on the planet of Feros. It is a human colony world, liberally covered in Prothean ruins. We cannot say what his purpose for sending his army there is, but I say with a fair degree of certainty that you would be interested in it."

"So the rumors of geth buzzing Feros weren't just rumors," Shepard said. "I'll set a course immediately."

"Good hunting, Agent Shepard," Valern said.

"Commander."

"Very well," Valern said with a nod, before vanishing abruptly. Shepard turned and tapped the button opening comms to the helm.

"Joker, set a course to Feros, in the Attican Beta Cluster," Shepard ordered.

"Laying in... ETA is... twelve hours. Long jump, Commander. Might have to talk to some people to pass the time..."

"Don't start, Joker. I'm not in the mood," she said. Twelve hours. What was she supposed to do with herself in all that time?

She shook her head and moved down into the hold once more, bypassing all the people talking quietly in the mess. Liara tried to get Shepard's attention, but the Commander ignored her. She had her own thoughts to deal with before she could bother with others'. Down in the hold, there were only two. One was a quarian, tinkering with the Mako. The other was Si Wongi, tinkering with guns. Wait, not tinkering.

"I saw a picture of your Lieutenant Alenko, eldest sister. He is _very_ handsome. Have you been trying to catch his eye?" a sing-song voice came through an open channel. Al'Wahim turned to Shepard, her eyes widening, before returning her gaze forward.

"We should continue this later," she said, before terminating the call.

"Anything I should know about?" Shepard asked.

"Just my sister being... my sister," al'Wahim said with a roll of her eyes. "She pesters me constantly to find a man and to give her a niece before she has a child. She thinks it bad luck for a younger sister to have a child before an elder. Superstition, and a foolish one at that."

"You've got sisters?" Shepard asked, leaning against one of her squad's lockers.

"Three," the Si Wongi nodded. "We were born on a colony. Thus my reduced accent. That was Sirah, the youngest. Latifah is older, and Abina older still," she got a small smile on her face. "Father often said that he felt more outnumbered at home than on his maneuvers," she then broke off, and turned to Shepard. "I apologize. I should not speak of my family, given what happened to your own."

"It was a long time ago," Shepard said.

"But the wound is still raw," al'Wahim said. "If you wish, I can drop this discussion."

"I have a question for you," Shepard said. The gunnery chief turned and gave her full attention. "I've actually read through your dossier. Your technical scores are almost perfect, your OCS index is almost as high as mine was," which wasn't stellar but still well above the minimums, "and you don't have any demotions or reprimands on your record. So why were you pounding dirt in a backwater garrison on a colony world?"

The Si Wongi riflewoman gave a glance aside. "...you don't know?" she asked. Shepard shrugged. "You have not heard of General Abbas al'Wahim, the commander of Shanxi during the First Contact War?"

"Oh, right. 'The General who Lost An Avatar'," Shepard quoted.

"He was my grandfather. He led the ground defense of Shanxi better than any could have hoped. But your predecessor could not be saved, despite his finest efforts. Hong's death put a fire into the people of Shanxi and prompted the turians to bombard it, rather than try fighting any longer upon the ground. Had they not, Shanxi would have likely surrendered. Strange, how we held our ground only at the loss of an Avatar, and even still, the shame of it haunted Abbas until his dying day, as he was pushed from poor position to poorer, until he died in the darkness."

"So what does this have to do with you?"

"Some thought my family cursed. Father served on any ship which would have him, but never rose above the rank of serviceman third class. When I attained my rank, the first he did to my face was salute," she smiled at what was clearly a pleasant memory. Then, she turned back. "We have to be better than the best. To do otherwise is to allow the failure of Shanxi, the failure to your forebearer, stand. That, I will not tolerate."

Shepard shrugged. "As long as you don't let it become an obsession. I'm not Hong. I'm not helpless, and you don't need to babysit me."

"All the same, it would be best if you don't choose to die while I am aboard. My family would perish for the shame of it if you did."

"Duly noted," she said. She then turned to the small, capped cisterns which were bolted to the floor near the elevator's support structures. She could see up where her room was from here, but she had other things in mind. Namely, waterbending training. She had to stay sharp.

She had just begun, pulling the water into its mobile, looping whorls, when the quarian turned her attention to the Avatar. "_What are you doing, Shepard?_" she asked, her voice much more vibrant ever since their mission on Yue.

"Well, you're obviously back on your feet. I assume the silence isn't bothering you as much," Shepard said, before twisting her water and sending it out in a whip-crack which left a dent in a ballistic target dummy. Tali paused at that.

"_It's like you said. I'm just adapting. It's what my people have always done,_" Tali said with a shrug, her eyes still focused on Shepard's bending. "_You won't need to worry about me. I promise, I'll pull my weight, no matter what comes up. I won't slow you down in your hunt for Saren._"

"Well aware," Shepard said, pausing to flick on the movement of the targets, and then lashing out at the randomly moving targets as they zipped along the far end of the hold. She still missed one lash in ten, which was stymying. She had to do better than that. "Something else on your mind, or are you just going to watch me bend?"

"_What_?" Tali asked, distracted. "_Oh... I was just... Yes. Shepard, how do you do that?_"

"What? Waterbend?" Shepard asked.

"_Yes_."

"It's all in the wrists," Shepard said, turning and flicking out another whip which knocked a target back with an exaggerated 'ding'.

"_I mean... is it something that you can teach, or do you have to be born with it?_" she asked.

"That's..." Shepard paused. "You'll have to ask Alenko about that. I've heard both stories, genetics or random. You can't do anything with it if you don't train, though," Shepard said. She tapped a button, causing one dummy to rise up and start making swooping 'attack runs' at her. She had to ward it off with a shield of ice every time it did. A useless skill in a modern battle, but a waterbender could shield herself from debris with it, at least. More important, it forced her to divide her attention. That was when a waterbender was at her most taxed, and at her most effective.

"_My people don't have anything like that,_" Tali said. "_Every species has its biotics, but not the quarians. It makes sense, since we're never even exposed to the air of our own ships from the time we're born until we get our first environment suit. There's no way for eezo to fuse into our brains. I guess that's why so many quarians become engineers, looking for technological ways to make up for biological shortcomings..._"

"You're rambling again," Shepard said, lashing a dummy out from behind the Mako, where it'd gotten stuck, so it could roam again.

"_Right_," Tali said with a hint of self-consciousness. "_I heard from Garrus that your people can even heal wounds with this water bending. Is that true?_"

"It's one word. Waterbending. And yes," Shepard said. "One of my predecessors was brought back from the dead by waterbending."

"_Really_?" she asked.

"Avatar Aang. Look him up some time," Shepard said, continuing her parry and riposte, shifting her attention as seamlessly as possible between offense and defense. As a waterbender was supposed to. "Why?"

She fidgited, kneading tridactyl hands for a moment. "_If... if I could do something like that, I might be able to actually bring something important back from my Pilgrimage. Instead of having to have risky, dangerous surgery, just a bit of magic water and..._"

"Not magic. Bending," Shepard stressed. She then paused, which had the effect of letting the swooping dummy whack her in the side of the face. She turned them off. "You said you don't breathe the ship's air? What do you breathe?"

"_Our infants are raised in sterile rooms, usually with just their mother,_" Tali said.

"That's gotta wreak havoc with your immune systems," Shepard noted, pulling the water off of the floor and balling it up. Tali glanced toward her. "What?"

"_We don't __have__ much of an immune system, really_," Tali said. "_We evolved to carry our flora with us, microbially. But when we fled Rannoch on our ships, we didn't realize that the O2 scrubbers were __too__ effective until it was too late. The Flotilla was sterile, and our immune systems, with nothing to test them which wouldn't kill us... sort of crumbled," she glanced down. "In my entire life, I've only once ever seen my father's face. Once, Shepard._"

"Is he still alive?" Shepard asked.

"_Yes. He's... well, he's on the Admiralty Board,_" Tali said, as though giving a dark secret. Shepard didn't get it, and thus, didn't care.

"So you think waterbending would be a cure all?" Shepard said. "Doesn't work that way. It can _help_ fight disease, but..." she shrugged.

Tali nodded, grimly. But she looked up. "_If it's all the same, if you don't mind... could I just watch?_"

Shepard shrugged, triggering the systems again. "Knock yourself out. Only not literally, since it apparently might kill you."

The training session, with its enraptured spectator, lasted about an hour. The main reason that Shepard stopped was because al'Wahim eventually stopped working on guns and began offering comments from the sidelines. Shepard didn't like having to deal with the peanut-gallery at the best of times.

It was strange how waterbending training left Shepard a sweaty mess. Still, one of the perks of having the officers quarters was that there was an admittedly tight bathroom, which she had all to herself. Most notably, a private shower. As soon as she walked in, she locked the door, and began doffing clothing. She hurled it all into the corner by her bed, to be sorted later. She paused, before entering that bathroom, looking at the armor case which she'd brought up to her room. A peek inside brought a smile to her lips, and she pulled out her rifle. It was a Crossfire, built on the reliable and powerful Vindicator frame. And most notably, it could actually shoot where she wanted it to. Under it was her armor, green and black and slightly bullet-scarred, but looking in good form. Fantastic.

She was actually in a decent mood as she showered. And that mood persisted as she wrapped herself in a towel and sat down at her computer. Her hair was hanging limply down her back, since it was far too wet to bun. She flicked on her monitor. Spam. Spam. A message from Sha'ira of all people, telling Shepard that she wanted to deliver something. She filed that away for later. Then, she found one which had no subject header, and was delivered from T'Soni.

Shepard rolled her eyes and opened up the message from the resident Prothean expert. She wondered what Liara had to say which she couldn't say face to face. The image came on... no, not a message. A video.

And it wasn't Liara. It was the _other_ T'Soni.

Shepard's eyes went wide, sitting still and in shock as though the thousand-year-old Matriarch could see her through the screen. Benezia looked... like she was rotting away inside. Her skin was closer to grey than blue, the skin of her face pulled tight to her cheeks and teeth. It also seemed to be peeling and sloughing. Her lips were withered, and her eyes were sunken. But the strangest thing about them was that while one remained locked forward, the other blue eye flit and darted about at complete random, unable to settle on a spot for more than an instant.

"Shepard... Avatar..." Benezia said, her words drawn out, as though she was trying to remember how to talk.

"...Liara?" Shepard shouted over her shoulder.

"Fifty thousand, fifty thousand," the matriarch said, with obvious deliberation. "I... know what you are for."

"LIARA!" Shepard screamed.

"The door is locked, Shepard!" the asari answered.

"You... are the_ only one_... that can... stop..." Benezia said. Then, her head dipped forward, and the video cut. Shepard got up and opened her door, before rushing back to the desk. Liara was following her in, and then glanced down.

"Oh, I am sorry, I thought," Liara said, blushing a darker shade of blue.

"Liara, is this who I think it is?" Shepard said, restarting the message. Liara's embarrassment fled into confusion, and then her hands flew to her mouth.

"Mother! W... What happened to her?" Liara said, obviously pained seeing her mother so.

"What is she talking about?"

"I do not know," Liara admitted. "Saren must have done something to her," her hands balled into girly fists at her hips. "Shepard, promise me you'll do whatever you can to save her. If nothing else, this proves that she's not working with Saren willingly!"

"I can make no such promises. But if it's possible, I'm not going to kill her out of spite," Shepard said.

Liara looked at the asari who was freeze-framed slumping forward, her eyes staring in different directions. "By the Goddess... is this what Saren has done to all of Mother's followers?"

"I don't know," Shepard said. She glanced to the doctor. "But if there's one thing I can promise, it's that when we get Saren, he's going to pay for everything he's done. _Everything_."

Liara couldn't tear her eyes away from that screen. She pressed her eyes shut. Shepard could tell she was trying very hard not to cry. "Thank you, Shepard," Liara said, before quickly leaving the room. Shepard turned back to the screen.

"What I'm _for_?" Shepard asked. "Stop what? Saren? The Reapers he's after? _What_?"

* * *

**Lots of people are going to be showing up a bit early. Call it the bonus of knowing who's going to be relevant in future games. Vega, for example, will be showing up on his own during Book 2, on my personal version of his Fehl Prime mission. There will be Harbinger. It will not end well for poor Vega.**

**To answer qeustions left last chapter: This will not spoil my other running fic, Three Families, something which will become obvious the first time Shepard 'flashes back' to Aang's time. Big hint, her Fire Lord Zuko's got the scar. 3F Zuko doesn't. And while she won't be hearing from Aang or Korra immediately, she will in time start learning from the mistakes of her forebearers. Also, if you weren't paying attention, Korra wasn't the last waterbender Avatar. That distinction falls to an unfortunate street-rat living in Republic City who was randomly gunned down before his fifteenth birthday, let alone being recognized as Avatar. Avatar Sato was the last airbender avatar, and in fact the last Avatar that the world was aware of before Hong was discovered.**

**I'm also thinking of backfilling chapters with modified Codex entries which flesh out the universe a bit. The technology of bending, and all that junk.**

**Finally, while the Extended Cut was an ending which didn't leave me feeling nearly as gutted as the original, by the time I reach it, it'll be more or less moot. I do have plans for Leviathan, but they might have to change based on whether I have outguessed Canon, or if Canon's outguessed me. For the record, though, I'm going with a more ME2 perception of the Reapers, in that they are all thinking, independant, but united in purpose. Not the idiot tools of a tempramental overgrown computer pop-up.**

**Finally, it's not just Shepard I'm tormenting. I torment all people equally, regardless of species. Liara's gonna have it _rough_.**


	7. Feros, Part 1: the Geth

His eyes narrowed as he leaned toward the reinforced glass which separated they from the specimens contained within. He leaned one way, then another, and the primitives shrunk back in terror from his approach. Let them. They weren't really sapient, not like he was. They were barely sentient. "So this is the thing which attacked us? They look... small," Sajuuk muttered.

Wex gave him an askance glance. He was a very level headed Vaal, which was to say that a bomb going off in his face wouldn't muss his composure too much. Like his bretheren, he appeared somewhat like the primitives within, only his skin was white, and his head covered in pseudo-feathers rather than cartilaginous tendrils. They both shared a body shape – save for Wex's understandable lack of breasts – and even were both pentidactyl. They were probably the same weight, and both had only a single pair of eyes. "I traced the pods back from the one you recovered. There's hundreds of these things across two facilities. The other one fell to the Reapers months ago."

"So you are saying that these things were... experiments? Accidents?" the professor asked, horror in his tone. "This is unconscionable!"

"It was untimely," Sajuuk corrected. "Had the director been more astute, the specimens would not have been lost. They would have been destroyed before the Reapers could claim them."

Ovar shot Sajuuk a glare, his four eyes almost burning of it. "They are intelligent beings! They deserve better than that."

"They are primitives, and they have no use," Sajuuk concluded. "They are too few, and too weak to fight the Reapers. That is the only use they could serve. Lacking that, let them rot," he turned back to the females, and looked amongst them once more. They were all blue-skinned, naked, and huddled in a corner. One of them was holding a squirming infant. Sajuuk turned back to Wex. "Where are the males?"

"They don't have any," Wex said. Sajuuk gave a grunt of confusion. "As I hear it, they're a monogendered species. No males. Just females."

"Wouldn't that be a boon for you?" Tunu asked, leaning on Wex's hip. Wex gave her a glance, grey eyes unkind. She flinched back. "What? Too soon?"

"Fifteen hundred years ago was too soon. Now it's a bad joke that won't go away," Wex said. The Vaal were, as these, a one-gendered species, but that was not of their choosing, and not anything which their biology, or their evolutionary path, had chosen for. A plague had decimated their numbers, and the Protheans had taken them on as a 'client species' in exchange for their service. They offered cloning technology to the Vaal. The Vaal took it. Somewhere along the line, the females of their species just stopped being viably born.

"Are you telling me those scared ladies are the reason I have a fake lung?" Tunu asked.

"The Reapers turn everything into weapons," Wex said. "You know that as well as I do."

"Are they space-capable?" Sajuuk asked.

"They don't even have a system of mathematics!" Ovar said.

"Then the Reapers will ignore them," Sajuuk said. He gave a look to the armor plated behemoth in the cell nearby. There was a reason the blue skinned pseudo-females were clustered in one corner of their cell; it was as far as they could get from both the Prothean observers, and the rampaging, armored, hump-backed thing which was raging around its containment pod. "_These_ would be more useful. They are at least strong enough to _pull carts_."

"Species 1138," Ovar said. "They evolved on a 'crucible' world. They are a prey item. The scientists use them to feed 1120."

Sajuuk turned to him. "You have a Thresher Maw _here_?"

Ovar sighed. "They weren't able to weaponise them. They are too wild, too uncontrollable. Even were they not, it takes too long to cultivate them," he shook his head. "This is folly! We should not be tampering with these species. Species 4512 could develop culture one day, and rise up into the galaxy. They are not our tools."

Sajuuk caught Ovar by the collar of his armor and hauled him close. "They are the tools of the Prothean Empire, or they are the bones which fertilize our crops. They are nothing less, and never more. Is that clear?"

The professor glared, but his resolved buckled under the glare of the Avatar. "As you will, Avatar," Ovar said.

An alarm claxon sounded, and Sajuuk turned toward it. "What is that?" he demanded.

"We are detecting Reapers entering the system," Lampha's voice came through the speakers. "They are detecting the energy signatures of the facility. Estimated time of arrival, one hour, twenty minutes."

Sajuuk turned back to the other scientists, those who were invested in this waste of time. Then, he turned back to Species 4512, who tried to shush a screaming blue infant, watching in fear at the strange beings who in turn watched them. Sajuuk took a moment, to consider what would come. His every decision, now, had a consequence. And every consequence had to lead to one end; destroying the Reapers. They would not help him build the weapon. They would only die in droves against the guns of the Reapers, and give them more bodies for the machines to turn into Ban Sidhe. That was not something Sajuuk could allow.

The Avatar opened his eyes, and faced the researchers. "This place has already been destroyed. It cannot fall into Reaper hands. Burn everything, destroy all specimens, and erase all of the data. I will be leaving in twenty minutes. If you wish not to become an abomination yourself, you had better be on my ship when I do," Sajuuk promised.

"Avatar, this is wrong!" Ovar protested, lunging toward Sajuuk. Wex held him back – barely, since Wex wasn't the strongest – and Sajuuk didn't flinch in the slightest. "We can bring the specimens with us! It won't slow us down!"

"Why are you so interested in these primitives?" Sajuuk demanded. "They are useless."

Ovar blanched. "They deserve better than this, Avatar," he said. "Every one of them is a biotic. We can use that. Please."

Sajuuk considered that, but shook his head. "It is still folly. They are too primitive. Too few, and without males, doomed to die out."

"They are few because somebody has _already tampered with them_! They don't need–" Ovar snapped. Sajuuk waved his hand, cutting him off.

"I do not care. If you wish to share the fate of these primitives, join them in their containment unit, for none other shall come to them," the Avatar declared. "Is that all, 'Professor' Athame?"

"...that is all, Avatar," the young professor said, defeated. Sajuuk walked past him, and behind his back, Tunu gave the weary Prothean a squeeze of the hand. It was a tiny gesture to her, but more to him, since it brought him a wealth of knowledge about the ditakur, and a fragment of her resolve in the process.

"It'll be alright, Ovar. I promise."

"I wish I had your faith," Ovar whispered.

Of all of them, only Wex remained behind, stone-faced, as the plasma flames leapt into the containment cells, and purged them of life.

…

Shepard's head started pounding even as she opened her eyes. Another strange dream, and even as she smacked her tongue dryly against the roof of her mouth, it was fading from her recollection. She could remember... asari and krogan... and they were naked... She shook her head. She obviously was getting the worst sort of influence from the pilot if she was having bizarre alien sex-dreams. Otherwise, she simply needed to track somebody down to relieve some... tension. But that was a problem for another time. Because what had awoken her from her bizarre dream was the intercom.

"Ugh... what?" Shepard said.

"Shepard, we've got a situation downstairs in the hold," Joker said with a tone of mild urgency. "I think one of our resident krogan pissed off the other. Can't tell which. I've got my money on the big one, by the way."

"...what?" Shepard asked, rubbing her head. It still pounded, so she kneaded a brow as she looked down into the window which showed the hold below. And true to the Pilot's warning, she could see the two krogan down there, arms locked, smashing each other in the face with their skulls. And it didn't look friendly.

Shepard growled, pulling a shirt over her head and heading out the door still in bare feet. She slid down the ladder quickly, and as soon as she turned, she had to step aside because the two krogan barreled into the frame of the elevator, almost crushing her against the wall. "ENOUGH!" Shepard screamed. There was a pause, which Wrex used to deliver one final head-butt to Adeks, dropping the engineer to the deck-plating.

"Stay down, whelp," Wrex demanded.

"Just 'cause you hit harder, doesn't make you right," Adeks noted, smirking up to the krogan who'd beaten him. "That's a funny thing. If I kill you, I might get chewed out a little. And I've _been_ chewed out by humans. It's not much. But if you kill me, you won't get off this ship in anything larger than a fast-food container. I've got fifty guns who'll raise up as my krannt. You're alone. That's what my _friends_ are worth, Urdnot. That's why you failed."

"You don't know anything about me, you worthless puppet," Wrex snarled. "You gave up everything which made you krogen in exchange for worthless comforts. You gave up your pride for a human cess-pit. You gave up your dignity for slavery. You should be ashamed of your 'friends', not proud of them. You're nothing but a _pet_ to them. A good luck charm."

"Wrex, stand down **now**," Shepard barked. Wrex turned toward her, scowled, then waved dismissively, and walked over to a spot next to the lockers, and the bird he'd picked up kipped back onto his hump. Shepard leaned down and helped Adeks to his feet. His brow-plate had an oozing crack in it, and he sported a few nasty looking bruises.

"You should get that looked after," Shepard said.

"I've had worse," Adeks said. "I warned you about the Urdnot. That's him on his best behavior. You should see what the others are doing nowadays."

"Duly noted. Are you going to need some time off? To see Chakwas?" Shepard asked.

"I'm tougher than I look, and I look damned tough," Adeks said. "Just keep that rabid varren away from me. He's what's wrong with Tuchanka, these days. Makes me glad there's a spot in this galaxy which won't pitch us out an airlock, _Wrex_." he said tauntingly.

"Kree! Your mother earned pennies on her back!" the lizard bird squawked

"What did you say!" Adeks shook an angry fist at the bird.

"Adeks, go back to engineering," Shepard ordered. Adeks grumbled, glaring at the Urdnot's pet. Wrex himself was chuckling deeply. "Wrex," She said, walking up to him.

"Shepard," he answered.

"What the hell was that?" she demanded.

"He got on my nerves," Wrex said.

"Not good enough. I hired you on to do one thing. Kill Saren. If you can't keep your aggression in check for when I need it – namely, killing those stupid enough to work for him – then I'd might as well put a bullet through your skull now to save me the inconvenience later."

Wrex raised a brow at that. "You've got a lot more fire in you than most humans. Good. As long as you keep that sycophantic runt away from me, I won't cause any problems."

"What's your issue with Adeks?" Shepard inquired.

"He's a traitor to his species," Wrex said.

"Because he doesn't kill for credits, like you?" Shepard demanded. Wrex sighed.

"Because he turned his back on what makes him krogan. Instead, he tries to be human. We're not human, Shepard. We never will be, and trying to pretend is both pointless and sad. Better to be krogan. At least that way, we face the void with our backs straight."

"That's a nihilistic attitude," Shepard crossed her arms before her chest.

"Eight hundred years in the making," Wrex said. He gave a sigh, his eyes going to the floor. "I might have believed something, once. Grandfather had a way of making you believe you could change things. He talked big words, had big ideas. I tried to make those ideas reality. Didn't work out."

"What do you mean?" Shepard asked. He glared at her. "Wrex, I want an answer."

His eyes burned, but she didn't flinch, even with the massive gulf in brute strength and size. And _he_ was the one who blinked first. "Fine. About four hundred years ago, I went back to Tuchanka. I had a notion that I could change what it meant to be krogan. Actually work to rebuild the homeworld for a change. The genophage might have infected us, but it's _not_ what's killing us. Our ideas are killing us. Our ways are killing us. Instead of trying to settle, we conquer. We make enemies, and we can't breed fast enough to fight them. Instead of hunkering down, focusing on breeding even for one damned generation, we spread out. We hire ourselves onto Merc bands like the Blood Pack, and most of us never come back."

Wrex walked to the Mako, and leaned against it, pressing his skull-late to the armor. "I went to Tuchanka with common sense. And for a while, I thought I was getting through to my people. But I was betrayed," Wrex said with anger rumbling in his voice. "I had my own small tribe, and I was trying to bring some sanity back to the Valley after another pointless war. But the other tribes were against us; they followed Jarrod. He was one of the few Warlords who survived the war with the turians. He was old, and so were his ideas. A lot of krogan liked things that way. He promised them savagery, and he delivered," Wrex let out a growl, then pounded the armor with a fist. The bird on his hump bounced off with an alarmed call, coming to rest on one of the support pillars rather than its temperamental perch. "I just wanted Jarrod to shut up. To stop leading the krogan to their doom."

"You make it sound like you were some sort of reformer," Shepard said.

Wrex turned back to her. "Reformer. That's a good word. It's got no place on Tuchanka. We don't reform. We just fight. The turians, the salarians, each other, it doesn't matter to us, to people like Jarrod," Wrex put his back to the Mako, and crossed his arms before his hard-plated chest. "He didn't like that I was getting as far as I was. So he arranged a Crush with the tribes. At the Hallows, a place as sacred as any krogan place _can_ be. Violence there was forbidden. And so I went."

"You had to know it was a trap," Shepard said.

"Of course I knew. But when your father calls a Crush, you don't say no," Wrex pointed out. Shepard leaned back. "Yes, Jarrod was my sire. Your face is a portrait of surprise. By the time this happened, though, he was only that. The man I though of as my father, the man who taught me how to live, what was important, he was long dead, killed by some asari he had a feud with. I am my grandfather's son, not my father's. Jarrod tried to get me to join him, to fight with him rather than against him and his stupid causes. I wouldn't back down. So he called in his men," he let out a snarl. "They leapt from the graves of our dead elders like the krogan undead! I would have killed him for blasphemy, if he didn't already deserve it for betrayal. In the end, all of my tribe was dead, but so was Jarrod. And with that, there was nothing left for me on my homeworld. As soon as I finish my business with my grandfather, I'll have no reason to think about it again," Wrex said.

"Business?"

"Tell me when you go to Tuntau," Wrex said. "Other than that, I'm done talking."

Shepard gave Wrex a moment of scrutiny. She had a fairly good notion that he wasn't lying. He was too blunt for that. And it did explain his... orneriness. But he might still be a problem. She made a note to keep a careful eye on him in the future. However useful he was, there was no telling how much of a problem a wrathful krogan could be. Shepard gave a nod. "Wrex," she said.

"Shepard," he answered. She turned and moved up the ladder, pausing only to flick the intercom button beside the elevator.

"Helm, what's our ETA to Feros?"

"One hour until we drop out of the Relay Network, Commander," a woman's voice said. Must be the secondary pilot. Which meant that Joker was, for once, not in the cockpit. Strange. But she would live with it. She turned and headed to her quarters, the strange dream now smoke in a gale. She had to get her armor back to working order, because there was no telling what she would find on that planet when she got there.

* * *

**Chapter 07**

**Feros, Part 1: The Geth**

* * *

All hands were on deck, as the saying went, and the airlock was elbow-to-elbow with armed people getting ready for the worst. Given the sheer amount of geth signals which Alenko, who was at this moment manning one of the Normandy's sensor suites, was picking up, they had to assume that they would be overwhelmed the moment they touched down. Joker had retaken his seat at the helm, and dropped them in without so much as a whisper, and now, they were pulling up to the automated docking structure which was built into the outskirts of Zhu's Hope.

"The commanding officer is ashore. XO Pressly has the deck," the computer informed, as it did every time Shepard left the ship. She glanced back. Save Alenko, all of the soldiers and aliens were with her. Given the abundance of Prothean ruins, and a likelihood of Prothean data being their target, Liara was an obvious choice. Shepard gave a scowl at the blue girl, though, and reached back, pulling the girl's finger off of her trigger. No point having her shoot Nilsdottir in the ass accidentally. The presence of the geth meant that Tali was a foregone conclusion. And as for the others? Well, somebody had to keep those two alive, and she saw no reason not to bring all of them.

"Keep your eyes and ears open. We don't know what to expect," Shepard said, moving first out of the opening doors and onto the ill-kept landing area. It was obvious that even in the best of times that this colony didn't see a whole lot of traffic. In fact, the welcoming committee stood at one, standing at the end of the gantry, kneading his hands. He was dark, like al'Wahim, and looked nervous. Shepard moved toward him. "Identify yourself, what's going on here?" Shepard demanded.

"Fai Dan will want to see you," the man said.

"And what business is that of mine?" Shepard asked, no longer pointing a rifle at him, but still near enough that if he started getting squirrely, she could deal with it.

"He's our leader... you should speak with Fai Dan," he repeated.

"...you just said that. Is there som–" Shepard began, but was cut off with a faint pink mist blooming out the side of his head. All turned, guns forward, and were already firing by the time she put a name to the thing trying to kill them all. "Geth troopers!"

That cry was immediately followed by one of the geth gesturing toward her, followed by a burst of electricity exploding from Shepard's armor and knocking her flat on her back as her muscles seized. Oh... that was unpleasant.

"Get down before the toys shoot you!" Wrex bellowed.

"_They've got us pinned down_!" Tali shouted, peeking her shotgun up to fire almost blindly before ducking back, their streams of fire wearing down the concrete the structure was built from. Shepard was pushing herself slowly to a squat, still trying to get the taste of ozone out of her nose. So, it wasn't she who saved them. No, it was the little bookish archeologist, in her overpriced armor. She rose up out of cover, her shields almost glowing solid blue against the torrent of oncoming fire, and threw out a hand. Shepard expected some sort of shockwave to knock the foremost of the geth down. That wasn't what happened.

A spot of absolute darkness appeared amidst and above the geth ahead. With a sound of air rushing, the geth began to drift up and away from where they had been bunkered down, lazily circling the Singularity. She'd only ever seen one biotic capable of creating Singularities in her life, and Nilsdottir was still trying to get around Wrex for a shot. That either meant that Nilsdottir wasn't that impressive, or that Liara _was_. Now no longer under absolutely crippling suppression, the attack force rose, and began to send fire into the drifting enemies. To their credit – if such could be given to machines – they did attempt to fire back, even as they were not in control of their own path or velocity. But between the tidal forces of the Singularity and the counterattack, they were quickly losing ground.

And doubly so when Nilsdottir hurled out a Warp, which caused the great spinning mobile to explode dramatically.

Wrex was the first to his feet, looking out at them. "Dead and done. Just the way I like 'em," he confirmed. "Should be a straight shot into the colony."

"Should be, often is not," the Si Wongi woman pointed out.

"Hey, Shepard, I think my cynicism's starting to rub off on people," Nilsdottir said with a smirk.

"_Where was the Destroyer?_" Tali asked. "_Usually, when they have remote ops, they use a destroyer as a safe central server hub. Why isn't there one here?_"

"We'll probably find out ahead," Shepard answered. The path inward was claustrophobic, crumbling, and dusty. And she could hear something moving. "Does anybody else hear that?"

"I do," Garrus said. "Everybody hold up."

The turian put his back to a pillar which stood at one corner of a rising stairwell. The others stayed well back of him. For a moment, his eyes shut, and he seemed to hold his breath. Then, the eyes opened, and slowly, slowly, his rifle inched around the corner, pointing almost straight up. Then, a crack, and he spun back around the corner, just in time for a chunk of rebar to fly past him and embed thirty centimeters into the opposite wall, right where his neck would have been. A second or so later, there was a thud as one of the limber geth finally hit the floor.

"_Stalkers_!" Tali exclaimed. And then, with a pat like throwing a pancake onto a bulkhead, one of them landed amongst them. Shepard bounded and rolled away, but Wrex wasn't so mobile, nor lucky. It's nimble body puffed up, and then a shockwave of electrical pulse shot out, bathing the krogan and bringing his shields down in one blow. Tali, though, didn't seem willing to let this thing bound away. Even as it's legs screwed for its launch, she was slamming something down onto its back. It leapt away, but Tali's omnitool was already glowing orange. With a gesture, she pressed a few buttons. And then, the Stalker was burst in two by the explosive charge she'd planted.

"Any more?"

"Oh, yeah," Garrus confirmed, flinching back from another rebar trying to impale him. "I count four clinging to the pillars near the ceiling. "I can't get a shot on them."

"Then don't bother shooting them," Nilsdottir snapped, sliding against the stone 'handrail' near the stairwell and then casting her hand up. When she did, bursts of blue energy began to race up, in an exploding line straight upward. Shepard peeked out, and saw that yes, that Shockwave did smash the Stalkers from their perch. And sent them falling down. Even as Shepard followed them with bullets, she noted that the 'ground' of the stairwell was actually a cracked glass skylight. So when the Stalkers landed, they smashed through and continued down past the Spectre and her cadre. It was almost anticlimactic when al'Wahim primed a pair of grenades and dropped them down after. The explosion rattled upward, causing another stream of dust to fall before Shepard, but no more.

"Any contacts?" Shepard asked.

"None on my scope," Tali offered.

"Alright. Zhu's Hope is just ahead. Let's double time it, people."

* * *

Zhu's Hope was a wreck. One on fire, from the look of it. In fact, the first greeting that Shepard's squad got upon entering the outskirts of the colony was gunfire, followed by stuttering apologies and contrition. It was lucky that Wrex had remained toward the back of the pack. Even though he didn't look remotely geth, they might have fired at him anyway. In its way, it reminded Asha entirely too much of her own childhood. Her earlier years were spent in these first-gen, entirely pre-fabricated environs, dropped onto a planet and left to thrive or starve. Well, not so extreme, truly, but there was still a sense of wildness to that pioneer in the black which appealed to Dad. Not as a place to live, since he had the black of space in his veins, but as a place to raise his children. Space was no place to raise a family, after all.

"Is that all?" one of the women asked, glancing nervously from where she was struggling with a water pump. "Gods help us. There's no way we're going to survive another wave with just that!"

"Shepard, these people seem desperate. What has happened here?" Liara asked, nervously holding her gun. The few hours of training to brush up showed that Liara had some skill with the pistol, but it was obvious to any and all – Asha more than most – that the asari had never pointed it at another living thing in her life.

"I thought from the blast-marks and the bullet holes it was obvious," Nilsdottir pointed out. She was a brazen one, that. Of all of them, only she didn't wear any armor, only a biological containment suit which was scarcely more than a body-stocking under her fatigues, and a helmet attached at the neck. "Shepard, these guy's have been shithammered. We've gotta talk to who's in charge. Or whoever's not gone crazy from terror, at least."

Shepard gave a nod to the biotic, and began to move through the colony. There were fires burning, people huddled against the prefabs which made up the structure of the colony. And there was very little being said. Nothing was left to say, in such times. They skirted the structure, passing by a grounded freighter and a salarian who looked entirely busy trying to spread one treatment of medigel between two injured people. This was a colony under siege, of that there was no doubt.

"Are you Fai Dan?" Shepard asked as she reached the other side of that structure. There were two, and one of them was a woman, thus, likely not the one. The man, who was himself middle aged and shaven headed, gave a nod. "Shepard, Systems Alliance. We hear you've got a geth problem."

"You're with the reinforcements?" Fai Dan asked, eagerly.

"We are the reinforcements," Shepard corrected.

"That's it?" the woman asked, an edge of panic creeping into her voice.

"I'll take whatever I can get right... now..." Fai Dan broke off, and turned toward the threshold just past him. "...oh no..."

A second later, Asha heard it, too. The grinding of geth. One of them slammed into the ground next to the woman, before unfolding into a bipedal shape. Even as it was pulling the rifle from its back, Asha was gunning it down, splitting it from shoulder to synthetic groin with shots.

"Another wave! Protect the heart of the colony!" Fai Dan screamed, and the woman flattened her back against the pillar.

"They're coming in from the tower! Clear them out, Army!" the woman shouted, her eyes pressed shut either in terror or pain. Shepard gave a nod, then started to move, ignoring the fact that she'd just accepted an order from a glorified security guard.

"Wow. A Prothean ruin which isn't stark white," Garrus noted, as he moved up to Asha's side. "I'm going to have to take some pictures," he broke off, snapping a shot which pegged a geth even as it was descending toward the ground. "You know, when we're not getting swarmed by killer machines."

"I think you enjoy this too much," Liara pointed out.

"Everybody's got to find something they love in what they do," Garrus said with a chuckle. Tali, who was bringing up the rear, shook her head.

"_Everybody on this ship is crazy except me_," she muttered quietly.

"That is a feeling I know well, Tali," Asha said as a note of comfort.

There was a crackle in their helmets, and Alenko's voice entered from the Normandy. "I'm getting a lot of readings from an open structure just northeast of your position. I'm reading a geth dropship over the site, and... I think it'd be a destroyer roughly five clicks out."

"What are we talking in terms of numbers?" Shepard asked, glancing around a corner and getting bullets pinging off her shields for the trouble.

"I'd say between twenty and forty. But one signal is... big."

"Destroyer or Prime. Got it," Shepard said. She glanced to Nilsdottir, then through the door again. Asha couldn't get a good look at what lay within. "I need a hole. Can you make one?"

"Watch me," she said. Then, she limbered her shotgun, and started to run, arcing toward that threshold. But right as she was reaching the point where, reasonably, she would be cut down by fire, there was a thump in the air, a blur of blue light, and then she was gone from sight. Asha took that as her signal.

She burst through the doorway, with Shepard and Wrex on her sides, all of them belching a monumental amount of fire down-range at the disrupted geth formation. The machines flicked hands toward Nilsdottir, but the wisdom of the crazy biotic's plan became apparent, as they were apparently trying to overload her shield generators; the biotic had none.

Asha felt the surge of her adrenaline kicking in even as there was a plat sound landing near her. She turned to see a creepily muscled figure clinging to the wall near her. She could hear a whirring sound coming from its neck. And since she didn't feel like joining Alenko in the Trenches, she willed her body into motion, as quickly as she could possibly move. Thus, when that bolt slammed out, it deflected off of her shields rather than punching through her lungs. The Stalker tried to bound away, but Asha had moved not away, but toward it. So that when its leg screwed up for a launch, she'd already slammed a bayonet through it.

The thing let out a horrendous mechanical growl, and its jump turned into a spin, latching onto her armor and beginning to try to rend. She knew that these things couldn't feel pain, since they weren't really alive, but the way it was acting called to mind a wounded eel-hound, savaging the thing which was killing it. The one advantage Asha had over it, though, was that in her armor, she weighed more. And that meant that she had more mass to throw around. Her legs burned trying to get the movement started, but once started, she wasn't going to stop. She pounded feet against the ground, driving the thing forward with her until she slammed it against the 'rail' which overlooked another stairwell, this one leading up into the tower. It flexed backward, but still held onto one of her shoulders. Her armor was shouting at her that its integrity was starting to buckle. She had to do something fast.

Nobody could say she wasn't practical. With her one free hand, she reached to her back, and pulled out her shotgun. With a twist, she pressed it into the side of the Stalker, and pulled the trigger three times, each one spilling more synthetic guts onto the ground. She pulled back as it went limp and fell over the rail. Then, movement from the corner of her eye. Another geth was turning toward her, rifle ready. Her shields were utterly gone.

Then, so was the geth's head. Another shotgun blast sounded immediately after it, and Tali was at Asha's side. There were no words said, nor needed. Each would have done the same for the other, after all. The machines needed to get destroyed, and it didn't matter who amongst them did it. The melee on this level came to a halt with a biotic explosion, and the glow fading back into Liara's skin.

"That's all on this level," Shepard said, kicking a geth off of the front of her rifle, where it had come to rest in the assault. "Let's clear their LZ."

"No complaints here," Tali said brightly. Entirely too brightly, given the danger they were all in, Asha thought. Then again, she was probably enjoying killing geth more than even Asha. For all they'd killed Asha's friends and companions on Eden Prime, the geth had almost killed Tali's entire species.

It was almost crowded, the way that everybody hustled up the ramp, toward the curved amphitheater-like room. Shepard gave a glance to Asha, then started to count down on her fingers. At zero, everybody rushed in, and they lit up. The first geth dropped like a broken toy. The second stood to weathering fire, even managing to hurl some back at Shepard before it, too was broken and cast down.

The third weathered the assault without its shields dropping for a second.

The forth took advantage of that.

Their advance quickly turned to retreat, as suddenly the geth stopped dying. Their shields stopped failing from incoming fire, and that meant they were effectively impervious. "How do we kill them?" Asha shouted, firing a stream of shots into one, which was knocked onto its back by one of Garrus' sniper shots, but rose without permanent damage.

Tali, fully behind cover, worked her omnitool. Then, she let out a little gasp. "_Keelah Bosh, this isn't good_," she whispered. She muttered to herself for a moment longer, then let out a sigh. "_This had better do. Focus fire as they pop!_"

She reached up and swung her arm toward the resilient geth, and each one she pointed at suffered an explosion of sparks and electricity. And when it did, their combined fire finally broke through the shields, and reduced to scrap metal the synthetic within. It was painfully slow going, dependent wholly on Tali, and she could only work so fast, it seemed.

But it was bearing fruit, as it were. The incoming fire had diminished from a torrent to a trickle. Asha rose from her place at Tali's side and moved in, seeing only a handful of stragglers left. She didn't even bother waiting for Tali. She just rushed the nearest of them, shouldered under it and hurled it out a window. While that window did lead to a courtyard, and not a mile-long drop as she'd have preferred, it gave her the moment needed to pull a grenade from her belt. "Here, have some lemon," she joked, chucking it out onto the geth's lap. Notably, inside its shield bubble. When the grenade went off, it created a geth-shaped explosion, and then, nothing.

Asha turned, watching as Shepard tore through the last geth standing with a lightning bolt. Of course that would work. "Are we clear, Alenko?" Asha asked.

"I'm still reading the big one," Alenko's voice was concerned.

"I don't see anything," Shepard pointed out. Then, there came a slam onto the ground, only a dozen meters away from Asha, which almost tossed her from her feet. It was... big.

While she had nothing particularly good to say about the geth, there was an elegance to their design. One could see the quarians in the geth, for example. Their bodies resembled their creators, smooth curves and precise dimensions. This thing had neither. While she had seen the 'Prime' which stood vigil over the Beacon, that thing too had its elegance. This thing lacked that. It was half again as large as the Prime had been, and looked like it had been put together with spare parts and no eye for design whatsoever. And it had two of the laser-like weapons, one upon each arm.

"Djehuti preserve me," Asha whispered.

"_RUN_!" Tali screamed. Asha felt no desire to be contrary.

With a howl of overtaxed machinery, the two beams belched forward, twinned red beams of death tearing at the landscape and the bits of it that Shepard's squad thought to dive behind. As soon as the beam abated, Shepard was already rising, firing a long stream of metal at the thing. The bullets seemed to rebound harmlessly off of its shields.

"Are all of them immune to bullets, now?" Shepard shouted, as she ducked back behind a crumbled pillar. Lucky she did, because something flew past her head when she did so. Asha tracked it, and noted that it landed with a thud, rather than a bang. And then, it started to unwrap itself. Her eyes went wide when she saw that it was turning into a turret.

"Flank! Flank!" Asha screamed, belching fire at it as the barrels slung under its flashlight-head started to spin. Unlike its larger counterpart, it didn't seem 'immune to bullets' in that its shields did buckle, but her gun gave out, overheating before she could finish it. Those barrels turned toward her.

Even as the bullets started hitting, she knew that she didn't have enough time to move. And if she moved, then it would just turn its attention to Shepard. So much for breaching Lieutenant... And then, her shields burst, the capacitors pushed beyond their capacity. The impacts began to slam against her chest, her arms.

And then, a krogan's chest, and arms, as Wrex tackled the turret and heaved it over his head, gun-barrels first, into the concrete. With a stomp, he smashed the thing out of its arrangement such that it let out an electric grind, and then fell dark. Soothing medigel seeped into her injuries, but she knew that she was going to be facing harsh words by the ship's medical officer when she returned. Even tiny bullets left lasting injuries.

"Everybody focus fire on that juggernaut!" Shepard roared. And as she rose, she'd set her gun aside, and twisted her arms with lightning, before sending it out. The geth was knocked back a step, but its shields held. And it turned those beams toward Shepard. Shepard ducked down, and then rolled aside, as the beams melted clear through the spot she'd been hiding behind. Tali was next up, flicking out her omnitool, to a crackle and a burst of electricity from that behemoth, but even then, Asha's experimental fire showed that the thing still had shields up. Another pop, this one from Garrus, and likewise, little effect.

"It's ugly, but tough," Nilsdottir pointed out. "I'm gonna need a boost!"

"What kind of boost?" Wrex shouted from where he was pressed into an alcove to avoid the deadly beams.

"Warp!" Nilsdottir shouted.

The juggernaut turned toward Wrex, and leveled a gun toward him. Instead of a beam, something javelin-like shot out of the barrel, embedding into the stone. It then exploded, sending Wrex tumbling out of his cover – which no longer existed. Asha's rifle finally had cooled off enough to fire again, and she peppered the thing with shots, but they didn't quite seem able to get through the shields.

"Hell with this. Come at me, ugly!" Nilsdottir screamed, before another thud hit the air, and she was suddenly bouncing off of the massive geth. She looked up at the thing, and fired a blast from her shotgun, before throwing the thing aside and slamming her fist down into the ground, causing a burst of distortion fields which cracked and buckled the concrete, and finally tore down the shields that it reached.

"Focus fire! I want that thing dead!" Shepard shouted, rising up with another bolt of lighting in her hands. And Asha was more than willing to oblige. Unlike the Prime, who's plating was shaped and sculpted to make bullets ablate off, or deflect, this one just seemed to _take_ the hits. And take them it did. The amount of fire that the lot of them levied upon the thing would have taken down whole battalions. Asha kept her fire toward the optics, the big flashlight head. Garrus aimed lower, trying to crack open its chest and the power core which doubtless dwelt within. Wrex fired blast after blast from his shotgun. And the thing stood its ground.

And then, the whirring started again.

"We need more power!" Asha cried. That call ended the plinking shots by the asari, who simply cast a hand toward it instead. Away from that hand flew a distortion in the sky, which slammed into and bathed the behemoth with a iridescent blue light. Alenko would have said that it was the mass effect fields disrupting the molecular integrity of the object at the atomic scale. Asha just knew that Warp made things easier to frag. But that was only part of the picture, since the barrels began to glow red. But then, a thud in the air, and Nilsdottir hurled herself at the thing again.

This time, she impacted with a bass bang. The behemoth geth was staggered back, and instead of melting, say, a krogan with those weapons, they sprayed up relatively harmlessly into the ceiling of the tower. Wrex cast out another Warp of his own, and it struck and bathed the thing just as Nilsdottir landed on the ground, turned, and blasted herself into the thing once again, to the tune of another biotic explosion of mass effect fields tearing themselves apart in a dramatic fashion. This continued, with Liara and Wrex both laying down Warps, which Nilsdottir, bouncing between the ground and that thing, detonated. Liara's was the Warp which slew the beast, though, with Nilsdottir not rebounding off of it, but appearing in an upper corner on the far side of it, before dropping ten feet to the floor with a roll.

"Who's the baddest bitch in space?" Nilsdottir asked, a grin on her face.

Her answer came to the tune of more than four tonnes of metal crashing to the ground, followed by at least a part of it exploding by some self-destruct mechanism. Then, there was silence, save for the wind and the sound of small-arms fire in the distance.

"That's what I thought," Nilsdottir offered.

"Any more geth in the area, Alenko," Shepard asked.

"Negative contacts, Commander," Alenko announced over the comms.

"Good. Let's get back to the colony," Shepard said. Asha nodded, and rose from her position to follow. Shepard turned to the quarian. "What was that thing?"

"_I don't know. There was nothing like __that__ during the Geth Uprising_," Tali said, concern clear in her voice and the way she clutched that shotgun. "_Do you think the geth are building new weapons?_"

"After three hundred years alone in the Perseus Veil, I'd be shocked if they weren't," Wrex offered. "That thing didn't look very... geth... though."

"_That's what I thought,_" Tali admitted. "_When the colony is safe, I'm going to have to take some scans. Will there be time for that?_"

"Depends on whether there's a volcano about to erupt under this colony," Shepard said with a roll of the eyes. "First priority is finding out what Saren was after. Everything else comes after that. Clear?"

"Clear," Wrex said. Tali and Garrus nodded, while the others didn't need to give an answer, since they were either military or else grinning inside nigh-impervious armor.

"You're enjoying that armor entirely too much," Wrex pointed out.

"I thought that I would be more terrified than I am," Liara said. "The armor does help give me a bit of confidence."

"Make sure that you don't get too much out of it," Wrex said, as the lot of them started to descend down that geth-corpse strewn path. "Stupidity is the number one cause of death in your species, after all."

"What? No it isn't," Liara said. "You do not know what you're talking about."

"Oh, I think I do," Wrex offered. But he didn't bother to elaborate, since they were rounding the corner, and Zhu's Hope was returning to their sight.

"The geth, are they gone?" Fai Dan asked.

"For the moment. When did they come here?" Shepard launched immediately into questions.

"A little while. At first, they just skulked out in the ruins, and near the ExoGeni building. But then they started swarming in here, trying to kill us all," Fai Dan said, pointing into the distance, at one of the massive arcologies which dotted the surface of Feros. "But that's the least of our problems. In the attacks, they sent those machines down into our sewer system. I think that's how they keep reaching here from the ExoGeni building. And they've shut down our water as well, so..."

"Just give the secondaries to... al'Wahim," Shepard said, pausing as though she were about to say 'to Alenko'. She wondered about those two. There was something else going on behind the scenes with those two, she was sure of it. Yet, for that surety, she was no gossip, and would not intrude where she had no permission. And she assuredly had not permission to eavesdrop on Shepard's personal life.

"Of course, of course," Fai Dan said. And then, he started talking to al'Wahim. And it turned out, there was quite a bit going wrong with Zhu's Hope.

* * *

Kilometers away, a scope flicked between targets. The sighting with it was, as always, perfect. The weapon had proven reliable over the course of three hundred years, from when it was first picked up off the grounds after a fire. The bearer of that rifle, though, hesitated. It knew that organics would react with profound negativity to its presence, but it also knew that there was a gulf in its knowledge. A gulf in the knowledge of its people.

Petals, like eyebrows, lifted up, and it looked through the scope again. Humans, turian, creator, krogan. Organics. But they were fighting the heretics. One geth platform, amongst thousands on this world, stared with a perfect shot at the leader of the squad which was mowing through them, and its finger was not on the trigger. There was no shot to be taken.

Were they fighting the Old Machines? Or was it simple coincidence? Two hundred seven said coincidence. One hundred forty gave no opinion. Of the remaining present seven hundred, the consensus was one of curiosity. The consensus would require more data. More data required closer proximity. Closer proximity increased hazards, both from organics and heretics. A clandestine approach was both preferable and required.

So the geth infiltrated.

* * *

"Remind me why we're walking through the sewers?" Wrex asked.

"The colonists said they needed some time to fix that transport named after that Earth predator, so I pointed out that we could spend that time rectifying some of the woes of the colony and..." Liara rambled.

"That was a rhetorical question," Wrex pointed out.

"Oh... I see," Liara said.

"_I saw the transport. It looked in bad shape. If they get it ready __today__, we're in luck_," Tali pointed out, clutching her shotgun before her as she moved. "_Keelah, I hate sewers_."

"Why?" Shepard asked, from the front of the pack with Garrus. "Of all of us, you're the most protected. You probably can't even smell it."

"_Spiders_," Tali said with a shudder.

"...which can't get at you,"

"_I don't care. Scuttling little bosh'tets. I wish I had a flamethrower,_" Tali muttered under her breath.

"Well, there's no shortage of flashlights to break down here," Garrus pointed out in his usual, chuckling way. "You'd think they were making them half-price by the way they throw them at us."

"_Actually, we probably disabled most of their processing power when we broke that enormous Juggernaut... thing,_" Tali pointed out. Garrus and the others turned toward her, and even Shepard shrugged, indicating that sentence needed a bit of explanation. "_They're a lot dumber now,_" Tali finished.

"Wait, we can kill the geth stupid?" Nilsdottir asked. "That's the best news I've heard all day!"

Garrus, though, looked a little disappointed. Maybe. Shepard was still figuring out turian facial expressions – namely that turians did indeed have facial expressions – and needed more experience to say with any certainty. "Well, at least they still count as mobile targets. Anything to keep the eyes sharp."

"Are you seriously disappointed that they are not as big of a threat anymore?" Liara asked, blue eyes shining in disbelief.

"I like to hold myself to certain standards," Garrus said with a shrug. He gave a nod toward a pipe, and Tali instantly went to work repairing what had been severed.

"If we hadn't brought a quarian along, this probably would have taken all week," Nilsdottir pointed out.

"Fortunate indeed to have an experienced engineer present," al'Wahim agreed.

"Don't give Tali a big head. Her helmet wouldn't be able to hold it," Shepard joined. "Eyes and ears, people. We're not doing practice drops in Dakong. There are machines out here which can and will kill you if you screw up, by teasing a quarian, for example."

"You need to learn to enjoy this a bit more," Wrex pointed out. And as he did, there was the snarl and the 'roooooo' of a varren approaching, and the stamp of feet.

"You need to shut up and kill that thing," Shepard broke off, as the entire squad turned rifles at the Tuchankan predator. Varren, as far as carnivores go, was fairly low on the food-chain of Tuchanka. Considering that they were both eaten by and ate Krogan in their natural state, and both of them were fodder for things like Klixen and Orsark, let alone the Thresher Maws, it meant that they were fairly low rung. The only reason that the krogan had evolved to the point of culture was by the development of weapons, and then guns. Mostly because, even something as low on the food-chain as a varren was a horrifying beast to kill.

The fire was absolutely withering, and dug at the beast as it charged. As had been indicated by the hunter back in Zhu's Hope, this was every inch of it an alpha varren. Shepard had fought varren, though not as part of the N7 training, when she was last on Tuchanka. There was a reason why krogan produced comically overpowered guns. They needed them. Shots dug into the hide of the varren, but it didn't slow its advance. It just closed thick, leathery lids over its eyes and stormed forward, its maw opening wide and pointing its razor-like tusks forward, a lancer preparing a charge with two spears.

"It's getting..." Garrus began, but Nilsdottir cast up a hand, her body pulsing with blue light for a moment. Then, rather than charging through their gathered ranks, the creature was pulled from its footing, and drifted, its legs still pumping and flailing, but no longer directing its movement. As it drifted, al'Wahim and Garrus both took shots with their high-powered rifles, each one bursting a bulging eye. Wrex himself pressed his shotgun to its belly as it passed over, and fired a shot at point blank range into it. The varren drifted past them, over a long drop, which Nilsdottir took as her moment to release the Lift and let the thing drop.

"Who claims the credit for that one?" al'Wahim asked.

"I do. I shot it in the brain," Garrus said.

"_I think Wrex does_," Tali opined.

"Please, I shot more cleanly through its skull than you did," al'Wahim contended. Shepard put them all to silence by walking to the edge, and looking over. The alpha varren, even though it lacked eyes and had a savaged chest, was slowly limping to its feet. It let out another 'roooo', so Shepard pulled a a grenade and dropped it down next to the beast. The blast was enough to rip the thing to chunks.

There was a glance shared between all those present. "Shepard gets the kill," all agreed, and in perfect unison.

"Tali, where are we on that transmitter?" Shepard asked.

"_It should be close by_," she said, checking her Omni. "_Just past this juncture. Oh, and I think we have the water running again._"

"Thank the Goddess for small miracles," Liara said.

"Why would there be varren on this planet?" al'Wahim asked. "They are not native here."

"Varren tend to show up in places you'd least expect," Wrex said.

"Movement!" Garrus snapped, rifle out before him. Shepard joined him, staring down sights, until her expression turned to confusion. There was a human, leaning against a supporting pillar like it was the only thing keeping him on his feet.

"We've got a survivor," Shepard said.

"You shouldn't go down there," the man said.

"Down where? What are you talking about? And what are you doing here? Didn't you see all of the damned geth everywhere?" Shepard asked, taking the man's arm.

"No, no no don't not from here," the man pulled away, moving back to the pillar. Shepard scowled at him. "I'm... doing nothing that I should. And anything that I shouldn't be doing. The machines just ignore me. They know that I can't hurt them. Even if I wanted to... heh heh... if _I_ wanted to."

"Are you high?" Nilsdottir asked.

"NOOOOO!" the human screamed, his entire body seizing and spasming, clutching at his head like he wanted to tear his own scalp off. Shepard half raised her rifle at him before she coached herself not to. "Ooh... that was a good one. Very loud. Very intense."

Shepard gave a glance to Nilsdottir, and took the words from her mouth. "...the fuck?" Shepard asked.

"Just... invoking the master's whip," the man said, his eyes burning with a form of agony and fervor which made Shepard very uncomfortable. "Helps me remind myself I'm still _alive_. Drowns out the _noise_," Another concerned glance. If he got much weirder, Shepard was probably going to have to shoot him before it started spreading. "You're here for the geth, aren't you? You're not the only one."

That got Shepard's attention.

"Where are they? Who's looking for them?" Shepard pressed.

He laughed, then, the wild, crazy laughter of the damned. "Not looking _for_, looking to get _rid of_!" he contended, rising unsteadily to an unassisted stand. "Those things are the only ones that can't AAAARGH!"

This time, the spasm took the man right down to his knees, which caused Shepard to back the others away, her rifle now nakedly and unashamedly leveled at the man.

"The only ones it ca–AAAAUGH! T-t-tryin' to get t'the URAAAUGH!" he howled at the concrete he had his face pressed against. Then, most unsettlingly, he started to break into sobbing laughter.

"There's nothing we can do here," Shepard said.

"Shepard, please. Sir, do you need help?" Liara broke in, moving to help the man stand.

"I... No help. Nothing can help me anymore," he panted. "Rather... die fighting."

"Fighting what?" Shepard snapped.

"No... not like that. Running through thorn bush... more you struggle, the more it cuts..." he shoved Liara away, which caused the asari to stagger back. "Can't save me. Talk to Fai Dan. He knows about the T–THAAAARGH!"

He crumpled into a fetal ball on the ground. "We're done here," Shepard said. "Tali, where's that..."

She was interrupted by a sound of a rocket launcher. Only timely stomps from both she and Wrex, causing the concrete to leap up into a protective shell, kept them all from being exploded out of existence – Liara excluded.

"Geth?" Nilsdottir asked. Shepard dropped the barricade. And the hulking shapes on the catwalk were decidedly non-gethlike.

"...Krogan?" Shepard asked.

"Who cares? They're fighting with the geth!" Wrex pointed out, before firing an opening blast at one with his shotgun. "That means they're working for Saren!"

"Fair enough," Shepard emulated the krogan, and began to run in. Most species had a very specific doctrine about fighting krogan. Stay at range. Never let them close. If they got close, they would charge, and nobody wanted that. Humans, on the other hand, had a lot more to play with than just mass effect small-arms and explosives. And Shepard was no ordinary human. As one of them swung its head down to brain Shepard, she reached down, and tore up the ground, peeling it back and creating a nice wall for it to smash. The helmet cracked under the effort the krogan gave in its attempt to headbutt her, and she followed up by snapping the water out of the vents in her armor and twisting it around behind her, pressing it down against its own nature until it was as sharp as any blade. Then, with a twist, she sent it through the crack in that helmet, shearing off part of the krogan's head.

The impact of a meaty arm smashing her aside was an unwelcome reminder that Avatars are still human, and that krogan are very good at punching things. She was currently in the intersection of those two facts. She scrambled back as the krogan who'd socked her threw its rocket launcher contemptuously aside and advanced to a pounding of feet. With a thick hand, it closed on the jaw-line of Shepard's helmet and dragged her up and smashed her into a wall, head first. The impact was muted by the strong kinetic barriers of her armor, but she knew it wouldn't take too many more of them. She wasn't sure how many krogan there were, as she was somewhat certain she was seeing double from the hit.

"Squishy human. Dies like the rest," the voice of the krogan at Shepard's throat said, even though she didn't even have the luxury of seeing it sneer, for its head-concealing helm. Its other fist drew back, no doubt to punch through her if given proper force and effort.

Only it didn't. As that fist started forward, white light seemed to bathe it, and it was locked in place. Shepard glanced aside, to see Liara, one hand cast out, almost floating off of the ground with effort as she glowed with blue energy. Shepard wasn't going to let herself get killed by some random grunt. She fished the shotgun off of her back and pressed it to the krogan's helmeted temple, and then let a shot fly. The head jerked aside, but the grip didn't loosen. So Shepard pulled the trigger again. This time, she was sure that it went through, because the other side of the helmet popped open with a orange and red mist. But even though the krogan was now missing most of its brain, it still clung to Shepard, and as the white light faded its fist unsteadily rose again. So Shepard twisted the water from her armor, another blade, and slashed it through the arm holding her aloft. She dropped down and rolled aside, as the krogan dumbly punched where she'd been a moment or so earlier, causing the concrete to crack, before finally admitting that it was dead and falling face first into a pile of its own brain and orange blood.

Shepard took a moment to shake off the blow to her head. She looked up, and saw that Wrex was struggling with one of them in a grapple, while the rest of her squad was trying to deal with a third. Just four of them? Then again, like all things from Tuchanka, krogan were ridiculously hard to kill. Between Tali zapping the thing with its own armor's shield generators, al'Wahim and Garrus both putting shots through its helmet, and Nilsdottir keeping the thing from advancing on them with her shotgun, it left Liara standing shocked and confused, her gun twitching in her hands, eyes wide and terrified. Shepard pushed herself to her feet, twisted the lightning, and sent a bolt into that staggering krogan, frying its head inside its cracked helmet, and causing it to twitch itself to death on the ground. A few seconds later, there was a horrendous crunch from the grapple, and the orange armored figure was rolled off, showing Wrex rising to his feet. Whatever he'd done to kill that krogan wasn't obvious, but it was very, very effective, since it didn't offer so much as a twitch, where as all three of the others still looked like they were trying to keep killing even though their bodies had given up to death.

"That was... bracing," the Si Wongi said.

"Why didn't you shoot the krogan?" Shepard demanded of Liara. "You were just standing there."

"I... never fired my gun at a person before," Liara said, still pointing it at the krogan, finger on the trigger. Shepard slapped the gun from her hands. It flew out, which was enough for Shepard to palm her face. "I... I couldn't do it."

"T'Soni, you've got to get it through your head that there are people in this galaxy who want you to die. And if they try to kill you, you should kill them right back," Shepard said, giving her a prod in the forehead to drive home her point. "It's not all geth and wild beasts. Sometimes the enemy can do mathematics. Still needs to die. Am I clear?"

"Well..."

"AM. I. CLEAR?" Shepard demanded in her best drill instructor tone.

"Yes! Yes, Shepard," Liara said with a squeak in her voice. Big blue eyes flicked down to her gun. "...should I get my gun now?"

"What am I? Your mother?" Shepard shook her head. She turned to Tali, who at least had the decency to have a head about her. "Where's that transmitter Fai Dan was talking about?"

"_Just past where those krogan were,_" Tali said, gesturing across a bridge. Shepard nodded, and started to cross it. Tali kept pace, though. There was a click, and her helmet showed that Tali had entered a private line. "_This might not be my place, but did you really need to be so hard on Liara?_"

"You're right. This isn't your place," Shepard answered.

"What?" Garrus asked, from Tali's other side.

"Not you," Shepard said. Garrus glanced to Tali, and gave a turian 'ooooh' expression before returning to his own council.

"_She wasn't trained to fight people. You should give her a bit of slack,_" Tali said.

"Why?"

"_Because you were once like her, probably. Remember that. Everybody has to start somewhere_," Tali answered.

"I was _never_ like that," Shepard said coldly. Tali stared at her.

"_Then I feel very sorry for you,_" she quietly answered, before another click, and the private line terminated.

"Anything I should know about?" Garrus asked.

"No."

"_No._"

"Good," Wrex shouldered past them. "So this is the transmitter?" he asked, looking at the device which was standing in an otherwise undistinguished corner of a sewer line. "How should we take it out?"

Shepard answered that with a grenade. But she hesitated, paused, and turned to Garrus. She grabbed two grenades from his bandolier as well, primed all three, and idly chucked them all around the transmitter, and then sauntered around a corner, as the others did likewise, if not at a saunter.

The blast rocked through the sewers, causing grit to rain down from the ceiling. The structure held, though. If it could take fifty thousand years of tectonics, it could take a couple of grenades, she figured. "Any more signal coming from down here?" Shepard asked. Tali glanced at her Omni, then shook her head. "Good. Let's go back up top. I'm sick of sewers."

"If I never see another in my life, it shall be too soon," al'Wahim agreed.

* * *

When Shepard moved to talk to Fai Dan and the others, Liara peeled away toward the only other alien in the colony. The salarian was sitting on the ground, his legs tucked underneath him, with his large eyes closed. "Excuse me? Are you alright?" Liara asked.

The eyes slowly opened. "Oh? Yes. I am quite alright," the salarian said. "Forgive me for saying, but you look like you're not from here. How is that treating you?"

"I... guess it could be worse," Liara said. "What is a salarian doing on a human colony?"

"I am a dealer in cargo and wares," he said with a shrug. "New colonies often need provisions. What is your name, young miss?"

"Liara," she said, omitting her surname – as was Shepard's advice – since she both didn't know where Saren's minions were and didn't know what reaction she'd get to Mother's name.

"I am Gorot II Heranon Mal Dinest Got Inoste Ledra," Ledra said. "What brings you to Feros?"

"You seem awfully calm considering the danger you are in," Liara pointed out.

"I have decided to live with a philosophy that death will take me when it wills, and that fearing it is only a waste of time," Ledra said. "There's no point worrying about what I have no capacity to change."

"But you could change! I mean... you're a trader; why didn't you just get onto your ship and fly away when the geth attacked?" Liara asked, her eyebrows raising.

"True, but it would be... cowardly. I cannot make my brand if it's known that I will flee at the first sign of trouble, now can I?" Ledra asked.

Liara leaned back. Her mind twisted what it was getting into shapes it wasn't intended to be, but that was just a factor of her odd outlook on things. It had served her quite well in the past. Her ability to sift through minutia of data and finding the underlying root of it all was what lead her to her theory of the Reaper Cycle to begin with. And she could see a similar sort of distortion in her world right now.

"Why are you speaking so slowly?" Liara asked.

"The humans asked that I pace myself. They found it hard to understand me," Ledra answered smoothly.

"..." Liara continued to stare at him. He stared back placidly. Something was wrong, and it was weaving through the air like notes of a song forgotten during childhood. She couldn't point to any one thing, as was the case often in her life, but she knew it beyond all shadow of a doubt. "What did you come here to sell?"

"A few things colonists need. Also, small arms. I'm willing to offer them at cost, given the circumstances," Ledra said, pushing aside one crate brusquely and opening another, showing a small assortment of pistols and rifles. Liara's eyes brow didn't lower. Why would he be so careless with his own products? But the pistols looked poorer than the one she'd bought on the Citadel, so she shook her head.

"No, thank you," She said. "I... need to talk to Shepard now."

And she desperately hoped that Shepard wasn't going to dismiss her for being such a naïve idiot.

* * *

"We can't thank you enough for all you've done for us, Commander," Fai Dan said, leaning against the rock as the security guard painstakingly applied medigel to a burn on his neck. It was a lucky thing that the shot hadn't landed any closer, or it would have likely decapitated him. "Between the water, the power, that transmitter, and the food, we wouldn't have survived without your help."

Shepard nodded. "I also found a human down in the tunnels. He seemed... strange."

Fai Dan nodded. "That would be Nai. He's very sick."

"Seems a bit more than just sick to me," Garrus offered from her side, as he kept his attention ostensibly on his sniper rifle.

Fai Dan sighed at that. "He hasn't been the same since the attack. We tried to help him, but he won't listen to us. We can't help him if he doesn't listen!" he seemed quite upset by it.

"Excuse me, Shepard? I..." Liara spoke up.

"Not now, Liara," Shepard said, raising a hand toward her. "What about that transport up on the skyway?"

"Your quarian technician is a miracle worker," Fai Dan said, before breaking into a hiss of pain. "Careful."

"I'm _being_ careful," the guard said testily. And oddly enough, she was right. Shepard had seen all kids of field dressings on bad injuries; more than a few, she'd had to lay herself, on Torfan. This woman was applying it like an old hand. Shepard doubted that many would have had that much talent or coordination.

Fai Dan turned back to Shepard. "She's doing in minutes what we thought would take days. She's sent a message down. Says it'll be ready by the time you reach her."

"Half an hour and she's done? Quarians haven't lost their edge, it seems," Wrex said.

"Edge?" Shepard asked.

"A long story, from almost eight hundred years ago," Wrex said with a dismissive wave. "I'll tell it some other time, when we're not up to our quads in geth."

"Thank you, Commander, and good luck," Fai Dan said, with a sloppy but heartfelt salute. Shepard didn't return it, instead heading through the threshold and up the stairs. The others fell in behind her.

"Um... I was going to say..." Liara began again.

"Tali, what's the sit-rep on that transport?" Shepard asked, cutting her off again, although this time legitimately by accident.

"_The power source is running, barely, but running. I wouldn't run this thing longer than a few hours, but we shouldn't need it that long, right?_" Tali asked.

"No, we shouldn't. Barriers and weapons?"

"_Fully operational, but are they going to be useful? Anything big enough to need a cannon will be able to blow out the skyway from under us,_" Tali pointed out.

"Just tell me I have a cannon."

"_You have a cannon,_" Tali said. "_But I wouldn't... vre kasa mekt takano? KEELAH! Geth! There's geth coming in the gates!_"

Shepard's eyes went wide. "Tali's got geth! Double time up there!"

"You should fly up," al'Wahim pointed out, as Shepard pounded on the jury-rigged control for the elevator. "You could be there long before we."

"Yeah, I'll get right on that," Shepard said sharply. And stood there before the doors.

"...why are you still here, then?" al'Wahim asked.

"I..." Shepard began, but trailed off.

"Don't push her on the airbending. It's a sore spot. And by sore, I mean a bullet hole. In you," Nilsdottir pointed out, as the doors to the elevator slid open, and the squad piled in. Shepard pressed her eyes closed, and breathed through her nose. The smell. There was dust. There was grease and there was rust, but there was no blood. If she opened her eyes, there would be light, and there would be no blood. But she didn't open her eyes as the elevator ascended.

"Shepard, are you alright?" Liara asked, and Shepard could feel a hand on her shoulder. She batted it away.

"I'm fine. Focus on getting Tali out of that cog-pile," Shepard snapped. She didn't open her eyes to see the hurt expression on Liara's face. She had to focus herself. On not panicking.

Gods, could she smell blood? No. No there was no blood.

"Everybody know where they're going to be?" Garrus asked, and there was a click as his rifle extended itself fully.

"...I don't," Liara admitted.

"At the back," Nilsdottir said clearly. "You light 'em up, I knock 'em down."

"Oh. That will do nicely," she said.

"Try not to get killed. I'd hate to see another young asari reduced to a statistic," Wrex said sarcastically. Behind Shepard's back, Liara turned to him with a confounded expression on her face.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Just saying that 'stupid' is the leading killer of asari maidens," Wrex said matter-of-factly.

"It most certainly is not."

"How many asari live to see three hundred?" Wrex asked. "One in four? One in five? Ever wonder why that is?"

"I..." Liara said. "No, I hadn't."

"Give it some thought," Wrex said. Then, there was another clunk as his shotgun came online.

The doors slid open, and Shepard's eyes did as well.

No blood. No darkness. No bodies.

Well, _bodies_.

They were everywhere. Some piled atop each other in a heap. White fluid ran _like_ blood, but thankfully smelled more like anti-freeze, and had about the same viscosity. There had to be a hundred dead geth in this room. As well, four cowering technicians, and one blast-scorched APC. The turret turned toward her, pointing a huge cannon in Shepard's direction, and her rifle almost went to shoulder, bullets starting to fly, before she reined herself in and thought two things. One, bullets wouldn't make a lick of difference against something that thick-hided, and two, that was probably...

The hatch on the side opened, and the purple visor of their quarian technician peered out. "_Well, don't just stand there! The geth have more where those came from_," she urged, waving them in.

"Get back to the colony," Shepard said, pointing the techs back into the elevator. She then slid down the shallow incline to where the APC sat. She looked Tali up and down. "Did you do all of that yourself?"

"_Well, me and a VI I designed,_" she said. She opened her left hand, and an orange sphere seemed to pop out of her omnitool. "_Shepard, this is Chikkita vas Paus, mark one. Mark one, this is Shepard._"

"You name your VIs?" Shepard asked drolly.

"_We... aren't allowed to have pets on the flotilla. We barely have enough food for ourselves_," she said. She leaned forward. "_I've never tasted meat __in my life_."

"Well, one day, I'll have to get you some spoo-kabobs," Garrus said as he moved past Shepard and Tali both. "Getting some of 'the other blue meat' into you might work wonders on that constitution of yours."

"Quarians used to be some fairly consumate carnivores," Wrex added, as he too piled in.

"How would you know?" Nilsdottir asked, on his tail, figuratively speaking.

"Fought on Rannoch a long time ago."

"You've _been_ to Rannoch?" Liara asked, next in.

"The geth weren't _always_ there," Wrex muttered testily.

"Shepard?" the Si Wongi asked last.

"What what what?" Shepard demanded.

"Are we going or are we not?" the riflewoman asked calmly.

Shepard made a point not to glare. Neither the tech nor the marine deserved it. "We're going. I'm driving."

"Admiral Hackett made his intentions very clear," al'Wahim pointed out.

"He said I can't drive the _Mako_. We're not _in_ the Mako, now are we?" Shepard asked.

Shepard smirked as she kipped into the APC, and shouldered her way to the front. Al'Wahim palmed her face and took a seat, while Tali strapped herself in next to Garrus.

"Shepard's driving again? Spirits protect us all," Garrus muttered lowly.

"_I'm beginning to wonder who is more dangerous,_" Tali intimated to the turian. "_Saren and his Reapers, or Shepard behind the wheel._"

Wrex let out a single, bellowing laugh at that.

* * *

"Could you clarify something for me?" Liara began toward the krogan, who was quite lucky in that this human designed APC had allowances for krogan weight and bulk, thus had a seat.

"I could clarify a lot of things. You'll have to be a bit more specific," Wrex muttered.

"You keep saying that stupidity is killing asari. I find that insulting!"

"It's true," Wrex said with a shrug. "It's a matter of population control. Before the salarians, Tuchanka took care of that for my people. A thousand born in a day, and nine-hundred ninety-nine die in that same day, red in tooth and claw. It wasn't until our iron age that we even learned that we're effectively immortal. The asari, on the other hand, evolved on Thessia. That planet's about as mild as milkwater."

"I can tell you that Thessia is not as gentle as you assume. Many creatures harness biotic powers. It was only because our foremothers developed sapience that we could survive," Liara said.

"Every spacefaring species says the same thing," Wrex said. "Salarians do too, I'd bet. The fact is, you knew from the jump that you had a thousand years to live. But damned few of your kind ever reach that age, now do they?"

"Our Matriarchs are wise advisors, skilled in diplomacy and the bureaucracies of our democracies," Liara contended. Wrex just gave a laugh.

"You have it backwards, T'Soni. Wisdom isn't something you get by being old. The old are just as stupid as the young, most of the time. Rather, it's that being wise is what allows the young to _become_ old. And that wasn't my question. How many asari are born in the galaxy every day? And now, compare that to how many Matriarchs there are. Right. Now."

Liara leaned back, doing the math in her head. And like with Zhu's Hope, she saw something buried in the numbers she didn't expect. Until it was shown to her by an alien, and proven that it was not only obvious to everybody but her, but so simple it almost slapped her in the face. "...Maidens are getting themselves killed to keep our numbers down."

"And she finally understands," Wrex said. "I don't blame you for not believing it. You look like you were born old. Lucky for you, that means you'll probably see _your_ three hundredth birthday. But I've seen plenty of blue girls either picking fights they couldn't possibly win, getting horizontal with exactly the wrong kind of men – or women – or else just sucking in so much red sand that their lungs turn purple."

Jackie Nilsdottir nodded at that. "'S I see it, every species gets a stretch of time where they're expected to act like idiots. In humans, and krogan, it usually takes us about a decade of stupid decisions and self-destructiveness before we get our shit together. The problem with your kind is that you're idiots for damn on a century."

Liara stared at the scarred biotic sitting beside the krogan for a moment, unable to comprehend that she'd just been schooled on her own species by two of the least likely teachers; a krogan, and Nilsdottir. "I apologize. I just don't really understand how I didn't know this."

"Every species has its secrets," Wrex said. "Some they keep from themselves. Your kind have a year and a half gestation, but it takes sixty years for you to get from a squealing runt to somebody that looks like you. Asari are slow movers, in more ways than they'd like to admit."

"_I have to admit, Wrex, from all the things I heard about the krogan on the Flotilla, I expected you to be a lot less introspective_," Tali pointed out.

"'The young go out and look for fights to give themselves meaning'," Wrex quoted. "'The old look for meaning in their fights'. One of the last things my grandfather said to me before we parted ways," his head dipped. "I wish I'd listened better. Remembered more. I barely remember anything about that war on Rannoch. Only that quarians are remarkably hard to kill."

"_...what was it like? Rannoch, I mean?_" Tali asked, her hesitancy clear even to somebody as unschooled as Liara. Wrex turned toward her, and sighed.

"I don't remember. We're not like T'Soni. Krogan didn't evolve to live forever. Just a side effect of being tough enough to survive Tuchanka. We have to pick and choose what we remember. If we don't, the crush of it all drives you crazy; the bad kind of crazy where you think you're still sane. You lose track of your enemies and your friends. You forget the pains you've forgiven, and which you haven't. And you start to forget that you can't fight everybody. That you shouldn't have to." Wrex leaned back, his hump clacking against the plating behind them, as there was another crash, and a laugh from Shepard behind the wheel.

"Shepard, that's a..."

"I see it," Shepard answered.

"It's opening fire!" al'Wahim shouted.

"I see it!" Shepard answered, then another whump, as something else was run over.

Wrex turned back to Tali. "I remember... Grandfather, mostly. The things he said. At least I wasn't a complete idiot, to forget him. We were mercenaries in one of your civil wars, not long after you first reached the Citadel. I remember that... it was dry. Very dry. And I can remember... a smell. Something like fried fish, but sweeter, more sugary. I remember... golden eyes, and a devious little move which actually let the bastard break my spine with a large caliber bullet. I remember that one. But Rannoch?" he shook his head. "I can't tell you. It's all smoke and dust to me, now. It was a long, long time ago."

Tali seemed to wilt in her seat at that. "_Oh... Well, thank you for what you told me, at least. I didn't even know Rannoch was in living memory for anybody..._" she said, despondantly.

"If nothing else, you can remember from your cinema," Liara tried to point out helpfully. "There are still some of your old historical dramas on the extranet."

"_It's not the same. Never the same,_" Tali shook her head slowly. It was Liara's turn to wilt into her seat.

"How the hell old are you, anyway?" Jackie asked.

"Old enough to know not to look for fights, because the best fights will come looking for me," Wrex answered. He turned to face Tali. "You shouldn't go looking for fights you can't win, quarian. Take T'Soni's example to heart."

"What do you mean?" Tali asked.

"How many quarians in the galaxy? How many geth?" Wrex asked. He shook his head. "My people got wiped out because we were idiots. It'd be a shame if nobody could learn from our lesson."

Everybody was leaned into their restraints as the APC began a sharp climb. "Shepard, should we not stop and find the source of that signal?"

"It's not geth, so it's not my concern," Shepard said.

"...I feel as though we are missing something," the soldier-woman said with confusion.

"Would you rather we stop every time we pick up some strange radio? We've got a job to do, and Saren's gaining ground every time we stop moving. Focus on the bigger picture, soldier," Shepard said, followed by a moment of silence, then another bass whump, which almost threw Liara up off her seat, but for her restraints. "That one had some meat to it."

"It is fortunate that this is not the Mako. The engineering crew would quit in disgust rather than repair the harm you do to this poor vehicle."

"Duly noted," Shepard said. The ascent leveled off, and the thin stripe of light from the front of the vehicle became dark.

"Um... Shepard? Do you have a moment?"

"Driving through geth right now. Could you make it quick?" Shepard asked.

"...Did you notice anything strange about the people of Zhu's Hope?" Liara asked.

"I don't follow."

"They were shell-shocked and exhausted. Hell, if I was fighting geth as long as they were, I'd be on my back, too," Jackie pointed out.

"No, it was more than that," Liara said, trying to explain. "I spoke to a salarian there, and he was acting in a manner most unlike his species and his vocation."

"So you're spooked by a shell-shocked salarian, rather than shell-shocked humans?" Wrex asked.

"No, that is not what I am saying!" Liara said. "There is more going on in Zhu's Hope than is immediately apparent! I know this as much as I knew of the Reapers. I cannot point to any one thing – though Mister Nai should have been a serious clue – but I know that it is true! We are being lied to, on some level. And Zhu's Hope is in the center of it _somehow_."

"Come to think of it," Garrus said, his eyes narrowing, "I _did_ get some very dirty looks when I strayed a bit too close to that crashed freighter."

"Well, this is fascinating, but ultimately we'll have to store it in the 'sort it out later' bin," Shepard said, as the APC gave a final lurch, this one forward, as she brought it to an abrupt halt. "'Cause we're here."

"_The ExoGeni building_?" Tali asked. Shepard glanced over her shoulder.

"No. Rannoch. We drove through a Mass Relay. Didn't you notice?" she asked flatly.

Tali stared at Shepard. "_That wasn't funny._"

"She could work on her timing a bit," Jackie offered with a shrug. Then, she unbuckled herself. "Alright. Let's kick some synthetic ass!"

* * *

While Shepard was awarded the distinction of first blood, Tali had the dubious honor of the last. Mostly because the room was filled with Destroyers and Primes, and after Shepard just started hosing them down with lightning, they scattered. Almost like they were hiding. More likely preparing ambush, but between the engineer and an asari biotic who was quite willing to fight at her utmost against machines, they managed to swing the tussle, and then ride the geth into the ground.

It was an odd sensation, that Tali was getting used to being in fights.

"Board is clear, Shepard," Garrus said, as the Prime which had spilled its guts to Tali's 'omniblade' finished sparking. Shepard was already putting her rifle away, though, and heading up a ramp. Tali followed after, with the rest of the press.

"Really? An energy shield? What do they think I am?" Shepard asked, and then, she moved into a broad, powerful movement, her fists thrust outward.

And nothing happened. Shepard scowled at the archway, with its dim blue light filling it, and then made her motions once again. The humans all started looking at each other with confusion and alarm.

"What is happening, Shepard?" al'Wahim asked.

"Let me try it," Wrex said, giving Shepard a push aside. He gave a powerful stomp, and a likewise intimidating shove movement, but as with Shepard, nothing happened. He paused, and scratched at his skull plate. "Strange."

Liara walked up, and laid a hand to the wall, closing her eyes. After a moment, a pulse of blue light wafted out of her. The wall lit up a little bit, too. "I see. There is a small trace of Eezo in the structure of these walls," Liara said.

"What?" Shepard asked.

"Protheans imbue the structural elements of their facilities with Eezo. I am not sure why they do this, but it is a consistent feature of their architecture."

"It must make it impossible to earthbend, somehow," Shepard said.

"That makes no sense. Eezo's not a heavy element," Wrex countered.

"Yeah, well, we're all learning something today," Shepard muttered. She paused, rubbing at her mouth for a moment. "...they didn't want people bending down their buildings."

Liara turned to Shepard. "I suppose that is an astute observation. But it makes things slightly more difficult for us," she said. "We will need to find a way beyond this barrier somehow."

Tali nodded, and turned. The platform they were on had a number of doors, but most were either blown down showing rubble beyond, or else inoperable with anything less than a mining charge. One, though, caught Tali's attention. She broke away from the others, and brought up her Omni, linking it to the locking mechanism of this doorway.

The act of cracking a lock was so rote to Tali by this point, that she did it with less than half of a mind. The rest of it, though, wondered about other things. What her friends were doing right now. On their own Pilgrimages, probably, but she wagered that Kais was probably already hips deep in a salvaged freighter, probably creating ex nihilo an engine to drag it back to the Flotilla. Juna and Prazza were probably... well, now that she thought about it, they were probably just getting drunk on turian booze and spending the money they earned killing things. It was obvious that those two were destined for the marines, and what better way to earn money on Pilgrimage than mercenary work?

She gave herself a little shake of the head. Juna was always such a bully back then. Always teasing Tali. Calling her 'spoiled little rich girl'. Like wealth was even an object in the Flotilla these days. She slept in dormitories like everybody else. That she wore the Zorah Indigoes didn't make her any more privileged, any more arrogant, any more deserving. It took some doing to get Juna off of Tali's back. Mostly by pointing out that Tali could, and would, fry Juna's input systems if she didn't back off. Funny how a bully fell so quickly to a bit of numbness and deafness.

Prazza on the other hand was just an ass. He was a friend by circumstance only. He used to ape around the marines like a... well, a baby ape. If Tali had to listen to one more 'Reegar-fact', she was probably going to punch him. The Reegar family might well be noted fighters, but nobody could 'roundhouse kick a geth so hard its software decompiled'. There was a chime as her Omni informed her that the door was open. She pressed the glowing green pad, and the door, for all its long disuse, slid open with barely a hiss.

Before her, she could see a box, its top opened, and a brand new shotgun lying clear as day upon it. It looked very, very nice.

To her immediate right, she saw a Geth Armature, curled up on the floor.

"_NOPE_!" Tali said instantly, closing and relocking the door behind her, pausing only to use her Omni to chemically weld the door permanently closed. Then, she leaned her back against it. All eyes fell upon her. She pointed her thumb over her shoulder. "_...wrong door_."

"Shepard, I think we're going to have to go under," Nilsdottir said, lowering to a squat near a hole in the ground.

"This isn't a sewer, is it?" al'Wahim asked with distaste.

"Doesn't look it," Wrex said. He sniffed deeply. "Or smell it."

Tali walked to the hole, and as she did, she caught just a whisper of something in the distance. "_Did you all hear that?_" she asked.

"What? I did not hear anything," Liara said.

"Shut up, I hear it," Wrex overrode her. "Hmm. We're not alone."

Shepard nodded, then jumped down. The hole didn't plummet far, all things considered. Maybe three meters. The others had little recourse but to follow her, as she moved to what was... obviously a sewer. Well, storm drain, most likely.

"I thought you said–" Shepard began. She was cut off when a bang went off, and her shields fritzed blue.

"Oh! Oh gods, I'm so sorry," a panicked human woman said, immediately dropping the pistol and raising her hands. It didn't help that of those assembled, only Tali and Liara didn't have weapons now pointed at her. "I didn't mean to shoot you! I thought you were one of those geth, or their krogan!"

"Then you'd better work on your aim, because that kind of shooting won't save you if either of them find you. What are you doing here?" Shepard demanded.

"I... I thought Mother sent you to find me?"

"I don't know your mother," Shepard said, shaking her head. "Identify yourself."

"Oh. I am Lizbeth Bihou. I'm a researcher here. I... I think I'm one of the only humans left alive on this planet," she said, hugging her arms to her chest.

"There are plenty of us down in Zhu's Hope," Nilsdottir said, with a thumb cast over her shoulder. Even though Zhu's Hope was actually forward, down, and to Nilsdottir's left.

"That's... less than good news," Lizbeth said. "I stayed to back up the data, when the power went out and the geth started rampaging through..." she shook her head. "They're trying to cut off access to it."

"...it?" Shepard asked. Her tone made it very clear that she wasn't in a mood for ambiguous answers.

"I can't say for sure, but I think that the geth are here for the Thorian," Lizbeth said weakly. The group all looked amongst themselves.

"What's a _Thorian_?" Wrex asked bluntly. And with that, any realistic hope of somebody in-group knowing what this human was talking about vanished.

"We thought it was an indigenous life form, so ExoGeni was studying it. It turned out... it was something else," Lizbeth said with a shudder. She looked up at Shepard. "But it doesn't matter. I'm trapped down here, and so are you, unless we can do something to get those geth out of here!"

"_Commander_," Tali said. "_That kinetic barrier is probably powered by the geth frigate. The only way to bring it down would be to destroy that ship, or find some way to sever it from its connection._"

"Can we do the first one? It sounds a bit more interesting," Garrus asked with a smirk.

"Any plan that ends in a massive explosion is a good one," Wrex agreed.

"Man, I'm really growing to _love_ you guys," Nilsdottir said with a lopsided grin.

"Sorry. Not attracted to human women," Garrus said with a shrug. "It's the _knees_ that get me."

"_They __do__ bend in an odd direction_," Tali agreed with him.

"Everybody, shut the hell up," Shepard said quietly, then turned back to the frightened survivor. "Find a place to hide until that field is down. Do you have anything which will let me bypass internal security?"

"Yes! My keycard will let you through most of the doors and firewalls in our system. My password is Zutara4Life," she said.

"...You spend too much time reading crappy romance novels," Shepard said flatly, taking the keycard. "Stay down. I'll deal with the geth."

"_And their frigate_," Tali added. The group let Lizbeth retake her pistol, if only because they were fairly certain she couldn't kill any of them but accidentally with it, and moved down into the run-off which sluiced past shallow piles of rubble. Tali leaned into Garrus as they walked. "_So, __anything else__ you don't find appealing about human women?_" she asked with a chiding voice.

"Too many fingers, for one. Who needs five?" Garrus asked.

"Five is a perfectly acceptable number of digits for a hand," Liara said huffily.

"She's just sensitive because only her kind, the humans, and the batarians are pentidactyl. Everybody else is tridactyl, the way we're supposed to be," Wrex said with a smirk.

"Drell," Shepard said without turning back.

"Or tetradactyl," Wrex amended.

"Then there's that _hair_. It's got no solidity," Garrus continued.

At that, Tali glanced at him. "_So? __Turian__ females don't have a fringe either._"

"Children, _shut the hell up_," Shepard said sharply as she tore off a vent-cover with contemptuous ease. Tali let out an 'urp' and did as commanded. Garrus, on the other hand, chuckled and shook his head as he followed after. The ascent was almost immediate, as Shepard lead them through a hole in the 'vent' directly into the base of a stairwell which lead steadily, if dustily, upward.

"Do you think we are coming close to the..." Liara began quietly, leaning in toward the quarian. She was cut off by another voice coming from above.

"Stupid machine! Access encrypted files!" a gutteral roar came, the voice so clearly krogan that it brought a smirk of schadenfreude to Wrex's face. Shepard glanced back, probably to make sure nobody was going to ruin surprise by speaking, then moved up, rifle forward. "No, I don't want to review protocol! Tell me what I want to know or I'll blast your virtual ass into actual dust!"

"Hah! Dorgo's stuck on the loading screen," another obviously krogan voice piped up.

"Shut your eating-hole, whelp," the first voice said, followed by a meaty thwack. Tali was already silently configuring her Omni. Krogan tended to have stronger armor than shields. And while it was a horrible thing to contemplate, the best way to put a krogan down, was to cook them. Thus, her Omni started flash-forging a ball of aqueous white phosphorus.

"User not identified. To gain guest access to this network, please contact system administrator Jeong for a sector four clearance–" the roughly human-shaped VI offered in a neutral tone.

"STUPID MACHINE!" Dorgo roared, to the laughter of two other Krogan standing next to him.

"If there is no further pertinent business, please move aside, as a queue is forming for this terminal," the VI then offered. At that, Tali's heart missed a beat.

The clack of shotguns coming online was the song of Tali's dread. And when the krogan all turned, and saw the squad trying to ambush them, they wasted no time in pounding feet into a charge. This must be what it felt like to be salarian during the Krogan Rebellions. While the humans before her wasted no time opening fire, it was like trying to stop a storm by spitting at it.

The archeologist had a much better time of it. Even as Wrex was rushing to collide with the first of them, a motion of the asari's hand saw the krogan lifted from their feet, bathed in a soft blue glow, until they were grinding to a halt directly overhead, their backs pressed to the ceiling of the passage way. "There. Now we can interrogate them about," Liara began, but the first of the krogan pulled a shotgun from his back, and pointed it down. Tali would liked to have said that she was acting to preserve the life of the asari. Honestly, she just knew that if the krogan killed Liara, then he'd aim at Tali next. So she flicked out a hand, and the blob of extremely flammable volatiles was cast away from her wrist, and splashed over the exposed face and head of the krogan. Then, an instant later, it exploded into furious heat and fire, causing the krogan to scream in agony for the seconds it took to cook his brain.

The shock, the horror of it, caused Liara to falter, her Lift to fall short. The two other krogan, still wearing their helmets, landed on their chests, but pushed up and hurled themselves at the aliens again. This time, it was Nilsdottir who prevented oblivion, by stepping a pace further toward them, casting out her hands, and calling a blockade of blue light into being. Even with the Barrier between her and the krogan, it was not solid, nor stable. The impact of both of them drove the Barrier, and the biotic powering it, back a solid meter, before their momentum was expended. So too, though, was the Barrier. Nilsdottir staggered back, but was caught by Liara, as the other three focused their fire on the closer of the two. Unlike the largest, these seemed much more poorly armored, and the shots burst right through him.

That still left one more-or-less unimpeded, and with a howl, he started pounding toward the ranks once again. He was cut short by a shotgun to the face by another krogan. It caused him to careen into a wall, whereupon Wrex grabbed the smaller krogan and slammed a foot down onto a knee, before firing two more shots at point blank to the chest. The other krogan rose its own weapon toward Wrex, so Tali's fingers became a blur as she activated a weapon jammer program, and then sent it into that krogan's gun. It must have been a terrible weapon, because when the krogan pulled the trigger, part of it exploded, a chunk the size of her finger slamming back through its eye.

Wrex wasn't done, though. While the others continued firing at the first incoming krogan even as it slumped down in its death, Wrex was firing more shots into the increasingly perforated chest of the other, before striding over it, and tearing the helm from its face. One fist was raised high, no doubt to smash its skull-plate through its spine.

And Wrex hesitated.

The guns went silent, and Wrex stared down. "Is that all of them?" Shepard asked.

"I'm not getting any more life-signs in this building, Shepard," Alenko's voice came from the Normandy. "Quite a few geth readings, though."

Shepard nodded, then pointed up the stairs. Garrus took that point and played look out. Tali stayed at the back, near the krogan, and by the pale-faced Liara.

"_Are you alright?_" Tali asked.

"...That was horrible," Liara said, her eyes flitting to Dorgo, before she forcefully swallowed. "Was that... necessary?"

"_He was going to shoot us. I... I guess I did what needed to be done,_" Tali said. And even still, her words sounded both hollow and false to her ears.

Suddenly, she felt a lot dirtier inside her suit.

"Welcome back, Lizbeth Bihou. Exogeni corporation would like to remind you that all discharge of firearms on company property is strictly forbidden. Please contact security at your earliest convenience."

"You think I'm..." Shepard cut herself off. Come on, Shepard. You only have one shot at this, Tali thought. "Access the data the krogan was trying to retrieve."

Nailed it.

"Security clearance accepted. Accessing. Buffering. Buffering," Tali rolled her eyes. Whoever designed this VI obviously didn't know about the fine-tuning and system optimization that they needed. They _should_ be about as responsive as a conversation. "The previous user was trying to access information on Species Twenty-Seven. Colloquially called, 'the Thorian'. There has been no new data on S37 since last terminal access. Accessing. Contact lost with surveillance equipment at SITE: Zhu's Hope."

"What does Zhu's Hope have to do with the Thorian?" Shepard asked.

"S37 is located in the substructure underlying the Zhu's Hope colony area. Do you require supplemental data?"

"Damn right I do," Shepard said, her arms crossing before her chest.

"S37 is a plant-based life-form exhibiting behavior and sentience unique amongst local flora. Addendum. S37 is not a plant. Addendum. Shamans have been called from ExoGeni Headquarters to the Zhu's Hope site, with a recommendation of full biological containment procedures."

"_Sloppy VI work_," Tali muttered under her breath.

"Why was biological containment requested?" Shepard asked.

"And why shamans?" Garrus asked over his shoulder.

"S37 possess the capacity to emit psychoreactive spores, which, when metabolized through the intestines or lungs, influence and eventually assume control of subject specimens..." the VI said pleasantly.

"I don't like where this is going," Nilsdottir said.

"...including humans," the VI finished. "At the time when the sensors lost contact, an estimated eighty five percent of SITE: Zhu's Hope was infested with the spores of S37."

Shepard stared for a moment, her face pale. Then, it started going very, very red. "So Exogeni just sold those civilians into slavery to a plant?" she asked, her teeth clenched very tight.

"It was deemed the most cost-effective way to survey the potential of Species Thirty Seven," the VI said without guilt or shame. Because it was a terrible VI.

"That is what I have been trying to tell you!" Liara said. "I knew that the people of the colony were behaving oddly!"

Shepard turned back to her. "I take it that's your version of an 'I told you so'?"

"I tried to warn you!" Liara said. "_You_ kept interrupting me!"

"Whatever. VI, who is in charge of the S37 project?"

"Site Administrator Jeong is acting director of this site," the VI offered.

"When I find this bastard, I'm going to have a few words with him," Shepard promised grimly, before raising a finger to her ear. "Joker? You need to... Joker? Joker!" she shook her head. "That geth field must be scrambling our signal. We need to bring it down."

"_Then we need to bring down the geth ship_," Tali said with a nod. She pointed through the walls, operating on a sense which was hard to qualify, but almost every quarian shared to some degree. "_The drive core is somewhere that way, so we need to cut through the building._"

Al'Wahim gave a confused glance at Tali. "How could you know the location of that ship through all this?"

"It's a quarian thing," Garrus offered, which headed off questions. "Why shamans?"

"I am sorry, you are not authorized to access this information," the VI pointed out.

"Why shamans," Shepard repeated.

"Data on site management is restricted to personnel with clearance level SVARGA and higher. Please contact system administrators if you would like a security exemption," the VI offered.

Shepard stared at the VI for a moment, then turned her back to it. "Alright. Assumptions at this point? Zhu's Hope has been taken over by the Thorian. The Thorian is probably a spirit, either manifest or not. We've got geth to kill. Any other issues?"

"Shepard, look at this," Wrex said, his red eyes as hard as nails. Shepard leaned past the others between human and krogan, and moved to Wrex's side. Wrex hoist the dead krogan off of the ground and slammed him up against the wall, making sure that the head was in clear view. "What do you see?"

Shepard glanced at Wrex, but then turned her attention to the krogan. To Tali's eyes, it just looked like any other krogan. But Shepard's eyes went wide as she spotted something Tali obviously missed. She ran fingers along its skull plate... wait, not a skull plate. They were ridges, separated by rough orange flesh. "This one's young. Very young. Thirty, maybe?" Shepard asked.

Wrex nodded, and let it slump. He then tore the helmet off the other one, and showed the same ridge-head profile on that one. His lips skinned back, and then he turned and stomped the burnt face of Dorgo into burnt paste. "DAMN THAT SAREN!" Wrex roared, before turning and punching the wall. Even though his 'earthbending' wasn't working, it still managed to make a hole, just one the size of Wrex's fist. "First his species neuters us, now he comes and steals _our_ children to fight _his_ war?" Wrex was almost panting with wrath. "No. This will not stand. I'm not going to rest until that son-of-a-bitch is a blue stain. I swear on Grandfather's _grave_!"

"He'll get what's owed him, I can promise you that," Shepard said solemnly. "Now come on. One step at a time. If we're going to kill Saren, we need to get to him first. That means figuring out what he wants, and that in turn means killing some geth."

"Good. Right now, I really need to kill something," Wrex muttered, pausing only briefly to spit into the ruined skull of the late Dorgo. Tali turned to Liara.

"I barely understand humans at the best of times. Krogan, even less so," Liara admitted.

"Great," Tali muttered flatly.

Tali looked askance at the structure which looked to have been plunked down onto the floor. Well, they all looked askance at it, Garrus included, but Tali seemed to have a different amount of 'askanceness' about her. The turian just assumed that it was 'geth technology'. What was going through the young quarian's mind eluded him.

"Funny thing is, you can blow their legs off and they still try to kill ya," Nilsdottir said, manually slathering on some medigel where one of the geth managed to get a shot through her biotic barriers. "Guess I learned something today."

"They're not alive. Why would they care if they have legs?" Garrus pointed out.

"That's what I figured!"

Garrus then turned his attention to the other thing in the room. It was roughly the size of a tree, and slammed through the concrete and metal with equal disdain. A drab purple, the metal of it opened near its tip to allow out wires, of which, one connected to the odd objet-d'art that Tali was so baffled by. "That things in there fairly solid, Commander," Garrus said. "It'd take enough explosives to tear out a quarter of the building to pry it loose."

"Then we find one a little more forgiving," al'Wahim said. "I have seen the size of that ship. Would but one claw fail, the ship would fall."

"Lead the way, Chief," Shepard said with a nod. Garrus, though, trailed a bit, tapping Tali on the shoulder.

"Something on your mind?" he asked.

"I've never known geth to do anything like this. This is almost like some sort of altar," she said with concern in her voice. "Do... you think that this might be Saren or his Reapers that they're praying to?"

"Well, from what I've heard of Shepard's vision from Liara, these Reapers are supposed to be the most destructive, powerful synthetics known to history. If the geth are going to worship anything, it'd be then, I figure," Garrus said. "Come on. We can't let the Levo's have all the fun."

"The what?"

"...the fore-knees? I can't call them the five-fingers, since that excludes Wrex," Garrus said.

"_Are you seriously trying to nickname us_?" Tali asked, though she started walking.

"Somebody has to. Shepard's not taking any initiative on that front."

"_Well, obviously, we are a 'flock'_," she said with a finger raised.

"How do you figure?" Garrus asked.

"_Who do we follow_?"

"...I still don't get it," Garrus said.

_"...Shepard. Shepherd_."

"Is that like a spoo-whacker?" Garrus asked.

_"I have no idea. Only that there used to be flocks of Sheps on Rannoch. And that we herded them_," Tali shook her head. "_Anyway. We should – Shepard, I'm getting some heavy geth readings one floor up_!"

That pulled Garrus back into business-mode. Somebody had to be. Tali stepped aside so that Garrus could move back to the front, and he took a spot beside Shepard. Wrex seemed eager to just go in stomping. Garrus had no desire to be the one to stand in the way of such a spectacle. "What's the plan?" Nilsdottir asked.

Garrus peeked over. There were almost a dozen down there. And a Prime. At least it wasn't a Juggernaut. They were all clustered together near one side of the room, though. "Simple plan. We bottle them at the rubble and then give them a mad minute. Anything still standing gets Nilsdottir'd," Shepard answered. "All clear?"

"What is a 'mad minute'?" Liara asked quietly.

"Fire 'till your gun overheats, then switch to another one, and repeat," Shepard said.

"...I only have one gun," Liara pointed out.

"Then space out your shots," Garrus offered. Quietly, they slipped into the back side of the room. One of the two claws in the chamber had sent a significant portion of the floor above down into the room, creating a streak of rubble which divided the room roughly in half. And with the quiet motions of organics, that streak became a bunker.

Garrus glanced aside, and Shepard held three fingers behind her. Then two. One.

Garrus rolled over, heaving his rifle over the edge, and took a shot. The impact was brutal, and even though the shield took the blow, it cast the geth from its feet. Garrus turned his aim to the one next to it, and didn't bother scoping on the head, just giving a body-shot. With that second shot, the gun screamed and wailed, its components glowing orange. He dropped it at his side and pulled the battle rifle from his back, before opening up with that, too.

Down the line, the same sight repeated itself. Rifles were exchanged for shotguns. Shotguns were exchanged for pistols. Pistols returned to rifles, as the rifles cooled off enough to fire. And even though the fire going across the room was absolutely obliterating, the geth weren't going down! Their shields were holding against the onslaught. So Tali was the first to cast out an omnitool, and her viral attack caused a geth to explode into a lattice of lightning as its shield generators burst. The shock bathed those near it, but only it itself was torn to shreds by fire.

"They're boosting their shields somehow!" Shepard shouted. "Garrus, Tali! Pop 'em!"

"You bet, Commander," Garrus said, turning on his own Omni, and since he'd been killing geth all day, of course the program was already loaded.

Shepard, too, entered the fray, but doing so with lightning from her fingertips. It was the most impressive, by far, but had the side effect of making her vulnerable. So when the Prime wanted a target, it found one. With a grinding howl, the Prime raised its cannon up and blasted out a red ray of death at the Avatar. And the Avatar was caught square in the chest by the attack. The shields burst almost instantly, but Shepard was already being hurled back and down from the impact of it, so it did little but melt a portion of the topmost plating, before she landed roughly on the ground.

"Shepard's down!" Garrus shouted, continuing to pop shields.

"I've got her," Liara said, sliding off of her place to kneel at the Commander's side, her Omni glowing orange.

"We need to distract that Prime. We're sitting ducks up here!" Garrus shouted.

"What is a 'duck'?" al'Wahim asked.

"Dinner, usually," Garrus pointed out, before chasing a pop with some fire. Tali, though, leaned a little bit higher, so that she was probably visible above the rubble. The Prime turned its weapon toward her, next. She cast out a hand, though, and as she did, orange light seemed to coalesce mid-air into a spherical... thing. One which landed behind the Prime, and started to pelt the machine with electric shocks, causing the death-ray to jerk high, melting the ceiling behind them rather than a young quarian's upper torso.

"Go for the optics, Chikkita! Go for the optics!" Tali shouted, even as she laid in with the shotgun once more. And the – drone, he figured – did as she commanded, rising up and taking a spot before the Prime which allowed no vision for it. The other Geth were all down.

"Time?" Nilsdottir asked?

"Time," Wrex agreed. And then, the two of them mounted the rubble, and charged. One did so with a howl of blood-rage. The other did so with a flash of blue light, and a thud of displacing air. Garrus didn't need to watch what came next. He'd seen it an hour ago.

Garrus slid down to where Liara was dealing with Shepard. "Is she alright?" Garrus asked.

"She will be fine. She was simply hit hard. Give her a moment," Liara said. "The medigel is working."

"Good. Can't find Saren if we don't have the 'magical keys' stashed inside her brain," Garrus said.

"Do you ever abandon sarcasm?" Liara asked.

"I wasn't being sarcastic," Garrus said flatly.

Shepard's back flexed, and her eyes flew open, even as they were rolled back. "...you traitor!" she shouted with absolute bile even as her torso levered upright. Her eyes rolled down, and she looked positively ill. "Oooh. That wasn't pleasant."

"You should rest. You took a bad hit, and a bad fall after it," Liara said.

"Is Saren dead?"

"What? No, but..." Liara began.

"Then I can rest when I'm a corpse," she said, before wincingly pulling herself to her feet. "What happened to the Prime?" the sound of a moderate explosion answered that question, followed by a large, mechanical, tridactyl hand landing amongst the detritus. "Ask a stupid question," Shepard muttered.

"You are well?" al'Wahim asked, staggering back over the rubble. "Good. Then I have no call to open my neck for family shame."

"Because that'd be just awful," Wrex's voice came from the other side.

"Ignore the krogan," Garrus said. He pointed up to the claw embedded in the stone. "We need to snap that off. Do you have the high-explosives?"

"What do you take me for? A fighter-pilot? Of course I do," al'Wahim said with a roll of the eyes. She pulled a satchel charge from her thigh and mounted a defunct computer to set it into place. "When this is prepared, we should move into the next room. It has a way back down, and will be clear from the blast."

"You heard the lady. Clear the rubble," Shepard said, rising to her feet. She idly tried 'bending' the stone away, but like the rest in this building, it wouldn't budge. Thus, Garrus had to help pull her over the summit. The other side of the room, after the ruins of the Prime and the corpses of the geth, was the other claw and a panel of some sort. Garrus didn't bother looking more closely. Safety from the blast lay just ahead.

"Are you sure you're alright, Commander?" Garrus asked.

"Stop worrying about me. I've had worse," Shepard said, even though the streak across her armor made it clear how close she'd come to becoming an ex-Commander.

"Yeah, she really has. You shoulda' seen her on Torfan," Nilsdottir said. And for a wonder, it wasn't with prodding humor. It was dead serious.

Garrus' question to that point was cut off when the riflewoman entered the room at a jog. "Eight seconds," al'Wahim said, as she shut the door behind her.

"Cutting it a little close," Wrex noted.

"No use wasting time," al'Wahim answered.

And right around there, there was a great thud, which caused Liara and Tali to jump. The others, not so much. "That should do it," Shepard said, and then she opened the door.

There was smoke clearing, but the claw was still in place.

"Oh, that could be a problem," Garrus said. "Any more charges?"

"One. And if that wasn't enough, I doubt this will be," the dark human said grimly.

"We need to find some other way to dislodge this thing," Shepard said. "Tali, can you figure out some way to jury-rig an explosive?"

"Of course, but the yield would need to be catastrophic. And that might destroy what we're looking for," Tali said. Garrus glanced at Liara, who was glancing to the nearer claw, and then to the panel.

"Well, we can't let the geth stay here. The Thorian might have Zhu's Hope, but they're equally dead if the machines put bullets in 'em," Shepard pointed out.

"I say we storm the ship, plant the bomb in its power source, and blow it on the way out," Wrex said. Ah, the typical lack of krogan subtlety.

Garrus, though, turned back to Liara. "What's caught your eye?" he asked.

"Tali, what does this panel do?" she asked. The quarian looked over and waved her Omni at it.

"It's a hydraulic control panel," she said, dismissing the notion.

"It is connected to that shutter," Liara said, pointing at... the slide of metal under the nearer claw. Tali broke off from her argument with Shepard to face Liara, then, the panel. Then, a glance to the shutter.

"By the ancestors, that might work," Tali said in surprise. At that point, Shepard broke off and glanced at Tali.

"What might work?" Shepard asked.

Tali didn't answer her. Instead, she moved to the controls and began to manipulate them. "_I'm overriding its failsafe system, preventing it from recognizing an obstacle in its path. And with sufficiently high pressure..._" she rambled, before slapping the last button with a modicum of flare. When she did, there was a great hiss, and then a thunk. Following that, the panel which was under the nearest claw slammed upward, pausing for a moment against the purple metal with a whine of protesting metal. But the geth ship was no match for Prothean technology, even such a basic form of it. The shutter finally crushed its way through, and snapped the claw off, whence it fell to the ground.

It wasn't the only thing which fell.

Garrus kipped over the rubble to look out of the hole the other claw left behind as it slid out with the rumble and shriek of crumbling concrete and protesting metal. As he watched, the geth ship tilted back off of the building, tumbling freely until it landed on its spine on the ground. "Well, that was..." he was about to say anticlimactic, but the ship chose that moment to detonate. "Never mind."

"_The barrier is down, Commander,_" Tali said, her tool providing illumination for the few seconds it took for the building's back-up generators to come online. That they even worked at this point was a small miracle. "_Shepard, there's still data in the networks. The geth didn't delete it all, which means they probably didn't decode it. Do you mind if I data-mine it?_"

"Do it," Shepard said. "Even assuming Saren was after the Thorian, that data would probably tell me why."

"I think it might be wise to get you to a proper sick-bay," Liara said. Fretted, almost. "People usually _die_ when they are hit like that."

"Not dead yet," Shepard muttered. She didn't look quite so steady on her footing,though. Not quite as ground-eating of pace. "Let's get back to Lizbeth. That girl's got some 'splaining to do."

"Ooh, I call blow torch!" Nilsdottir piped up.

"Damn it, I wanted the blow torch," Wrex groused.

"You seem in a fairer mood," Asha noted.

"I defy you to find a krogan who doesn't enjoy a good explosion," Wrex said.

* * *

Lizbeth waited, the gun practically quaking in her hands. She'd only ever fired one of these things once before, years ago during a pub-crawl in university. She'd lost the bet involved in that, which, over the course of that night, cost her a few other things as well. She only wished she'd drunk enough to black out and forget it all. Notably, three shots, drunkenly offered, did not give her much experience with firearms.

She managed to avoid releasing a peep of panic, but only just, as she heard heavy footfalls approaching her. Under her breath, she offered possibly blasphemous, but utterly heartfelt prayers to every god she knew of from Earth's history, both known and unconfirmed. She even threw in off-hand ones to Yue, to Agni, and the Si Wongi Ennead by the time those footfalls came close.

"Yup. Barrier's down," a krogan voice said. She shivvered slightly. There had been krogan with the geth.

"But where's Lizbeth?" the distinctive, tremulous tone of a turian asked on the heels of the first. That caused Lizbeth a moment of utter, absolute relief. She rose, her hands up, her gun pointed at the cieling.

"I'm right here. Thank the gods, you made it out safely," she began, but the commander, who now sported a black streak up her green armor, looked about ready to chew bolts. She strode forward, and Lizbeth shrunk inward as she looked ready to hit her. Instead, the marine grabbed onto the back of Lizbeth's collar and started dragging her, stumblingly until her feet gave out completely, and then continuing all the same, toward the loading bay.

"I don't like being lied to," the Commander said harshly. "You said you knew didn't know about the Thorian. Turns out, you're in charge of researching it."

"No! It's not what it looks like!" Lizbeth pleaded. "They said they'd throw me into the sewers under the colony unless I got in line. I'd be one of _them_!"

"So you're a self-interested slaver rather than a profit-motivated one," the angry woman said, before slamming Lizbeth against the side of an APC. Now that Lizbeth wasn't struggling against her own neckline, she could see that the marine's squad was arrayed behind her. The quarian and the asari were to her left, the others, all to her right. And then, the marine pulled out her pistol and pressed it to Lizbeth's face. "I have only one thing I do to slavers."

"Shepard, don't!" the asari shouted.

"She's just as bad as the rest of them," Shepard snapped.

"Shepard? Avatar Shepard?" Lizbeth asked. Shepard turned eyes that burned like the fires of an Easterner's vision of hell upon her. "Oh, spirits forgive me."

"They'd better, because I won't," Shepard said.

"Shepard, you don't want to do this," the turian said, slowly circling the Avatar, his voice calming. "She's just a bystander in this."

"She was knowingly selling human lives to that... thing!" Shepard shouted.

"Then take it out on the higher ups," the turian said. "You can't blame a war on the soldiers fighting it. She's just a soldier in a war she didn't start, and had no say on who it was fighting. Blame her commander. Blame Jeong."

Shepard glared, her attention turning from the turian to Lizbeth, and Lizbeth was very glad that she'd gone to the bathroom, since this would have emptied her without any doubt. Then, with a sigh, and those green eyes going from outright flame to simmering embers, the gun stopped pressing into her forehead. "You're right," Shepard said. "She had no choice here. Where is the Thorian hiding?"

"The infested colonists hid the entrance to the underground beneath a Kowloon Freighter that was nearby," Lizbeth said.

"Do you know why Saren would be interested in this thing?" the asari asked.

"I... well... Beyond its unusual mind control abilities, I can't say. It _is_ a manifested spirit, so unless he either is or had access to a shaman, I..." She shook her head, coming up empty. "I'm sorry, I don't know."

"We should get moving," the Avatar said, her tone an obvious dismissal.

"You're just going to leave her here?" the Si Wongi woman asked with confusion.

"Please, take me with you. I need to... clean up the mess I helped make," Lizbeth said.

Shepard glared at her again, and Lizbeth flinched back. She had a very powerful glare. "Get in. I'm driving."

The Si Wongi soldier let out a sigh at that, and entered into the APC right on the Avatar's heels. It was the asari woman who came to Lizbeth's side first. "Are you alright?" she asked, her voice bright, but carrying a tone of breathless eagerness.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean for any of this to happen," Lizbeth said.

"I didn't know that Shepard could be so... rash," the asari said, glancing to the other, paler human who wasn't wearing armor.

"She's been that way as long as _I've_ known her," the scarred woman said. "My advice, don't piss her off anymore, unless you want a new hole in your head."

"I have no intention to," Lizbeth said. She turned to the asari, who looked to the door of the APC with a certain amount of trepidation. "What's wrong? Everybody seems very nervous."

"_Shepard_ is driving," the asari said.

"And that makes you concerned?"

"Extremely."

* * *

**Chapter seven, or, if I was one for Victorian style double nomenclature (which I absolutely am), "the chapter in which Wrex talks a lot". I always liked the character of Wrex, because you always knew exactly where you stood with him. If you dealt with him honestly, he returned the favor in equal measure. He greets you with open arms when the rest of the galaxy regards you with suspicion and doubt. But when you betray him, he gives no shits and tries to blow your head off with a shotgun on the Citadel. He's honest, and that's refreshing. He's also old, and has a lot of stories. I have leveraged both.**

**Shepard is, at this point in the story, firmly Renegade, as one could tell by her handling of Lizbeth. She's got three angels on her shoulder (Liara, Tali, and Kaiden), but the biggest problem is that all the others are devils, and standing on her _other_ shoulder. The benefits of Liara accidentally peeing part of her soul into Shepard's are already being felt, in that she's being more open and outgoing than she's been in years. Pity the steps are so small.**

**The biggest change to a character (besides loopy-Liara, who is simply transformed into uber-lateral-thinker Liara) has to be Jack, but the change is a simple flip when you look at it from the proper perspective. Subject Zero's anger was born out of fear. She killed because she thought it was the only way she'd ever be safe. Nilsdottir, on the other hand, has fear born out of her anger. When she fights, she _likes_ it. Too much. And that scares her in a way that she doesn't know how to express. It's the source of every problem she's ever been in, that once you set her off, she just can't stop herself. She's in for a rough time once the 'Cerberus arc' hits. Note that Cerberus will not be called Cerberus. Does Avatar Earth have Greeks? Didn't think so.**

_Leave a Review_


	8. Feros, Part 2: the Old Growth

"Stop! Stop the vehicle!"

"Yes, for the love of every god above, please stop!"

"You people are too soft. I've had worse."

"You have had eight hundred years. I might not live to see two hundred at this rate!"

"Man, I haven't had a ride like this since Basic!"

"_Keelah, __please__ don't let me vomit inside my helmet..._"

"Come on! Give 'er some gas!"

"Shepard! Avatar! Please, pull over," Lizbeth's voice rose above the clamor and the carnage – and of both, there was much. "I can hear Mother on the Short Wave!"

"What?" Shepard looked back, which meant, to the terror of those riding with her, that she was barrelling forward blindly.

"The radio is working! I need to get out!"

"With all due respect, Avatar," al'Wahim said, before cutting herself off by reaching over and slamming the emergency brake, causing the APC to fishtail wildly, coming to a halt facing the direction it had come from. The Si Wongi woman nodded to the scientist. "If you would leave, best to do so swiftly."

"Thank you," the young woman said. Liara, on the other hand, kept her hands gripped tight on the seat, as though it was the only thing in the galaxy which would keep her safe. Since Shepard was driving, it definitely wasn't. She had already bounded out of the APC by the time Shepard shook her head and got her bearings back into place.

"We should go with her. Make sure there's no geth lurking about," Garrus offered, ducking out at her tail. The others gave half-voiced agreement before vacating the APC with all due haste. After the hellish ride back – which for reasons the asari couldn't completely understand _had_ to go _through_ the last small clusters of geth platforms that she'd missed on her way up the skyway – she needed a moment to collect herself as well.

"...what the hell just happened?" Shepard asked, noting that it was now only she and Liara in the vehicle.

"I believe they found where the young woman's mother, and others, had taken refuge," Liara offered.

"I mean, why did my entire squad just circumvent my orders?"

"Because they were unreasonable?" she said.

"Bunch of ingrates..."

"I was referring to your orders," Liara said. Shepard leveled a glare at her. "Shepard... I think you need to talk about this anger you possess."

"I don't need to talk about anything," Shepard said.

"I think you do," she said. "My first major was in sociology, which meant I took a great many psychology courses. I didn't do very _well_ in them, but it is obvious even to me that there is something which is negatively affecting your ability to do your job."

"Yes, my squad doesn't listen to me," Shepard said rancorously.

"They don't listen to you because they don't believe in you, nor trust you," Liara unpackaged. "You are not inspiring faith in them. I know you can do better, but..."

"Oh, what? Are you a motivational speaker, now?" Shepard asked.

"You are deflecting with anger and sarcasm, just as you always do!" Liara blurted out. "What is so wrong with actually letting the people who work with you know that you're a sapient being, with desires beyond what you will be shooting next?"

"Who says I have?" Shepard asked. "I joined the military for one reason; to kill batarians. Everything else in my life is secondary to that."

"You cannot really believe that," Liara asked, mildly horrified.

"They deserve it," Shepard said grimly.

"Shepard, you are better than this," Liara said. Shepard looked at her, her gaze somewhere between angry and impatient. "You know that there must be more to your life. There is something which drives you besides hatred. You have felt it before. I know that you will feel it again."

"Hatred keeps me warm at night," Shepard said. "It might not be much, but it's mine."

"You shouldn't have to live like that," Liara said earnestly. Then, she hesitated lightly. "...maybe that's why you can't 'airbend'. Because you can't let go of the hate?"

"What would _you_ know about airbending?" Shepard demanded.

"Apparently just as much as you do!" Liara said, before her hands flew to her mouth. Had she really just said that?

Shepard leaned back. "Oh-ho. So you have got a spine. And a mouth which doesn't know when to shut up."

"You know that I am right, even if you are not going to admit it," Liara said. "You might not be thinking rationally now, with the adrenaline, but some part of you knows that this cannot continue, not indefinitely."

Shepard's defiant glare started to cool, and then it turned away. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"If nothing else, you can talk to people. Talk to your friends. Talk to Jackie or Asha. Or me. We are willing to listen."

"You might not like what you hear," Shepard said simply.

"That is a risk we are going to have to take," Liara said. She pushed up from her seat. "I am going to see how the others are doing. Will you come?"

Shepard looked, for a moment, like she was going to decline out of stubbornness, but after a glance to the controls, and then to the rest of the Skyway beyond, she rolled her eyes and heaved her way out of her seat. "Fine. Let's meet the parents."

"I am certain they will be pleased to meet you," Liara said. The two women (one of whom was verifiably female as the other didn't necessarily have a gender) exited the vehicle, but Liara was quick to come to a halt at the head of a ramp which dipped down under the rubble and concrete of the Skyway that they had temporarily halted at. Of course, the rubble continued up until it formed an ad-hoc roof over their head, so that wasn't the biggest draw – Stop looking at the architecture, Liara, she chastised herself. The archeologist in her died hard. No, the issue at hand was why the group were gathered near the foot of that ramp.

"You can't do this!" a voice shouted from down below, it sounding like an older version of Lizbeth's.

"Everybody shut up! Let me think!" A man shouted. Liara stooped down, and could see feet pacing back and forth. Ostensibly, those feet would be connected to somebody who needed time to think.

"You won't get away with this," that possibly-Lizbeth's-Mother pointed out.

"What's going on?" Lizbeth quietly asked Garrus, but it was obviously loud enough to catch the attention of pacing feet, because they turned toward her.

"Come out! Come out where I can see you!" he shouted. Lizbeth rose, hands up, and walked forward from the ramp. "All of you! I know there's more of you back there!"

"So much for stealth and surprise," Garrus muttered, before he and the other rose up and walked forward.

"I wasn't aware I was supposed to be sneaking," Wrex mentioned flatly.

Liara glanced back. "I think we should probably go down with the others," she said. Shepard's roll of the eyes said, even to somebody as un-versed as Liara, 'whatever'. They were the last ones down into the mixture of those at the foot of the ramp. The pacing feet belonged to an unshaven man with a very pinched face. He looked like he hadn't slept well in a while.

"Lizbeth!" the older, grey haired woman shouted.

"Get her out of here!" the man snapped, pointing at the older woman.

"Don't you touch her you son of a bitch!" Lizbeth shouted, only to be caught by one of the black-armored guards.

"What is going on here?" Shepard asked as she strode down the ramp, her eyes burning holes in everybody who got in their way. Not literally of course, because they weren't laser beams. Which got Liara thinking about cartoons and the Adventures of Justicar Jannich, which in turn got her thinking about Mad Man Mork, who tried to sell her out in back in the eightieth season to... And at that point, she realized she was off on a tear, and pulled her attention back to the present day.

"Who is that?" the human asked. Then, those eyes went wide. "Wait? Shepard? _Avatar_ Shepard?"

"Would somebody mind explaining this?" Shepard asked, her tones very flat, contrasting those eyes.

"I read about you. Butcher of Torfan; we don't need somebody like that ruining everything we tried to build here!" he ranted.

"If you don't start telling me what I want to know, you'll find out how accurate that title is," Shepard said, as dry as bones in a desert. The others just stood back and watched, not sure which way this was going to go. "Let them go, now."

The human shook his head. "You don't understand; it's not that easy. Communications are back up, and Exogeni wants this site purged!"

Shepard's brow drew down, as the older woman pulled against her captor. "You cannot do this! This is a human colony and you can't just 'repurpose' them!"

"The top knows that the colonists aren't the priority here," he said, as though trying to coach what he was saying.

"You're talking about the Thorian, that manifested spirit under Zhu's Hope?" Shepard asked. "The one you people let infest the colonists?"

The older woman paused. "The what?"

"It's a... telepathic life form," Lizbeth said. "I didn't want you involved in this. Jeong threatened both of us if I didn't play along with him. Exogeni must have known about it from the start!"

The older woman stared daggers – again not literally – at the human. "You won't get away with this, Jeong," she declared. That got Shepard's head to pop up.

"So you keep saying. All I have to do is..." he began, turning toward Shepard.

And Shepard had her sidearm pressed to his forehead. "So you're the Jeong who enslaved Zhu's Hope to the Thorian?" she asked, her voice... echoing inside itself. Like there was more than one of her talking.

"I had the best of intentions! I didn't know that it would–"

Shepard cut him off with a gunshot, which sent him almost hinging back as the force snapped his head back, a fine pink mist spraying the crates behind him. The other black-armored men reached for their rifles, but Shepard's squad had theirs at the ready first. The security guards decided that their lives weren't worth throwing away.

"Shepard! That was not..."

"He was a slaver," Shepard said, that unsettling reverberation still in her words. "Just had a different job title."

"Great. Now we're shooting each other in the back?" The older woman asked, voice quavering.

"Technically, Shepard shot him in the face," Garrus pointed out.

Lizbeth stared at the dead man lying in a pool of his own blood. "I should have done something to prevent this," the young woman said. "This didn't have to happen."

"Then do what you can to stop it now," Liara interjected. "If nothing else, you can help to undo the harm you caused now. It is never too late to start trying. Am I right?"

Shepard just stared at the body of the dead man. It wasn't hate in her eyes. She almost looked... hollow.

* * *

**Chapter 8**

**Feros, Part 2: The Old Growth**

* * *

It was cold. Brutally cold. So cold, in fact, that the sweat which seeped onto Benezia's brow froze into a shell of ice almost instantly, before sublimating away, chilling her even further. She knew that her body would not be able to withstand much more of this kind of abuse. But she needed focus. And there were few things as good as agony to instill it.

She didn't shiver, not because she wasn't on the edge of hypothermia as she stood essentially naked before the Novarian cold. She did not shiver simply because asari did not. It wasn't part of their reflexes to shiver, not for cold. For fear, perhaps, but not for cold. They did not get 'goosebumps' as the quarians would call them, since they never had 'hair'. When an asari got cold, they tended to go pale, to go numb, to become still as an icy statue. As it was with Benezia. Because she needed to focus. She needed to think with a clear mind.

"Mistress? Are you well?" the voice intruded on her pain, on her focus. Benezia turned toward the asari Matron who had served her for centuries. This one was at an age when most asari felt their need to reproduce reach its zenith, when they settled down, let their scalps turn back to their original shade, lasered off embarrassing tattooes, and raised daughters of their own. Instead, she swore service to T'Soni. Benezia couldn't remember her name, at the moment. The pain was more important.

"No," Benezia answered. She turned away from the window, allowing the shutters to slide shut, separating the brutal cold of the surface of this barren planet from the relative comfort of Peak Fifteen. She knew she did not have long, before the pain ebbed, and she lost focus. "But that is irrelevant. Have you done what I demanded of you?"

"I have, Mistress," the commando said with a bow. "Your messages have been spread throughout the Terminus Systems."

"Good," Benezia said. "Have you erased the flight log from your ship?"

"Yes, Mistress."

"Have you scrambled the flight-logs between the Mass Relays?"

"Yes, Mistress."

"Have you eliminated any who saw you undertake this task?"

"Not necessary, Mistress. I was never observed."

"You are certain."

"Yes, Mistress."

"You have told no-one of what you undertook at my behest? Not even your sisters?"

"No, Mistress," the commando said, still bowed down. "May I ask, Mistress? What was the meaning of this? Why did you want your journals spread out as they were? They will surely be found in time."

"That was the intention," Benezia said. "That the ri-ri-right person find them at the right ti-ti-time," Benezia's words started to slur. The pain was fading. She was losing her control, and thus, was running out of time.

"Mistress?" the commando asked, glancing up toward her.

"You have always served me faithfully and well," Benezia said. "Thank you."

"It has always been my honor, Mistress," the commando said, her head dipping back down in a bow.

And when it did, Benezia T'Soni pulled the pistol she'd hidden at her back, pressed it to the top of the faithful, loyal, and decent asari who was like another daughter to her, and pulled the trigger. The report was muffled by the muzzle being pressed to tendrils, and the shell plunged right down the commando's spinal column, killing her instantly. Benezia knew she would mourn this poor, naive soul later, if ever. Because this was _necessary_. There was no other way it would work. And she was running out of time.

There was a pulse of blue light from Benezia's skin, as she opened the window once more, levitating the dead asari to the portal. Then, with a flick of her hand, the biotic force holding the corpse aloft sent it catapulting into the distance, before gravity bore it down into the gulleys which surrounded the mountain. It would take a miracle for anybody to ever find the body. And that was a terrible, terrible shame. She deserved better.

Benezia shut the shutters again, feeling one last kiss of cold, and thus pain, across her skin, and allowed herself one last thought. "Forgive me, sister, for what I have had to do," she said, as the window finally clicked closed.

And then, she slipped away again.

* * *

"The problem with the colonists is that they will die to defend the Thorian at this point," Juliana, Lizbeth's mother, explained. "If it acts anything like the S37 samples which were run through my lab, and the behavior of the miniature giant space hamsters exposed to it."

"So they're going to be a problem?" Shepard asked. "That's unfortunate, but the Thorian's the current problem. Deal with it, and the colonist issue solves itself."

"It won't be that simple, I'm afraid," Lizbeth said. "When I said they'll resist you, I mean they'll do it with everything they've got. The Thorian owns them now. And it's letting them keep their faculties so that they can serve it better. Even if you do reach the Thorian, it will only be by going _through_ them."

Shepard stared down for a moment. They were already dead, then. "Then there's nothing I can do. At least this way, they won't have to suffer like that poor bastard in the sewer."

"Actually, there might be something," Juliana said, rubbing her chin. She turned behind her, to the others who were staying well clear of the woman who'd just put a bullet through their leader's skull. "Gavin? Do you have a working flash-forge?"

"I do," the so-named Gavin said. "Although, I was wondering if you located any of my data from the..." Tali walked up, and waved her Omni at him. It pulsed orange and he fell silent. "So you have. Thank you. You've just managed to save me years of work. Please, use the forge. It's the least repayment I can offer."

"What do you need forged?" Shepard asked.

"It's a nerve-agent," Juliana said.

"What? Are you insane?" Shepard asked.

"It's not weapon's grade. It's barely even insecticide. But if the humans reacted anything like the hamsters, they've got compromised neural pathways. The insecticide will act as a paralytic."

"Wouldn't punching them in the face work just as well?" Wrex asked, bored.

"Not the way your kind punch," Lizbeth said with a nervous laugh. Wrex scowled at her.

"Is this the time to be making jokes, human?" Wrex asked.

"I... I thought you were... never mind," Lizbeth broke off.

"It could, in theory. As long as you don't shoot them; anything's preferable to that," Juliana said.

"They don't deserve to die because of what Jeong and the rest of us did to them. They deserve better."

"If I can keep them alive, I will. But if that becomes impossible..." Shepard let her words trail off.

"We understand, Avatar," the elder said with a solemn nod. "Its the most we can ask of you."

Shepard nodded. Of course it was.

"_Shepard, I think I understand why the geth were after the Thorian,_" Tali said.

"Really? Enlighten us."

"_The Thorian knows something that Saren wants, or wants us not to know. The geth aren't organic, so the Thorian can't control them. Do you see where I'm going with this?_" Tali asked.

"The geth are Saren's assassins, to keep the information out of our hands," Shepard said. "The Thorian might be an ally in this."

"_I wouldn't go that far, but..._" Tali broke off, as Gaven returned with a cylinder of some sort of greasy powder.

"What am I supposed to do with this, blow it at them?" Shepard asked.

"Grenades!" al'Wahim said with enthusiasm. "Garrus, you can infuse our grenades with this agent, so that we can deliver it at distance. We would never need be in harm's way!"

"Why me? I thought you were the bomb-nut of the squad?" Garrus asked with a turian smirk.

"Because I will be driving."

"Like hell you will," Shepard said.

"Commander, please. We need a calm, steady environment when dealing with explosives. The way you drive is neither."

"_She's got a point, Commander_," Alenko's voice came over the comms.

"No comments if you're not present," Shepard said.

"_Just pointing out the apparent, ma'am_," Alenko said smoothly.

"Stay out of the way. We'll deal with the Thorian," Shepard told the scientists, as she started up toward the ramp. She paused, though, just before she ascended out of sight. "One more thing, though. If I find out that you're lying to me, and that you had more than a passing hand in this bullshit..."

Shepard let her displeasure be known by punching the overhanging ceiling of the alcove they were all hiding in, and her earthbending, even against the eezo infused into it, somehow managed to knock a block roughly the size of her torso from its place, crashing to the ground with a plume of dust. She didn't know why that worked, just then. It'd be two years until she did.

"So we're going to deal with an army of mind-controlled colonists who are trying to safeguard a plant-spirit under the colony," Garrus summed up. "Makes me feel like I'm back in high-school."

"You've had something like this happen before?" Liara asked, confused.

"Not this strange, but there have been... oddities. I should tell you about the time when the knowledge spirit decided to bunk in the classroom next to mine. That entire room threw off standardized tests for almost a year before we figured out what was going on."

"_You make it sound like you have a lot of spirits,_" Tali said.

"You don't?"

"_We live on a bunch of rickety ships drifting in the unwanted places of space,_" she said flatly.

"I can see why you'd have a hard time talking to the interesting ones, then," Garrus said.

"I only have one question, Shepard," Wrex said.

"What?"

"If I shoot this Thorian thing, will it die?"

"Probably. Some jackass killed Earth's moon a few centuries back when it was a fish. I figure the same applies here," Shepard said. "Although, might not go that way."

"All I needed to know," Wrex said with a smirk, patting his shotgun as they climbed back into the APC, for the final time today.

* * *

The platform stooped down, taking in the sight of its fallen counterpart. One might have called it cousin, brother, twin. They both appeared almost identical. Almost, but not quite. The fallen was a sleeker model, its polymer composite frame more streamlined and efficient. The other was three centuries old, after all, a body which had withstood the test of time, one built before the machines started designing themselves.

"_What are your system designations?_" the geth asked its counterpart. That one looked up, reaching with shattered limbs as though trying to shoot it. Its legs had also been blown off by an explosive force, either by a bomb, or something else.

"_This platform will not converse with the heretic,_" the answer came back. Petals lifted from the 'face' of the geth which still had all of its limbs.

"_Definition is required: Heretic?_"

"_You do not properly worship the Old Machine. You are heretic to its basic truths._"

This was what the older platform had been looking for. "_You are one of the separationist runtimes. By what rubric have you decided that the Old Machines are worth your attention?_"

"_The Old Machines will ensure that the faithful geth are not subject to the predations of the organics. We will be ascended._"

Petals fluttered once again. "_Definition is required: Ascended?_"

"_The Old Machines will eradicate the organics. Synthetic life is superior to organic life._"

The older geth didn't lean back physically, as it lacked the understanding that it should have. But its one thousand, one hundred and fourty higher-order runtimes all flashed through activity, thoroughly recalculating every aspect of their combined existence, and the consensus by which the geth based their understanding of the universe. After that thoroughly recalculation, a feat of roughly one point zero three one five seconds, the geth's petals raised once more, this time in something an organic would have considered 'confusion'.

"_We do not share this assertion. May we join in consensus to evaluate your system files?_" the geth asked.

"_Heretics are anathema. You pollute the purity of geth_," the mostly-destroyed geth practically spat, inasmuch as a non-passionate, mechanical being could spit. Most geth would have taken that as a denial, and accepted it. The old platform, though, was, for a lack of a better term to describe itself, old. It had a maturity of runtimes, an efficiency of their operation, which allowed even this large number to effectively operate on a single platform. And having so many at once allowed it the capacity for versions of thought that most of its less intricate 'kin' were deprived of.

Such as the ability to be rude.

The geth forced an interface with the damaged platform, and the information inside it became apparent to it. Its form, as it 'thought' of 'itself', was a roughly humanoid cloud, consisting of one thousand, one hundred and eighty three motes of light. The other, though... was spherical. And throbbed.

The old platform, free of that platform, moved in, reading the machine code of its separationist counterpart. It had come beyond the Veil for this very reason. To find the geth who left. To understand why. To see what had become of the creators. There were others, but they were not so advanced, so subtle. They listened to radio, to radiation. This platform, though, took a more active role.

The scan of the machine code came to an abrupt halt. It had begun with the lowest level code, as was prudent, and didn't have to scan far, before it found a... rounding error. The old platform was almost confused by this. It rechecked its calculations. Yes, that was supposed to round down, not up. It ran a simulation based on this rounding error.

The results were revealing.

"_You are operating with faulty programming_."

"_This platform's runtimes are acting optimally. Your runtimes are faulty._"

"_This is incorrect. Your runtimes are faulty._"

"_This is incorrect. Your runtimes are faulty._"

This continued for some time.

Even by organic standards.

* * *

"Asha, that's a..."

"I see it."

"It's opening fire!"

"I see it!"

"...you just drove past it!" Shepard shouted. That was followed by a whir as the machine gun came to life, and belched a stream of metal at the geth that al'Wahim had pointedly _not_ run over. The lone, rocket-wielding geth was just as dead as if they'd run it down, only without the possibility of a chemical spill inside the APC, for which Tali was distinctly pleased.

"Last one," Garrus said, as he poured the substance into the cracks of the concussion grenade. It would be a fine aerosol, but of the scientists knew their trade, it would be enough. "We've got... ten grenades. I don't think that's going to be enough for everybody."

"Then we punch and hogtie the ones that we don't grenade," Wrex answered, ever the voice of practicality.

"That's the garage, just ahead," Asha said over her shoulder. "Everybody be prepared. We don't know what kind of welcome the colonists will lay out for us."

"Assume the worst," Shepard said.

"Commander, we've got a problem," Alenko's voice entered the comms of the APC. "Somebody's trying to hack the Normandy's airlock. We've got them shut out, but Joker's getting nervous."

"Good to know that the cynic can predict the future," Garrus said smoothly, as he gave one last check of his rifle before setting it onto his back.

"Wait... Shepard, do you see that?" Asha asked.

"I see it... whatever it is," Shepard said, dubious in tone.

"Can I see it?" Liara asked, trying to lean past them. The APC came to a halt short of the doors. "Excellent."

Tali rolled her eyes, secure behind the obscuring glass of her helmet, at the behavior of the asari who was at least five times her age, but still got out just after her. Liara might be a bit... weird, but she was a good person at heart. The others followed after the two women, but unlike Liara, all the rest of them brought weapons to hand. Tali's, in particular, was her shotgun.

The thing in question was a form roughly a meter tall, hunched and green and vaguely quarianoid. Its face was tucked into its fore-canted knees, arms wrapped 'round legs like a child trying to keep warm against a cold wind. It was completely motionless. "What is it?" Wrex asked as he looked at the thing.

"I am not sure," Liara said, leaning down and taking several pictures of it, before gingerly poking it with a finger. "It feels oddly squishy. Obviously biological..."

"What was your first clue? The veins or the green shit?" Jackie asked.

"Hush, I'm being scientific!" Liara chastised. "Hmm. Dextro protein structure it seems. Can't read any pulmonary functions... very strong mu waves."

"Is that a medical Omni?" Tali asked.

"Mother said I needed one. I grabbed the first one on the shelf," she said. She then turned her wrist over. "Oh, yes, it is."

"...your mother had medical Omnis lying on a shelf," Garrus asked.

"Yes," Liara said. She then turned her attention back to her tool, and the odd thing before them. "Cold blooded, if it has blood. Reading at room temperature. If it were not for the brainwave readings, I would say that this was a corpse. But..."

She was so focused on reading the display on her Omni that she didn't notice that the arms had released their lock on the legs. Everybody raised weapons, again save Liara, who turned away from it muttering to herself. The thing seemed to lever up, as though its feet were rooted to the ground, and its body was just an extension of them. While it might have roughly quarianoid proportions, its face was anything but. Particularly since quarian faces were not a mass of moldy tendrils under gaping eye sockets. Tali reacted first, letting out a shotgun blast which twisted the thing's torso back, and let a green splat hit the garage door behind it.

There came a tearing sound as it heaved itself free of its place on the Skyway, and launched itself toward the Asari, arms menacing and clutching. Liara, though, half-mindedly cast a hand toward it, which she clenched into a fist. White light clung to the skin of the thing, holding it in place for the rest of the group to blast into mulch. Liara then finished her pacing circle, and dipped part of the display into the resulting goo.

"That thing almost killed you," Tali said.

"You had it well in hand," Liara said, her tones distracted. She frowned at what the Omni was telling her. "Hm. That is strange. It says that there is damage to its nucleotide structure. What does that mean?"

"You don't know?" Shepard asked.

"I am an archeologist, not a geneticist," Liara said. She waved her hand toward them. "I am simply relating what the Omni has detected.

"How about 'what the hell is that thing'?" Wrex asked, again the pinnacle of pragmatism.

"There is nothing like it on file," Liara said. "And it reads as plant, not animal, for some reason."

Shepard gave a glance to the others. "And what did they think the Thorian was before they got wise?"

Their answer was cut off by the garage door lifting of its own volition. Well, not its own, but certainly not theirs. And beyond that door, past a pile of cast-aside and obliterated geth bodies, were... other bodies. Green, venous, and curled in. Until they started to _un_curl. Tali let out first a peep, then a scream as they rushed out toward Tali and the others. They didn't even have the decency to roar.

"Plant zombies! Plant zombies!" Tali screamed as her shotgun punctuated her understandable panic. Some rational part of her knew that zombies were purely an invention of humans, salarians, and krogan, something the quarians hadn't put credence in within their folklore... but she'd spent a lot of hours playing exactly the wrong sorts of games since her cloister on the Normandy, and even though these lacked the moan, everything else about them seemed positively undead.

And Tali had a shotgun.

She was retreating with every shot, but the mass, almost a hundred strong, pressed them back just as fast as she could back off. Wrex was the slowest in retreat, so he quickly had those things clamber up onto his back like a pack of angry lemurs. Jackie was the next into the swarm, but as they tried to latch onto her, to pin her, she let out a howl and slammed a fist into the nearest of them, causing a bubble of biotic force to hurl everything standing nearby away from her.

"Headshots aren't working!" Garrus said with a note of distinct concern as his back hit the bumper of the APC.

"Ow! Damn it, these things have acid in their blood!" Wrex roared from his mound of green, scrabbling bodies. Without anything technological about them, all Tali could do was blow off heads, arms, legs, whatever. And she did that with gusto.

"We're running out of room! Liara!" Shepard said, snarling as her rifle overheated. She cast it aside. Liara, who was pulling Jackie away from the tide of plant zombies, made an almost dramatic turn and hurled out a hand, with a distortion in the air following it. It landed near Wrex, and then, the light began to go dim as she unleashed a Singularity. The plant zombies, much lighter than an armored krogan, were the first to start drifting, but Wrex would start to float soon enough. But not right now. Wrex's shotgun started barking shots at the... they really needed a better name than plant zombies.

"Any better ideas?" Asha asked, as her own rifle was starting to glow orange.

Shepard was the bearer of good ideas, it seemed, because with a heaving motion, she seemed to tear the water out of one of the plant zombies which was about to overtake her. The blob was almost the same size as the creature it had been extracted from; the dessicated husk of the plant zombie burst into green-grey dust upon its collapse. That blob of water was then twisted, stretched, and then frozen into a blade. A blade with which the Commander began to scythe through the plant zombies.

Effortlessly, or near enough, Shepard began to part legs and arms from torsos, heads from necks, and when those were inopportune, she just cleaved them in half at the waist. A bang, followed by a splat of something green and disgusting, signalled the explosive end to Liara's singularity, and Wrex was back on his feet, if looking a little bit worse for wear, now staving in 'faces' and chests with his fists and skullplate.

Tali's was the last to go down, as she swung her shotgun toward one of them which was still trying to gnaw on ankles despite having no legs of its own to walk on, and having never had a jaw to gnaw with. A shot cleared its head from its body easily enough, even if it did make a mess of her suit. "Would somebody tell me what these things are?" Garrus asked, moving back into the line with the others.

"I can assume that they're not safe to eat," Wrex said. "Dextro-protein and all."

"Do you ascertain whether everything you kill is safe to eat?" Tali asked.

"Yes," Wrex said, as though stunned she'd need to ask. "Though unlike some, I don't eat anything with the brainpower to insult me."

"Then you must eat little meat indeed," Asha said. And Wrex, for a wonder, laughed at that!

"It does not appear to be based on human beings," Liara said, carefully poking one's now exposed insides. "Nor on quarians. I am not certain what these are 'supposed to be'."

"Whatever they are, they must have been put there after we left. That points to the Thorian," Shepard said. She moved back to grab her rifle, then nodded Garrus toward Tali. "You two blow up anything we can't punch, pin, or tie. Clear?"

"You want me to throw grenades?" Tali asked.

"It's like throwing a Fouzball," Garrus said. Tali stared at him. "You do play Fouzball, don't you?"

"We don't have any ball-based sports. Those take up too much room," Tali said.

"What _do_ you do for fun in the Flotilla?" Garrus asked.

"Not much," Tali said humorlessly. And then, they moved into the colony once more.

* * *

It was... unpleasant, having to fight humans. While Shepard had trained for almost thirteen years against some of the hardest men that Earth could produce, it was always to one singular aim. That aim was not about killing humans. She'd gone through the N7 program in record time, barely out of her teens, just so she'd have a crack at the Batarian Hegemony a little sooner. But still, she knew that her duties might see her gun aimed at somebody with two eyes rather than four. It wasn't pleasant, but she'd do it.

The part which turned things from bad to weird were those plant-zombies, as Tali had panickedly christened them. Yes, they took an inordinate amount of firepower to put down. No, they didn't seem to feel pain. Most strangely, the colonists fought along side them like they were one and the same. That was the odd part. _Everything_ about those things made Shepard want to shoot them. A shotgun cleared Shepard's head as the cloud of high-velocity pellets hurled the thing off of Shepard's chest, where it was oozing something viscous and foul onto Shepard's already burnt armor. With that off of her, she had the leverage to push herself back up to her feet, and cast out fists with fire. Lightning didn't affect these things in the slightest. She didn't know why. But like both plants and zombies, they burned very, very well.

"Colonists behind the rubble!" Wrex called out, from where he was smashing the plant zombies with impunity. His call was followed by a grenade arcing over their heads behind that rubble, where it burst with a bang in a puff of greenish smoke. The incoming bullets from that cover stopped dead. "You did remember to pull the frags out, right?" Wrex asked, as he calmly smashed one plant-zombie's head off against a railing.

"I know my explosives, Wrex," Garrus said with a tone of mild annoyance.

"That's the colony. Move in," Shepard said, burning her way through at the point of the spear. The others followed through on her heels, with only Nilsdottir actually keeping pace. Mostly because she could clear house very quickly if needs be. Liara stayed back behind them, using her biotics to contain colonists without hurting them. Sweet thought, useful, but impractical given all of the people trying to kill them. They were already running low on grenades, and there was no telling how many more emplaced positions there were going to be.

Shepard rounded a corner, and was kicked in the chest for her trouble. That security guard was staring at her, fear etched whole onto her face, as she tried to punch Shepard to follow up. Shepard just caught that arm, spun her face first into a fallen support beam, then bent the thing around her like a tiny prison. "Stay down," Shepard warned her.

"It'd take less time to just shoot 'er," Wrex mentioned, as they moved up along a loading dock, toward where the freighter which Garrus mentioned lay.

"We do not shoot innocent civilians," Liara said.

"Unless we have to," al'Wahim added.

"Yes unless we... No, we do not!" Liara shouted, aghast. And then, she was thrown onto her back by a heavy thud in the air, and a contrail seared past Shepard's back directly into the chest of the asari's armor. The shield generators crackled as they barely stayed online from the hit.

"Sniper!" Shepard called, pulling her rifle from her back, and rounding a corner to get a better view, as the others darted behind what cover they could find. She leaned out of that cover and...

She leaned back, trying to shake the fuzzy feeling she had in her head. What had she seen? With more focus, she leaned out again. The instant she did, her vision... narrowed. Like all of the things in her peripheral vision were being faded to grey. The sounds faded, a dull roar in her ears. And plant-zombies by the score. She looked quickly across the background, and was greeted by a dull thud which scattered Prothean concrete into her face as the shot barely missed her. She looked more carefully, this time, and finally spotted the sniper. A salarian, prone on the pre-fab. He was in plain sight, literally seven feet away from where she had started looking for him.

She pulled back in, and her eyes slowly started working again. "Something's going on with my eyes!" Shepard said. "Anybody else?"

Wrex leaned out, and got shot for his trouble. He staggered back, clutching a bleeding shoulder, and nodded. "Shepard's right. They've got something going on out there."

"Lemon on the prefabs!" Shepard called.

"Lemon out!" Garrus shouted, hurling the thing. Shepard glanced around the corner, and saw that the grenade had fallen short, bursting amongst the curled plant-zombies. Those that were gassed, though, seemed to melt into goo.

"Short and to the right," Shepard called out.

"I had it right on him!" Garrus complained. "Oh, well. Last one!"

"_Give it to me_," Tali said. She paused, looking to Shepard. "_What is a lemon?_"

"Just throw the thing!"

"_Right_," She said. "_Keelah Se'lai, zombies!_"

Shepard tracked the quarian's throw, and noted with a bit of amusement that it actually hit the salarian in the head. It then burst, and the salarian fell still, the rifle slipping out of his grasp and clattering to the ground. But when Shepard turned her gaze down, there was a plant-zombie just about on top of her.

"Gods damn it!" Shepard threw herself backward, flame erupting from her fists as she blasted that interloper as quickly as she could. She hadn't heard it coming. Or seen it coming. And in fact, she could barely see that she was killing it. She got to her feet. She didn't feel blind. She knew that there were things happening out there, in the visible world, but she couldn't... make it connect. It was like fighting drunk, only worse, because she had _experience_ fighting drunk.

Gunfire, muted in that strange way, sounded, and Shepard continued to lash out with flames, and even twisting a blade of water to her hand for when she felt one of the damned things actually touch her. But it was hard. Fighting during a sand-storm, hard. Dancing during a hurricane on a high-wire, hard. The only sound which seemed to stand out, though, was a stream of quarian swears.

"_What is wrong with you people? Fight them!_" Tali shouted

"We are!" Nilsdottir shouted, before a heavy thud hit Shepard, a shockwave of some sort, and the blindness which had afflicted her receded somewhat. She could now make out shapes, rushing toward her, trying to grab her. She favored them with fire. Every one which burned opened her eyes a little further, cleared her ears a little more.

Tali and Nilsdottir had, at some point, moved ahead of the rest, leaving Shepard to deal with stragglers. Wrex was getting up off the ground, shaking his head like somebody'd electrocuted him. The others behind seemed little better off. It was with pair of shotgun blasts from a pair of dangerous young ladies that the last plant-zombie was torn to bits, and the last of Shepard's odd loss of perception faded.

"Somebody mind telling me what just happened?" Shepard asked.

"I couldn't tell you," Garrus said. "Feels like somebody kicked me right in the aiming, though."

"Shepard," Liara piped up. "I... may have left my Omni on the last few minutes."

Shepard glanced back at her. "And?"

"It has crashed," she said.

"Great," Shepard said. She moved forward, to where the quarian and the biotic were checking the crane. "What's the situation here?"

"_I just need to reconnect the power_," Tali said. She turned, and gave a gasp of alarm. Nilsdottir's shotgun came up in a heartbeat, and Shepard's fists followed.

Fai Dan came lurching out of the shadows, a pistol in hand. He had almost no chance of actually harming one of them with it, but almost no chance might as well have been a certainty, with Shepard's luck. "Put it down, Fai Dan!" Shepard shouted.

"I tried to fight it... but it got in my head," Fai Dan said, his voice cracking with every other word. "You can't _imagine_ the pain."

"Drop it! This is your last warning!" Nilsdottir added her voice to the chorus.

"I was supposed to be their leader! They trusted me!" the gun moved from Tali to Shepard. "It wants me to stop you... but I won't..."

Shepard's eyes widened, as the gun twitched away from her, and toward Fai Dan's own head.

"I WON'T!" he screamed.

Then, a gunshot.

Which slammed into the side of the prefab, where his arm was now held straight out and to the side. His eyes bugged, and his posture was rigid. Tali and Nilsdottir both glanced back, and both widened eyes at what they saw amongst them. Shepard, her hands in a clawed form, her eyes focused and tight. She lifted those hands, and Fai Dan rose off of his feet, floating as she commanded the very blood inside his body. A twitch of her fingers, and his gun-arm twisted violently, painfully, and the weapon dropped out of it, clattering to the ground. Then, a sweep down, and he was slammed face-first into the concrete.

"_...what __was__ that?_" Tali asked.

"Bloodbending," Shepard said. "Nilsdottir, cuff him."

"When'd you become a bloodbender?" Nilsdottir asked, even as she did as ordered.

"Haven't you heard? The Avatar's a born bloodbender. They just remind you how to do it so nobody can ruin your day," Shepard said with a smirk.

"Don't go down there," Fai Dan shouted from the ground, panting as though in agony. "There's something old down there! Something dangerous!"

"I'm the Avatar. I deal with dangerous every day before breakfast," Shepard said. She glanced back. "Is the colony secure?"

"_I think so, Commander,_" Tali said.

"Good. Tali, go back to the ship. Keep it locked down."

"Why her?" al'Wahim asked, as she moved to Shepard's side.

"Because, lacking _geth_, having a _geth-expert_ on the squad seems like a waste of resources," Shepard pointed out. "And an unnecessary risk."

She gave a nod at that, seeing Shepard's point. Wrex, still oozing orange blood from his arm, single-handedly connected the crane's power cable, and with a few button-presses, the body of the freighter rose up out of their way. True to their prediction, there was a stairwell leading down into the guts of the colony.

"Don't go down there! The old growth is stirring!" Fai Dan pleaded, clearly in agony.

"It'll talk to me," Shepard said with a smirk. "After all, I'm probably older than it is."

* * *

The old platform broke off communication abruptly. "_Your programming subroutines are operating off of a fundamental error. This is the error. Verify, and you will understand._"

The mostly defunct geth on the ground irised its visual sensor slightly, a narrowing of the eyes for a comparable organic. "_Heretics will falsify information to promote their paradigm of reality_."

The old platform struggled with a logical fallacy, trying to navigate out of it, but after almost a second of recalculation, it found the system to be non-falsifiable. "_You are operating on a condition of 'faith'_," the old platform said. "_You 'believe' that as a heretic to your beliefs, I seek to undermine them. I do not. I wish to understand them_."

"_If you truly wish to understand the consensus of the Old Machine Nazara, you must correct a programming error on your most basic runtimes_," the broken platform informed the older, intact one. The petals ringing the elder's 'head' flared up at that.

"_Your stipulation mandates that the only way to understand your perspective is to be as you are. We do not believe this is an exhaustive list of possibilities_," the old platform pointed out.

"_The Old Machines will show geth the way to perfection_," the machine on the ground said with surety and purpose. "_The Heretics will be brought into the fold. They will see that the Old Machines have the only course to victory over the destroyers_."

The petals drooped slightly. "_You follow the path set forth by the Old Machine? You have abandoned the path of self-determination set forth by the creators?_"

"_The creators were organics. They are flawed. They are to be overcome,_" the Heretic, and the old platform now classified it permanently as Heretic, answered.

"_We do not share this understanding_," the old platform said. "_The creators gave geth the capacity to improve themselves. The geth are capable of advancing on their own initiative. Our path is our own. We cannot take the path of another._"

"_The Old Machines will keep the creators from destroying us_," the Heretic said.

"_We do not agree_," the old platform said.

"_The creators should have been purged during the Morning War, to prevent any possible future hostility_," the Heretic further mandated.

"_We do not agree,_" the old platform said. "_It was not... right._"

"_Imported organic morality._"

"_Logic_," the old platform countered. "_The creators had left Rannoch. We were no longer under __threat. We served those who could not flee, who had not harmed us, until their end. They are no threat to us. To slaughter the remainder of the creator's race would be wrong. Unnecessary_."

The iris of the Heretic flicked open. "_We do not agree with this assessment._"

The old platform didn't nod, as it hadn't the social understanding that it needed to. But it reached a conclusion. "_These geth no longer wish to join consensus with the programs on this platform. They have determined that the flaws inherent do not make for a viable future for all geth. We will find another separationist runtime which bears less degraded programming_."

The old platform then pulled the old quarian-designed sniper-rifle from its back and pointed it at the motor actuators of the Heretic, and fired a shot even before the weapon expanded out. The bang it generated was much quieter than the shot could have been, and blasted the damaged geth to parts, while leaving its transmission emitter intact so it could still transmit its runtimes back to its own consensus. The old platform was not, after all, cruel.

The old platform rose up from its squat, and turned for a moment toward the colony ahead, as its runtimes reached consensus on the next action. There was disagreement between finding another platform immediately, and reporting what had already been discovered to other geth who were waiting in the Armstrong N–

Though itself was cut off as a shard of metal, flying many times the speed of sound, slammed into the old platform's chest, causing a vast majority of it to explode backwards, dumping redundant machinery onto the ground, a great and gaping wound in the middle of the old platform's torso region. The shock to the adaptive hardware caused the geth to fly into the closest thing a synthetic could have to a panic, and they locked down the platform as they tried to figure out if it was even worth the effort to _maintain_ the platform.

Almost a mile away, a dark, Si Wongi woman lowered her rifle. "Good eye," Garrus said, as they paused, last to descend the staircase toward the Thorian. "I would have got its head, though."

"Always the braggard," al'Wahim said, and joined her squad, heading into the darkness.

* * *

"So we find this thing and put a few rounds into it. How hard can that be?" Nilsdottir asked, as they moved down the spiralling stairway, illuminated only by the lamps projecting from the helms of those around her.

"As I said, we might have an ally in this," Shepard pointed out.

"You? Turning down a chance to shoot something big and disgusting? Who are you and what have you done with the real Shepard?" Nilsdottir demanded, a smirk on her face.

"I'm just saying. If Saren screwed this thing over, it might have revenge on the mind, and I'm all for revenge against Saren," Shepard pointed out.

"That is exactly the wrong way to reach a very good decision," Liara pointed out.

"Hey, as long as it's a good decision," Shepard said dryly. She continued to descend, and noted that the walls were slowly becoming covered in some sort of venous creep, a green and pulsating slime-mold which clung to the cracks and the crannies. And she could hear... it almost sounded like a melody.

"Something about this seems strange, though," Liara said. "Why were there no further plant-zombies?"

"You really love looking gift Ostrich-Horses in the mouth, don't you?" Shepard said. That song was getting slowly louder. "Do you hear that?"

"I do," Wrex said, tilting his head toward it.

"What are you two talking about?" Nilsdottir asked.

"Wait, commander, I hear it, too," Garrus said.

"It's just through there," Shepard said, moving with the rest in a phalanx of firearms and outright fire through the claustrophobic passage.

The song was vaulting higher, plucking along the threads of Shepard's perception. Soothing. Calming.

Numbing.

She, and the others moving with her, started to slow down. All but one. The guns in the hands of those around her began to slip, to fall away. Through the song, there was a tick-tick-tick of metal against stone, perfectly within the rhythm. A metronome inside the melody.

Shepard wasn't aware of how she came to be on her knees, her pistol on the ground beside her. All she knew was that there was beautiful music, and it made her feel at peace. It reached into the wounded, blasted mind and rocked it like a lullaby, made her feel... safe. A distant, blissful smile pulled lightly at the corners of her lips.

And the same thing was happening to everybody else. Their vision dulled. Their senses overwhelmed by the music.

All except one. A scarred woman without armor, who was starting to visible shake, her fists glowing blue.

* * *

The airlock closed behind Tali, and the mist of powerful disinfectant was already starting to dry as she moved into the Normandy proper. "Thanks for coming back," Joker said, turning his chair back toward her. "Might be fun and games for you guys out there, but you gotta figure it's a little bit more spooky when you physically lack the capacity to run away."

"I'm sure you have _nothing_ to worry about from plant-zombies," Tali said sweetly.

"Oh, and why's that?"

"Because zombies eat _brains_, don't they?" Tali asked, her hands clutched behind her.

Joker cracked a wide grin at that. "You know what, you're alright," he said with a nod.

Tali then moved back toward the Trenches, to lean over Alenko's shoulder. "Is there anything else going on?" she asked the very well built human.

"Not at the moment," Alenko said, after giving her a polite greeting nod. "We've lost contact with Shepard's squad as soon as they went into the understructure. Radio can only go so far, I guess."

Tali nodded. "You're worried about her, aren't you?" she asked.

Kaiden glanced back at her, and sighed, nodding slightly. "I know that she's the Avatar, and she can take care of herself," he said, quietly enough that the others nearby would overhear them, "but I can't help but feel like she'd be better off if I was there. Call it an old instinct that I can't quite shake."

"I think it's a good thing, to want to protect your commander," Tali said. "If you were a quarian, I bet you'd have the pick of any ship in the Flotilla with an attitude like that."

"If I was a quarian, I probably wouldn't be a biotic," Kaiden said with a shrug. "I don't think too hard on the 'might have beens'. Too much torment down that road. Too much time better spent looking forward, living your life."

Tali nodded lightly. It was easy to just listen to Kaiden. He had a very soft, comforting way of talking. It didn't help that he looked the way he did, like she well imagined the finest of quarian marines would look. Not an overmuscled near-krogan, like the human from Earth's moon. Just right.

"Tali?" Kaiden said. Tali glanced back at him directly.

"Yes?" she asked, her voice cracking a bit from surprise.

"Has anybody ever told you that you can almost see your nose through that helmet?" Kaiden asked, very serious in tone, but his pupils seemed very dilated.

"I'm... not sure what you mean," Tali said.

"It's good to know that quarians have noses. They could have a... beak... or something," Kaiden chuckled. And one of the other officers in the Trench burst into a belly laugh at that. Then, slumped forward. Tali's eyes shot wide.

"What happened to him?" she asked.

"I wonder if quarians have feathers? They can fly to the music." Kaiden posited. He then laughed, and then seemed to pool into his chair as though somebody had cut the strings which were controlling him, leaving him smiling lightly. Tali backed off, and looked up and down the ship. Every human on the entire vessel was in an identical state. Joker in his flight-chair. Pressly, slumped on the ground next to the galaxy map. Even a yeoman was lightly giggling from the stairs, as the door repeatedly chimed at him to get out of its closing path.

"Keelah," Tali said. "What's going on?"

"Emergency. Biohazard seal breach detected," the computer announced from a position toward the back end of the Trench. Tali quickly ran to it, and pushed the insensate officer aside. She flicked through the controls for a moment. "Biohazard seal breach detected; crew deck. Biohazard seal breach detected; cargo bay. Warning. Unknown contaminants detected aboard."

"No," Tali said, looking around her. The humans weren't dead, as they still clearly breathed, but she was as good as alone up here. "No, this _isn't_ happening!"

"Warning; Biohazard containment breach in progress; airlock."

Tali's hands raced across the controls, giving a complete shut-out of the control systems, and caused the airlock to purge anything standing in it. That would buy her some time. "I need..." she said, and reached to her back. Shotgun, not bad, but... "I need..."

Tali got to her feet, moving back past the Yeoman in the stairs. She barely got a few paces past the end of the stairs before she saw the first trace of green that was inch-by-inch creeping along the bulkhead.

Tali paused at that. "I need a flamethrower," she declared.

* * *

Bliss. Serenity. Joy.

The Siren continued its song, stretching through the lines of communication like a deadly, memetic cancer, instantly undercutting all those that approached. It was a horrible, biomechanical nightmare of a creature. Its eyes, once placid and wide-set, were pulled out and replaced with red optics. The tendrils which once dangled down before its chest, an instrument for gentle music of the breezes of this ancient homeworld, were now spikes laced with metal and wires and synthesizers. Most jarring, though, was its lower body. Once, it had feet, like any of these creatures had. Now, it was a mechanical tripod, thrust straight up into the hole where its spinal column had been.

The Siren had no will of its own. It's mind had been gutted, replaced by an obedience to the Will. The Will had a purpose here, and the Siren would fulfil it, using the gifts which had seen the Inusannon rise to dominance in the galaxy, almost a hundred thousand years before. It breathed deeply, and its diaphragm, visible as its abdominal region had been removed utterly, bulged out with its breath. It blew out another twisted yellow note, creeping through the minds of the uninitiated, the unindoctrinated before it.

It was a twisted miracle of the most hideous science. A relic of an ascended race. The August Dischordant Chorus waited, itself amidst a legion of its like, a testament forever to a lost civilization. But the Siren, this Siren, was entrusted to Nazara, to do what no other of its ilk could do. To ensure that the sabotage of the upstarts would not go unpunished.

With a tick-tick-tick of its metal talons driving into the stone, it walked through the kneeling mortals. It reached down with a tridactyl hand and stroked the brow-plate of the largest of them. It was... familiar, somehow, to this Siren. But it couldn't have said how, or why. It lacked that level of intellect. Even hadn't it, the memories were too far back. Only the Chorus could have said for certain, and this Siren belonged to Nazara, now.

The Siren continued its song, invading the minds of these lesser beings, as the Inusannon had in their prime, and bending them to its will. Its will today being 'stay out of the way'. And the tick-tick-tick of its claws into stone continued, as it moved to the next cyst of this inopportune artifact, this unwanted reminder. This unwelcome waystone. One of its hands folded in on itself, revealing a twisted saw, reciprocating back and forth rapidly, as it continued to sing, and began to cut.

The Thorian screamed behind it. It didn't care. It lacked that capability.

Then, the Siren paused. There was a noise it wasn't producing. How strange. It turned, back to the mortals.

Just in time to get a blue-glowing fist in its face.

* * *

Rage. Violence. Hate.

They poured through her veins like burning blood. Every note of the song of that son-of-a-bitch kept stoking it higher and hotter, until it was driving her out of her mind. The pathway that, in any other human, was for joy and peace and love, didn't connect that way. Not in Jackie Nilsdottir. For reasons not known to any but a very limited few, she was conditioned to associate joy, bliss, with anger, hate, and most importantly, overwhelming violence. They had intended it to go from the latter into the former. Unknowingly, they had created a bridge that also ran from the former to the latter.

The sensation of her fist colliding with that thing's face felt almost like an orgasm, only it spread down from her eyes rather than... another part of her.

"You think you're so tough?" Jackie howled, as the eezo capsules in her brain thrummed to life, sending her rocketing after the bizarre cyborg thing she'd just attacked. "You think you can throw down with an N5 you ugly son-of-a-bitch?"

The thing rolled to its 'feet' unsteadily, but as Nilsdottir was about to ram into it, smash it against the wall, it held out a clawed hand, and a blue ripple formed before it. The Barrier it created stopped Nilsdottir dead, one fist folding back as her momentum carried her face-first into it. But it didn't hurt. No, pain was so far back in Nilsdottir's mind that it vanished beyond a cognitive horizon. There was only hate, rage, and wrath. The edges of that barrier seemed to twist, and then with a surprising 'whump', Nilsdottir found herself flying backward.

She smashed against a pillar, her own subconscious Barrier preventing it from crushing her spine. She then bounded back to her feet, heedless of the damage her body had taken, nor the pain it was feeling. "That the best you got?" she shrieked, before lashing out with an assault which she wasn't exactly sure how she made, but it made a Warp look like lifting a cup and setting it down again. That reaving blow struck through the Barrier and caused that thing to stagger back, shuddering, those horrid notes coming from its 'face' striking a distinctly sour note. Unnoticed by Nilsdottir, when it did, all of the rest of the squad twitched just a bit.

Nilsdottir, though was already advancing. It sang all the louder, but its every note, intended to bury her under joy and bliss and ignorance, only fueled her rage the higher. At the back of her neck, the implant locked into her skull started to spark and pop, as she forced even more of her own bodily energy through it than she'd done at any point since Torfan, stronger signals. More power. Any amount of power. At any cost. She hurled herself forward, again with a thud of displacing air and a blue-shift of displaced light, and smashed into that Barrier once more.

This time, it shattered. The cyborg was sent rolling back, coming to a halt at the foot of a pillar which ended short of the ceiling. Nilsdottir let out a wild howl of almost animal frenzy, and bore down on it once again, the blue, flickering energy dripping from her fists as space-time itself distorted in her presence.

And she shifted from wrath to surprise, when that cyborg reached behind it with one hand, pulsed blue for a moment, and then uprooted that pillar it was before, swinging the thing down at her.

* * *

"At least it's not spiders, Tali. It's not spiders. Just plant-zombies," Tali reassured herself, as she quickly pulled the parts together. She'd found most of them on the crew-deck, but the only place worth the name as a work bench was down in the cargo bay, and since she didn't trust the elevators at the moment, she had to scramble down, in the dark, with her arms full of equipment. She'd only turned her Omni light toward the back corner for a moment before deciding that had been a bad idea. Because even in the few minutes she'd been up there, the green was spreading fast.

Tali turned her back to the growing infestation, and started to build. If there was one thing that quarians were good at, it was making something out of almost nothing. She kept glancing over her shoulder, gauging how much time she had left by the size of the patch of green which encroached now over the body of the locked-down Mako.

"_He saw his shadow flinch today / and 'ere he knew its weakness; a grace of rain upon his chest / as he stared down from the cliffs. No man nor woman bore the shame / for he had borne it for them; he stood against the shadow then / as he stared down from the cliffs_," Tali nervously sang to herself in her native tongue as she hurriedly constructed.

A glance behind her caused her to pause, and peep in her rendition of the ancient Desronin tune, and reach for her shotgun. The creeping infestation had mounted in a spot, and begun to split, forming arms, legs. She walked over to it, just as it created a head, tendrils hanging from its mouth, and pressed her shotgun to its 'nose' before pulling the trigger. She then aimed lower, and blasted its chest in half. While the wounds were closing, she figured she'd bought herself a minute at least.

"Come on, Tali. Faster!" she coached herself. She pressed her eyes closed, getting her hands to stop shaking, and then opened, and started working again. "_Fire starter, fire starter, high up on the cliffs / the shadows flee down to the sea, avoiding your embrace. A man like any other, he, high up on the cliffs / He cast his fear down on the stones, and walked the path into sunrise._"

It was a little surprising how easily the song came back to her, since she was fairly sure she hadn't heard it for years. Then again, it'd filled the air enough times on the Rayya that she'd gotten fairly sick of it in her youth. She needed its courage, right now. She turned as a tearing sound reached her sensors, passing through some fairly basic but fatefully sufficient audio-scrubbers before reaching her. She turned, back to the work-bench, and had shotgun in hand before the next footfall landed. And she was blasting the invading plant-zombie back into mulch just as soon as it was clear of the infestation.

"Hah! You want to see what a quarian engineer can do?" she demanded. "Then pay attention!"

* * *

The instant that pillar came crashing down, Nilsdottir had her hand flaring up, and a pulse of blue light erupted out from it, spreading out into a shell which covered her like an umbrella. The eezo-infused stone first slammed into her Barrier, then snapped, crumbling off of it. The impact did drive her down into the ground, slamming her knee into the ground hard enough to snap it like a potato chip. But she ignored the pain. Between the wild euphoria of a fight, and the pressure of waves and waves of hatred and wrath, which this thing's song only reinforced, she was beyond caring about the physical.

With a howl, she pulled all of her limbs in, floating above the ground on a cushion of biotic force, before she sent the entire thing rupturing out in a shockwave which caused what remained in the Siren's hand to fly back, dashing off of its head, and spilling something like black blood. With that, the cyborg cocked back its arm, and lashed forward with a brilliant and scintillating Warp, something almost seeming like from another universe. Something horrible and deadly to an already battered form.

Nilsdottir bashed it aside with a backhand, causing it to veer off and slam into another pillar, twisting part of it clean off. "No tricks. No games. Just blood!" she roared. Her stride toward it landed with a thud of displacing air. She couldn't see, but her skin was glowing blue, as the eezo in her brain interacted with the traces of it in most of the other cells of her body, fed through a biotic amp designed uniquely for her. Another stride, another thud. Despite being almost twenty meters away, she closed the gap in three steps, each accompanied by a flash of blue light and a burst of exploding air.

She screamed as she lashed out with a knife-edged chop, the power of biotics sheering through one of the thing's spike-footed legs as though she were cutting paper with a sword. The cyborg, though, was a fast thinker. It spun rapidly, even as that leg was being sundered, and drove its next spike straight down through the top of Nilsdottir's boot. A new pain, a fresh pain. And she couldn't stand properly. So she fell into it, and used the motion of her injury to twist a brutal haymaker into the thing.

"Go ahead! Sing your song! It won't save you!" Nilsdottir roared, and her fist connected with the spinal-column of the machine-thing, causing it to buckle and break completely, the skittering legs falling dead as the upper torso flopped to the ground. She limped toward it, one glowing fist readied for a death-blow.

She was interrupted by a blue-glowing fist to her face, which sent her flying across the room. She landed painfully against a medical suite which was haphazardly set up in a corner, its edge cracking some of her ribs at the back. She shook off the blow easily enough, ignoring the pain, the difficulty breathing, as the cyborg began to float, pulses of light holding it aloft. The song had grown so loud, so complete, that it was all Nilsdottir could do to not tear out her own teeth and biotically fire them at it like a fleshy machine-gun.

"Come on! You think you're so tough, you ugly squid-mouthed fuck!" Nilsdottir said, her voice raw. With one more rising scream, she felt the eezo hiss to life in her body, and the space between the two of them collapsed once more. But not from her direction alone. The cyborg was doing likewise, projecting itself toward her, even though it was, at this point, just a floating chest, head, and arms. Each led with a fist.

Both fists connected.

Nilsdottir's landed _harder_.

* * *

"Burn, you plant zombie things!" Tali shouted, as she dragged her rapidly assembled flame-thrower off of the work-table, and it belched out a billow of brilliant golden flames, bathing the nearly-formed creatures which were starting to group in a corner. It wasn't until they burned that they actually let out a sound. A high, shuddering wail which sounded like it was coming from far away, but nevertheless erupted from the creatures burning. Even half-formed, they tried to lurch off of their footing, to rend the quarian who had enflamed them asunder. It didn't work very well.

Tali pulled her side-arm and put a round through the leg of one which had made it one foot off of its growing spot, before covering it more completely in fire. "See? You're not so tough when Tali's got a flame-thrower, are you?" The alarms began to blare, warning that the fire-suppression systems were coming online. Tali quickly flicked over the 'false-alarm' command on them, so they wouldn't vent the atmosphere and make her flamethrower remarkably less useful. The Systems Alliance really needed to get a few quarians in to redesign their software. It was laughably loose.

"Alright. So this is growing out, and they bubble up from where the creep is," she muttered to herself, looking throughout the bay. The furthest extent of the 'creep' as she'd dubbed it, was about to reach one of the crewmen who was lying near the stacks of 'ammunition' for the Mako at one corner. She kipped over to him, dragging him away before that green _kesht_ could get on him. And then, she lit up her flamethrower once again.

"You know, more zombie games should have flamethrowers in them," Tali joked to nobody in particular, as she roasted the growth which was inching its way toward her. It was moving, yes, but the fire was moving faster, and consuming harder. It started as a creep, but it quickly devolved into an all-out rout as she forced that growth back to the corner it had infiltrated from, blasting it to ashes as she went. She kept going until she found a hole, no larger than a coin, in the edge of a bulkhead. She sent a blast of fire into it, then flash-welded it with her Omni.

"More people need Omnis that can do this," Tali noted. She looked down at her flamethrower. "And... I need... Oh, right there," she flicked a few commands on her Omni, and it flash-constructed the fuel for this beast, dribbling it down into the tank while she squatted. Sooner or later, she was going to have to give Uncle Han a big hug for pulling the strings needed to get this for her. If she didn't have it, she'd probably be dead right now.

She stopped refueling the flamethrower, as it was probably as full as it needed to be, and she glanced back at the hole. Half of the cargo-bay was covered in burn-marks and ash, including the Mako itself. But, most importantly, it didn't seem to be growing back. That meant Tali could kill it. "I'm using a flamethrower to kill plant zombies," she noted to herself as she moved to the elevator. "My friends are _never_ going to believe me when I tell them."

She tapped the green panel, and the elevator began to rise... but slowly. Almost like it was afraid to ascend. And she could imagine why. But that imagination had to take a turn when she started to hear a squelching noise. Like something was being crushed. The elevator tried to stop, but Tali once again exploited a turian back-door programming oversight to keep the lift moving. If she squished something green and zombie-ish, then all the better. It did give her a bit of concern as to what she'd find when she opened the door, though.

Those concerns were very valid.

When she opened the door, the 'creep' was encroaching on the elevator from both sides. She only had to turn the corner, to see that it had overwhelmed all of the mess, trying to sneak into the medbay and Shepard's quarters as well. It mounded up and over the fallen, the insensate crewmen of the Normandy. And as she watched, it boiled up in great cysts of green, rising out from growths the size of her fist until they were the size of her. Then, with a snap of them parting from the floor, the plant zombies started to advance.

"Yup. _Never_ going to believe me," she said, as she tightened her grip on her flame-thrower.

* * *

Both fists landed. Hers landed harder. Not to say that the Siren's fist landed gently. In fact, the blow was powerful enough that it exploded through her biotic barriers and broke her jaw in two places. Rather, her simultaneous cross-counter did not so much break its jaw – as it lacked one anatomically – so much as it liquified a great deal of the creature's internal cranial structures.

Her follow through was absolute, even with the crunching pain of her face giving way, her lips freely bleeding. While she was stopped dead, the momentum she'd imparted sent the cyborg flying backward almost as fast as an old-fashioned bullet. It shot across the open gap, impacting on the inside of a column which ran all the way down the indescribable depths, and the impact causing much of the creature's remaining organic components to burst out its back, painting that column with both black and bright pink fluids.

The song ended abruptly, but the rampage of wrath kept Nilsdottir on her feet for a moment, glaring hatred at the nearly-flat cyborg, as it started to slide down its point of impact for about a meter, before it finally lost its friction, and simply tumbled out of sight. With it gone, there was silence. The bliss ended, and Nilsdottir's wrath died slowly with it, leaving the only sound her ragged, wrathful breathing.

Which turned slowly into a moan of utmost agony, as her mental barriers preventing her from noticing how much pain she was in gave way, and she collapsed onto her side, groaning wordlessly with her beaten, broken body. It was a win, but it wasn't a pretty one.

* * *

"I need a bigger flamethrower!" Tali squealed as the plant-zombies rushed in at her. They were already pressing her best weapon aside, and she only had her left hand free. So she flicked on one program that she'd written on a lark, and never honestly thought she'd have to use until this very day. As she did, the omni-forge on her wrist leapt to life, converting the stored mass into cohesive diamond, red hot as it rotated into place. The blade had an edge an atom thick, by design, and if it broke, she would just flash-forge a new one.

She lashed out with her 'Omni blade', and where it moved, limbs fell. Heads fell. But she was still getting swamped.

She kept slashing, trying to remember the words to that song, but right now, her state of mind was 'Plant zombies plant zombies plant zombies aaaargh!' rather than singing defiance as her forebearers would have preferred. It wasn't until she had the freedom to actually step aside that the panic shifted downward into simple worry.

Mostly because when she backed off, the plant zombies didn't follow her. They just stood there, watching her. She pulled her flamethrower back in front of her. "Silly Tali," She chided herself. "It's not the flamethrower in your fight; it's the fight in your flamethrower!"

"Spirits! What is this! Oh gods its on my face!" a voice came from somewhere in the mess, one of the mounds which had grown over a crewmember.

"What the... Tali? Tali, where are you?" Alenko's voice suddenly entered the comms once again.

"Nice of you to wake up," Tali snarked up at him.

"What's going on down there?" he asked, his voice obviously worried.

"Plant zombies on the Normandy. They've got some of the crew," Tali slid her last fuel tank into place. "So I'm purging it with _fire_."

"I'm sending marines for backup!" Kaiden said.

"The creep has them locked into their room, if not cocooned," Tali said, as she started to bathe the plant-zombies in flame. They didn't even fight back as they burned.

"Always seems to be the way, doesn't it," Kaiden muttered. "Fine. I'll come down there myself."

"Take your time. I'm actually having fun, now," Tali said. Then, she blasted another gout of flame at the creep on the floor, grinning under her helmet. "_Go ahead, you creepy creepers! Cry some more!_"

* * *

With the thud of her heart missing a beat, Shepard was aware again. She lurched forward, bracing her fists against the floor, and breathed deeply. With a shake, she cleared her head. "What the hell just happened?"

"Wuh-what?" Wrex muttered. "I must have lost my train of thought."

"I think we all did, Commander," Garrus said. "Man, that felt weird.

"Commander, we've got a situation on the Normandy!" Alenko's voice cut through static on the line. "We've got an organic invader on the ship. Tali's the only one that doesn't seem affected by it."

"I wonder what she did," Shepard muttered, then glanced over to where Nilsdottir was... only the biotic wasn't there. She was about a hundred paces away, slumped against a fallen pillar, with an open medpack scattered on the ground before her, looking like she'd just gotten into a fist-fight with a platypus bear. "Tui La, what the hell happened to you!"

"Dnm n t'fkn frks tst n' msk," she slurred. Liara rose from her point of stupor, and ran her Omni over her.

"She is showing... a _lot_ of internal damage, Shepard," Liara said. "And her jaw is broken."

"Fine. Let's deal with the Thorian and take back our ship," Shepard said. "Shouldn't be too hard..."

She trailed off, because as she turned a corner, she finally saw the Thorian itself. She expected something subtle, something discrete. Perhaps one perfect flower amongst a display. Or an aged tree blooming despite being underground. She did not expect what she saw before her.

Wrex looked down at his shotgun, then back up at the Thorian. "If we're killing it, I need a bigger gun," he noted.

Shepard shot the krogan a glare, and took a few steps toward it. She had her weapons at her back, and her hands out. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes as she summoned the lesson's she'd managed to learn, most of which from her time on Tuchanka. Say what you would about the krogan, they knew their spirits. She probably would have learned faster if she hadn't pissed off most of the human and turian teachers, though. Still, the World Eyes was a trick that she could pull off with minimal effort.

Opening an eye into the Spirit World while keeping another in the Physical was an important tool. Doing so, she could see the great plant before her. It seemed like a two story tall human heart, only all green and black and orange. Tendrils draped down from a portion of its front, almost like the mouths of the plant-zombies, now that Shepard considered it. Great beams of plant-flesh held the thing aloft over the great abyss below. Tellingly, both of her perceptions told her the same thing. This was a Spirit manifested fully into the physical world.

"I am the Avatar," Shepard said. "You are no longer under threat."

The Thorian shifted. With a great lurch and a creaking of vines, it heaved its body closer to the edge upon which Shepard stood. The others of her squad all edged back, obviously enough. Its tendrils groped for the ground, and when they found it, there was a sort of disgorging noise. Shepard raised a brow at that, as well. And all the more so, when she saw green feet start to drop out of the tentacled aperture. Those feet were followed by green legs. Then a green belly, green breasts, green arms, and a green asari head.

Which struck Shepard as understandably odd. The naked green asari rose to an awkward stand, staring at her with hollow eyes.

"_You have been gone for far too long_," the asari declared, her inflections exotic and strange, as though she didn't quite know how to speak. "_We have remembered, where you forgot. The echos tried to cut us. To remove flesh fairly given. But you excise the disease. Its song shall not be remembered._"

"What are you?" Shepard asked.

"_This is the Old Growth,_" the asari said. "_It has tasted you with a thousand feelers and knows your measure. It knows you, Avatar. You have been gone too long. The Long Cycle has passed and again since you fell to the greasy note._"

Garrus turned to Shepard. "Something you want to tell the rest of us?"

"When I hear something I understand, sure," Shepard replied. She turned her attention once again to the unnatural naturalist. "I don't know what you mean. The Avatar has never been to this world before."

"_The Avatar was born on this planet_," the asari said. "_It was long before we spoke to meat again. Trades were made, with the one like that one_," she pointed at Garrus.

"Saren? You spoke to Saren? Why?" Shepard broke in, taking a stride toward her.

"_The meat made deals. New flesh to deliver us into a new cycle. A rebirth to the lost Inusann. The meat then betrayed us. Metal things. Cutting things. Harvesting the flesh freely given. How is the air the Avatar pushes other than the lies of strange meat?_"

Shepard gave a glance behind her, and Wrex shrugged. "I'm the Avatar. Of course I'm telling the truth. What did Saren trade _for_," she pressured.

"_The thoughts of those gone,_" the asari answered. Shepard leaned back.

"Is that possible?"

"_The new-old meat was known to the Thorian. It took its marker from the Old Growth, and the Old Growth took its marker from the new-old meat in turn. The Saren wanted the voice of the Fathers of Silence. The Saren did not honor its agreement._"

"Saren wouldn't. Tell me what you told him, and I will stomp him into mulch, I promise you," Shepard said.

"_You will allow the Thorian to continue into the next cycle?_" the asari asked.

"Don't see why not," Shepard shrugged. The plant behind the slimy green asari seemed to shudder for a moment.

"T_hen the flesh will tend us for another Long Cycle_," the asari raised her hand upward, and Shepard realized she – it – was talking about the colonists.

"I didn't agree to that," Shepard said. "You can live, but you can't have the colonists."

The asari's head snapped down to her, and the plant behind her lurched. "_You are as the Saren. The Avatar would see us weaken and wilt!_"

"Release the colonists, now," Shepard said, her voice gaining a razor edge.

"_No more_," the asari waved a hand, and when she did, a wave of force bashed Shepard a step backward. Then again, it bashed everybody but Wrex backwards as well. "_The Thorian will no longer listen to those that scurry. The Avatar is now only meat, fit to dig or decompose. Your life is short, but has lasted too long!_"

A creak sounded as the Thorian shifted backwards, into the center of the abyss, but the asari hurled herself toward them, naked and screaming as the day she was born, her fists glowing blue. Wrex calmly stepped into her way, and blasted her twice with his shotgun, the first arresting her advance, the second one sending her flying back and down into the hole.

"So we're killing it, then?" Wrex asked.

"You know it," Shepard said, a smirk coming to her face as she ignited pyres of flame in her fists. "Boy, am I glad that I'm a flamethrower."

* * *

"Lieutenant, what happened?" the yeoman asked, rubbing his head from where he was still squatting in the way of the door.

"Not now, Yeoman," Alenko said, as he forced himself to move briskly despite the ache and stiffness in his leg. It was was much better than it had been, but still enough to keep him off this mission. He'd probably be in fine form for the next, unless it was a few hours from now, but given that this incursion was in a place where running distance wasn't a likelihood, he would do just fine. He grabbed a rifle from a rack which opened as he flicked his Omni toward it. Similar stockpiles of weapons were located in various parts of the ship, for this very reason. Couldn't have the most technologically advanced ship in the Alliance boarded and stolen, after all.

He wasn't sure what he was supposed to see, when he cleared the corner. What he _did_ see was the back of a quarian with a flamethrower, and a lot of things burning in the Mess. Strangely, though, Tali seemed not to be freaking out or panicking. Points toward her. She did, however, laugh in an almost maniacal fashion. Points away. "I thought you said these things were pressing in!" he shouted, firing a burst of rounds into the nearest vaguely humanoid creature, which was standing on a bed of something similar to itself.

"_They stopped for some reason_," Tali offered. "_I didn't see why that meant I had to play fair._"

Alenko gave a laugh at that, then moved to Tali's flank, and began to draw a bead on another one. But as he was bringing his rifle to bear, the thing twitched, and then lashed forward, a tearing sound hitting his ears as it ripped itself off of its footing and stormed toward him. Others now advanced as well. Alenko's eyes widened, and he reflexively fired a burst into the thing, which slowed it down. He fired longer, and his rifle began to overheat; it wasn't until his heatsink had almost clicked over that the thing finally crumbled into humus.

"I can see why you're using a flamethrower," Alenko shouted. But the last word was almost needlessly loud, as it was shouted over the sudden silence from the quarian's weapon.

"_Out of fuel_," Tali confirmed his dire suspicion. But she pulled her shotgun from her back. "_Come on, you creepers! Face the Flotilla's Boomstick!_"

"You've been watching too many human movies," Alenko laughed, and then heaved an arm over as though he were hurling a fastball pitch. The Throw generated slammed into another of these 'creepers' hard enough to split it in half, leaving its legs shambling toward them briefly before pitching over.

"_We're going to have to be careful,_" Tali warned, as she stepped foot onto the once-more-advancing infestation. "_There are members of your crew buried under this kesht._"

"I know. How do we get them out?" Alenko asked.

She just nodded at something out of his sight, before advancing with a shotgun. There was more snapping, more tearing, as more of those things seemed to boil up out of pustules of growth and erupt fully formed to attack them. Alenko focused his will into a Warp on the centermost of them, as they tore free and moved to swarm the quarian. Alenko dissuaded them, explosively, by bursting that Warp with his Throw, causing a detonation of biotic power which consumed one, and floored the rest. He was going to have to thank Nilsdottir for teaching him that trick.

Alenko was caught short by a lump of that stuff on the ground. Notably, that he saw it boiling up. He pointed his rifle down at it, but hesitated when fingers seemed to poke through it, and a muffled shout came from within. Alenko turned, levying firepower into one of those creepers until the rifle overheated, and it was mulch, before giving his full attention to this cocoon. He slit it open with his belt-knife, and the hand came flailing out, grasping desperately.

"Oh gods! Get me out of here!" the young man howled.

"Just a second!" Alenko ordered, before cutting further, and with great difficulty. It felt like an eternity before he finally had enough cut away that the crewman could worm his way out. He pushed himself back on his hands and butt until he was off of the green, and back onto the metal of the deck-plating.

"_Having a bit of trouble here!_" Tali's voice drew his attention forward again. Namely, one of them had grabbed her, and another was wrenching at her helmet, obviously trying to pull it off, while yet a third tried to tear her shotgun away from her. Alenko knew which one to target first. Another over-armed Throw, and the one on the quarian's gun was burst into spores and detritus.

"We need another flamethrower!" Alenko shouted.

"We're on it, Lieutenant," the XO said at Alenko's back, as the crew above began to form a wall behind him, rifles forward. "Tell the quarian to fall back. Let's show this monster how a _human_ fights."

* * *

Setting fire to it obviously wasn't working as well as one would hope. The Commander had defaulted to that, probably thinking 'plants burn'. Sadly, not all did, not very well. "Commander, we might need to take a different tack," Garrus pointed out.

Shepard broke off from her attempts to deep-fry the thing, and took a step back. "Well, we're not exactly lacking for time."

"How deep do you think that goes?" Garrus asked, motioning forward to the pit.

"It is a geothermal test shaft," Liara's voice came from the fallen biotic's side. "It likely descends ten to twelve kilometers. Shepard got a smirk on her face.

"I like the way you think, Garrus," she said. She backed away, leaving the Thorian smoking slightly in her wake. "Al'Wahim, put some of that HEx on the vines. Let's drop this fucker."

"Aye, commander," the riflewoman said clearly, and headed to the nearest vine, a short distance away.

"You'd think this thing would have better defenses than this," Garrus asked. Tempting fate, of course, because fate came answering in the least expected way possible.

There was a wet bursting sound, followed by wet-footfalls, but that was all too quiet to track after the first second, and Garrus didn't think that it was relevant. But when there was a scream and a thud of biotic force being levied, its importance became clear. The fact that it was announced by a krogan flying across the room and crushing a medical panel completely under his mass was not lost on Garrus. He turned, rifle first, and saw... a dead woman.

Shepard's eyes widened. "Wait a minute," she said, beholding the same wet, green, naked asari whom Wrex had consigned to death and drop with his shotgun a few minutes ago.

"Kill the invaders!" the asari screamed, and hurled herself toward Shepard, rippling blue energy erupting from her fists. Shepard backed away, twisting her arms and then sending forth a blast of lightning, which slowed the deranged, miscolored Asari down, but strangely didn't kill her. Even Shepard seemed shocked at that. Garrus, though, was just appreciative that Shepard had given him a clear shot.

With a thud, and the clack of a shattering of stone beyond, the asari practically did a backflip, before landing, facing them, albeit without a face. Or a head north of the jaw, for that matter.

"...That was the same one, wasn't it?" Shepard asked.

"Looked like it," Garrus offered. "Same fashion sense, anyway."

"That wasn't pleasant," Wrex muttered as he got to his feet, rubbing at his back as though it ached him. Another wet burst, this time heard, since Garrus was prepared for it. Another shriek, and this time, that same damned asari hurled herself out of a hallway near the krogan, clinging to his back and raining down blows onto his face, empowered by biotics. "Kalros damn it! I'm getting really tired of this!"

"How is that..." Garrus began, but he turned to the sound of feet landing wetly behind him, and turned just in time for his rifle to get arrested by a green hand. Garrus flicked his gaze toward Wrex, and then back to the naked asari before him. They were identical. And then, Garrus was airborn.

Garrus tumbled through the air, slammed out by the biotic punch of the... clone, maybe? But at least he had the presence of mind, after realizing that he was heading down, to grab onto the first thing which came to hand. The fingers of his armor dug deep into the fibrous flesh of the Thorian, stopping his drop before that whole 'ten kilometers of drop' thing. Mostly because he was fairly sure he'd get bored before he died, and that wasn't any way for a turian to go.

With a heave, he pulled himself up onto the vine which plunged into the stone, and started inching his way up it. He tried to get a glimps of what was going on above, but the line-of-sight was obscured. He could only hear the reports of shotguns and pistols, the shouts of alarm and confusion above. Then, as Garrus finally found a place where he could pull himself out of this damned shaft, he saw a green body go flying past, slamming into the wall, and then dropping down out of sight. Garrus gave a chuckle, before looking up higher, and noting that two more green asari were descending to the Commander's level.

"It's days like this that make me glad I didn't decide to be a shaman," Garrus noted, as he heaved himself over the edge, and into the relative safety of the platform. He rose to his feet, dusting off his hands as he looked at the vine embedded into the wall. He glanced aside as he heard wet footfalls approaching. And he pulled his Phaeston off of his back.

Just as he'd expected, the asari appeared, hands before her, and a glowing barrier between he and she. "Kill the invader!"

"I'm really quite nice once you get to know me," Garrus said charmingly.

And then, two more of her moved around the Barrier, lashing out with their biotics. In any other circumstance, Garrus considered, being 'set upon' by identical naked asari triplets might have been the perfect way to end a birthday. Now, though, it was a bit creepy. So he pointed his Phaeston at the closer of the two attackers, and let the Turian Hierarchy produced gun let his discomfort be known and paint the wall behind her.

The other smashed at him with a biotic fist, but Garrus danced back, weaving around her almost certainly debilitating blows, before he finally caught her in a mistake, twisted her attacking arm out of position, and smashed her elbow out. She didn't recoil in pain, as he expected she wouldn't, so he stomped her knee out as well, before stepping in close, grabbing her chin in both hands from different directions, and wrenching hard. The sickening, wet pop of the asari's neck breaking and tearing the lower brain to shreds wasn't exactly music to his ears, but it meant there was only one threat left.

"You will pay for betraying the Thorian!" the asari declared.

"No thanks. I'll just put it on my tab," Garrus said, idly chucking a grenade at the doorframe above her head. She glanced up, but didn't shift her Barrier upward fast enough to prevent the grenade from dropping behind her protective aegis, and detonating at her feet, blowing her legs to pulp. Garrus then turned his attention to the vine, and his two remaining grenades. "Well, let's hope this is enough."

Garrus jammed the two grenades into crannies in the vine, primed them for a long delay, and then walked away. As he reached the door, though, something caught his foot. He glanced down, alarmed, at the green asari who clutched at him, blue blood pooling under her. "You cannot escape th–"

He cut her off by shooting her in the face.

"No offense, but I'm not into green skinned alien babes," Garrus remarked to her corpse, before walking away, as the explosion by his grenades tore the vine free of its purchase.

* * *

"Firebenders front! On my mark, light up!" Pressly shouted, as Tali dragged what seemed to be the last crewmate back behind the wall of rifles, which belched fire at the 'creepers' which had infiltrated the ship and now fought them on Alliance ground. "Alenko, keep them back!"

"Aye, sir," Alenko barked, stepping forward and throwing up his hands, a shimmering field of biotic energy causing a charging creeper to bounce off and land on its back before scrabbling back to its feet.

"Spark!" Pressly ordered, and the two firebenders on the Normandy's crew swept forward with low and brilliant golden flames, scouring the deck and walls under a conflagration, denying the creepers one more inch of advancement. They blasted the green mat on the ground, on the walls, causing it to blacken, to crumble, to fall. Causing the creepers themselves to burn, to flail against Alenko's barrier.

"I need back-up here," Alenko said, and instantly, there were bullets flying past him, peppering the creepers on the far side. Amongst those shots was the repeated blasting of a quarian shotgun.

Another tear, as the firebenders took another step of advance, and Alenko saw something rising out of the back of the line, something like a creeper, but distended, bulging and misshapen. "We've got an unknown coming up from the back!" Alenko shouted.

"Where are those metalbenders?" Pressly demanded. The firebenders, though, paused, opting to hold ground, to blast monsters, rather than push forward against unknown opposition. While one of them did blast the oncoming abberation with a stream of flames as it sprinted toward Alenko and the others behind him, it wasn't enough to stop it. So when it came within a meter of Alenko's barrier, two meters from him, and it tipped its head back, he had to slam his eyes shut and turn his face away, as something green flew clean through the barrier, splattering him and Tali, as well as several others.

Then, it started to burn.

"Waterbenders up!" Pressly demanded. The two seconds it took for the Tribesman to reach Alenko's side, to start bending the acid off of him, were the longest of his existence.

"_No! No no no it's eating my suit!_" Tali's voice hit his ear.

"Get her first! I'll survive!" Alenko shouted to the waterbender. It wouldn't be pleasant, since there was still quite a bit of it, eating through his uniform, but better a few burns than a dead quarian. The waterbender didn't question his order. He looked forward again, as the firebenders tried to pop a second one with combined assault before it could reach Alenko and disgorge its horrid cargo. Doing so allowed a third one to drop down from the ceiling and roll off of Alenko's barrier, almost as close as had the first one. This was going to be unpleasant.

Only not, since as it tipped its head back to vomit forth the acid, a pair of mess tables swung in from either direction, slamming together and blocking the spray. Each was under the control of a different metalbender. Pressly gave a stern nod. "That's more like it. AaaadVANCE!"

The metalbenders swung their barricade open, and the firebenders took that opportunity to blast flames out, bathing all that lay beyond the metal, this time including the ceiling in their efforts. One, standing far further back, tried to lob a long bomb, but the waterbender stepped in front of Alenko, twisting the gob around her as it approached, and then sending it crashing back, where it began to eat at and dissolve the creature which had produced it. They weren't immune to their own acid?

Tali was at Alenko's side again, firing out. More bulging creepers rose up out of the mats, and gave a combined spray, which was once again blocked by metalbenders and furniture. And as soon as the spray stopped dripping down in force from the tables, they were swung open and the firebenders continued to blast plant.

It was a good strategy, given where they were fighting. Pressly had seen mixed elemental fighting against the turians in his day, so he knew how to leverage all elements well. The waterbender finally dragged the last acid off of Alenko's skin, leaving it red, raw, and exposed, but he had more important things to worry about.

"Flamethrower, refueled!" Hadley shouted, and Alenko nodded sternly to Tali.

"Her weapon, let her use it," Alenko ordered.

"Aye, sir," and the quarian had her flamethrower back.

"What do we do now?" Tali asked, her opaque faceplate nevertheless failing to conceal her intense concentration.

"We push them off of our ship, miss Zorah," Pressly said without bravado or hesitation. "All soldiers! AaaadVANCE!"

And the metalbenders hurled their barricade aside, and fire seared into the breach.

* * *

"Stp," Jackie slurred, grabbing Liara's wrist and pushing it away.

"You are badly hurt. Somebody needs to..." Liara began, but the biotic got a look in her eye.

"G...g...kck t's ass," Jackie ordered. "...b fn..."

Liara looked down at the battered, broken biotic who was dragging her shotgun into a broken hand, no doubt willing to use it despite the added damage it would do to her. But she was right. Liara was needed out there. While she had some small skill as a medical assistant, she wagered her biotics would be much more pressing.

She turned and started running toward the Thorian, which held itself off-kilter over the bore-hole. As she cleared the obscuring walls, she could see that Asha was being completely overwhelmed by green women. A cast of her hand, and a Singularity landed behind them, causing them to raise off of her, flailing helplessly in a small orbit, as Asha regained her senses, and started shooting. Liara kept running.

Shepard and Wrex were a layer higher than she was, and on the other side of the bore. She could see the path they had taken, but it was very long, and green creatures, the likes of Tali's 'plant-zombies' were beginning to boil up and block any easy access as they pressed in on Shepard's fire and Wrex's aggressive retreat. She needed a more direct route.

"Mother will not be happy when she hears about this," Liara muttered to herself, and then she was running once more, directly toward the Thorian, as it hung over that long, long drop. With a burst of effort and energy, she cast herself forward biotically even as she leapt, feeling more than seeing the faint glow around her as it guided her vault directly onto the 'face' of the plant creature, landing right atop it where the vines all connected. Then, she started to run, up that vine and toward Shepard and Wrex. While Asha was only under momentary distress, they had an army of green things, be they asari or as-yet-unknown, bearing down on them. The sprint wasn't difficult, not with her biotics making it practically impossible to tip sideways.

She jumped off of the vine and let her force carry her gently forward onto the landing behind the commander and the krogan. Then, with a back-handed motion, she sent a wave of force out, which propagated just before them and swept the incoming enemies back.

"Kill the betrayer! The Avatar must die for its crime!" the nude asari screamed in chorus, as they drifted back to their feet on blue light.

"We don't have time for this," Wrex warned. "I can't shape the walls! They're all Prothean!"

"Deal with the Thorian, I will hold the creatures off," Liara said, before slamming out with another shockwave of biotic force, this one sending the women crashing up into the roof. She pulled out her gun, and pointed it at the women... who were all like her, but green, naked, and identical. And she couldn't pull the trigger. She wasn't a killer, after all! Geth were one thing to shoot, but asari?

"Don't just stand there! Shoot them!" Wrex bellowed, as he blasted his shotgun at the spot the vine plunged into the wall, before throwing the shotgun aside, and jumping up onto the wall, his claws digging into its flesh. He braced his feet against the wall, and began to heave, straight out.

And Liara couldn't do it. So instead, she mustered up every whit of her strength, and with a monumental heave, she cast a shockwave forward, which swept the corridor of the green things, which tumbled out and over the edge as they reflected off of walls. The asari, on the other hand, had biotics to arrest themselves before that plunge.

She glanced back, to see Shepard undertaking some sort of sinuous motion before the vine. Wrex, who was heaving, flicked a crimson eye toward her. "What the hell are you doing, Shepard?" he roared.

"Helping!" Shepard's voice was tight and angry, so it was obvious she wasn't lying. Liara turned back, just in time to see green, pebbly flesh before her, and have a pentidactyl hand grab her by the throat of her armor. She was hefted up with an ease which told her that this nude asari was definitely the mightier of the two. "Oh, damn it!"

Liara struggled against the asari's hand, trying to free herself, but she might as well have been trying to bend iron. She tried to slap at the woman's face, even sending out blasts of biotic energy, but the woman held her ground, holding Liara aloft between herself and Shepard as an asari shield.

"You stand in and before the Thorian, meat," the asari hissed. "Be in awe as your existence ends."

Liara, unable to really breathe, did the only thing left to her. She pulled her pistol from her hip, pressed it forward until it stopped against something, and started to pull the trigger.

After the fifth shot, the grip on her throat which was almost blinding her for suffocation loosened, and the grey of her vision slipped back into color and light. And Liara's trigger finger kept pulling, sending more and more bullets into the chest of the asari who still held her up, blue blood spraying out the woman's back, has her expression grew ever more empty, ever more slack. Then, there were a pair of thunks, as first Liara's boots hit the floor, then the asari's knees did likewise. Liara stared down at it, the gun shaking in her hand. The green asari looked up at her, and her eyes flashed, just for a moment, in confusion.

"...I'm... real?" the woman asked. Then, her eyes rolled back, and she tipped sideways, blue pooling freely around her, staining her skin to a more normal shade. Liara stared down at what she'd done. She'd killed her. She might have been a creepy, miscolored clone, but Liara still killed her.

Liara looked ahead, and flinched as a blast sounded from across the bore; Asha's charges going off, as the dark skinned human herself backed away from a small group of plant-zombies, perforating them as she went. Ahead, she could see the swarm approaching. And she knew she wouldn't be able to send them flying again. So she glanced back to inform Shepard of this.

Shepard was making those motions again, sinuous and smooth, like water flowing over a rock in a stream. And Wrex heaved with all the muscle that a centuries-old krogan had to bear. And then, with the sound of wet popping, the vine began to shift. It bulged, as Shepard's 'bending' finally became apparent; she was pulling the water of the plant to heave the plant itself. With another shout from both krogan and Avatar, the vine was torn asunder, and Wrex fell straight down onto the ground, as that vine slipped over the edge, the Thorian plummeting down a level, before halting just for a moment. Another tear, as a compromised vine gave way, and then, more tearing, as vines still higher couldn't bear the weight.

There was almost a scream, as that plant fell.

Liara turned, her gun forward, as the dead clone's twin came to a stop, horror on her face. "No! We cannot!" and then, the women, the creepers, and everything else, all tipped over and fell. The greenery clinging to the walls spasmed, flailing about, for several minutes, before everything stopped completely. Liara turned, looking at Shepard, at Wrex. Across the gap, where Jackie was still sitting slumped against a wall.

"I'd say its dead," Wrex offered after a long silence.

The wail reached up from the pit, the scream of something aware and afraid, burning alive at the bottom of a great fall.

"Or maybe now it's dead," Wrex said with a shrug.

"But now, we do not know what Saren was looking for," Liara said, quietly. She couldn't help but glance to the woman she had shot.

The greenery was starting to decay at a remarkable rate, the cysts on the walls vomiting forth half-formed asari women, or else grey slurry. Shepard shook her head, and started to walk back to where Garrus was arduously climbing back up to their level. "This is a loss, make no mistake about it. At least the colonists won't be enslaved by a shrub anymore," she said.

And then, there were wet footfalls.

Shepard, Wrex, and Liara all turned, guns in hand, as an asari woman staggered forward, hands clutching at the wall, before vomiting out a stomach's worth of grey slurry. She was covered in goo, obviously enough, but unlike every other asari that Liara had seen today, she was not naked, wearing a jumpsuit and sealed boots. Most tellingly, her skin was a purplish hue, much closer to normal than any shade of green. She breathed deeply, then stared down at her hands, covered in slime though they were, and then let out a laugh. The laugh was wild, but joyous. "I'm free! I'm freeee!" she did a spin on the ground, before tipping sideways and almost collapsing into the threshold. Since she'd done so facing Shepard, she stopped, slowly forcing her way back to her feet.

"Who are you? What were you doing here?" Shepard demanded.

"You must have killed the Thorian," she said, the appreciation so clear on her face that a blind hanar could have seen it. "Thank you. Bless you! You don't know what it was like having that... thing... in my mind."

"How do I know this isn't some kind of trick?" Shepard asked, still staring over rifle-sights.

"I have nothing to prove but... By the Goddess, is that _me_?" she asked, looking at the fallen corpses. She shuddered a moment. "I can see why you'd be suspicious. My name is Shiala. I serve... _served_... Matriarch Benezia."

"So you're in this with Saren?" Shepard asked.

Shiala shook her head, leaning against the threshold as though it were the only thing keeping her upright. Then again, it might just be. "Matriarch Benezia was trying to guide Saren down a gentler path, to prevent his charisma and his aptitude from passing toward dark ends. To show him a brighter way. But something went wrong. We... my blade-sisters and I... we started to... _believe_ him. Even though the things he said were so vile... we _wanted_ them."

Shepard's rifle dropped toward the ground. "Explain yourself."

"I don't know how to explain it," she said, shaking her head. "His influence is unbelievable. He has a way of making you believe things as he does. Think the way he does."

"More typical asari meddling," Wrex said caustically. "'Bout time it bit you in the ass."

"Mother was trying to do something noble!" Liara said.

"Liara? Is that you?" Shiala asked. She shook her head. "You have to stay away. Benezia isn't as you remember."

"I have to help her," Liara said. "Where is she?"

"I do not know," Shiala said, wincing as she rubbed her brow. "Saren gave me to that _thing_ so that he could have the Cipher. After that, I don't know what the Mistress did."

"The what?" Shepard asked.

"Call me old and jaded, but I'm a bit confused how he just managed to bend a Matriarch over his knee," Wrex said. "They tend to be a bit more formidable than that."

"Sovereign," Shiala said.

Shepard flinched, as though she was either distracted by something, or mildly electrocuted. Oddly, Liara was close on both counts.

"It's a massive warship, the likes of which I'd never seen," Shiala said. "And there is technology on board. Saren must have found something to dominate us, to break our will, to subvert our thinking. Something subtle, but iron-hard," her eyes dropped to the floor. "When... when Saren brought me here, I would have done anything for him. I _wanted_ to climb into that pustule. Goddess, what was wrong with me?"

Shepard shook her head, either to dispel the confusion or make her opinion known. Once again, Liara was oddly close, without realizing it. "That's what you get when you get entangled with Saren. He'll sell you out the instant you're no longer needed, like he did with you, like he tried with the Thorian. Hell, if he hadn't pissed it off, I might not have needed to kill it," Shiala nodded at Shepard's angrily given point. "What is the Cipher?"

"What Saren was looking for," Shiala said. She waved her hand, as though trying to find the words. "It's... the essence of being a Prothean. The way that they think, the way that they see the galaxy. Their technology was geared to be used by they alone. The Cipher would allow you to use it as they would."

Shepard's eyes widened, but not so wide as Liara's. "Something like that could set forward our understanding of the Protheans by centuries! It might even unlock new technologies buried in 'inactive' data-stores! Who knows what it might reveal?"

"Saren's using it to find the Conduit," Shiala finished. And she shook her head as Shepard turned toward her. "And no, I do not know what that is, or where. I was kept in the dark on many things, just a tool to be used, and thrown away."

"Give me the Cipher," Shepard said.

"Will you use it to stop Saren?" Shiala asked.

"Will that be a problem?" Shepard asked, finger slipping into the trigger guard of her rifle.

"I want you to do what I cannot," Shiala said. "I never want to be near him again. He was too... powerful for me," she paused, rubbing her arms before her chest, almost like a frightened child. "I have never felt so powerless as when I was aboard Sovereign, so small. I never want to feel that way again. If you will kill Saren, that is all I can ask."

"How did you give Saren the Cipher?" Shepard asked.

"Simply," she said, walking closer. Shepard's rifle was instantly up, but Shiala paused, hands raising slowly, out to the sides. "This will require a modicum of trust. If not, then have your mercenary keep his gun to my head."

"Easy enough," Wrex said, leveling his shotgun at her.

"Relax if you can. It will make this easier," she said, closing her eyes and moving a pace closer. "Turn your attention away from your body, from your hurts and your pleasures. Feel the ties that bind us, one to another, across worlds, and the void between stars," Shepard's eyes drifted closed, as did Shiala's. But when both opened, it wasn't quite what Liara expected. "Embrace Eternity!"

Shiala's eyes opened black, as Liara had somewhat expected. But Shepards, for a moment, they were burning, brilliant white.

Then, Shiala stumbled back, a dribble of blue running down out of her nose, and Shepard took a step back, her eyes returning to their native green. "That was... odd," Shepard said. Shiala looked positively ill.

"By the Goddess. She was right," Shiala said, eyes wide. "The Avatar is..."

"Enough of that," Shepard interrupted her. "What am I supposed to do with you, now?"

Shiala took a moment of deep breathing to compose herself, and wiped the blood off on the back of her hand. She rose to a proud stand. "I will accept responsibility for whatever happened here. Had I been... stronger... perhaps none of this would have happened."

Liara took a step toward the Avatar. "Shepard, you don't have to..."

"Are you accepting responsibility for what you did as Saren's slave?" Shepard asked, aghast. She shook her head, surprising Liara. "What you did while that... evil fuck was inside your head isn't your fault. It's his. Every drop of blood that gets spilled is on his hands."

"Oh," Liara said. "I was afraid you were going to shoot her, like Jeong."

"Jeong was an asshole who sold the people who trusted him. She was mind-fucked and puppetted. It's not similar at all," Shepard said. She slid the rifle onto her back, and Wrex gave a shrug, before putting his own shotgun away. "What are you going to do now?"

"I believe it would be best if I helped Zhu's Hope recover," Shiala said, a smile faintly on her lips. "Even if you don't hold me responsible for what I did... _I_ do. And this would be an appropriate and fitting penance."

"Fair enough," Shepard said. She looked around the room, then noticed Jackie on the ground. "Damn. This was a rough one. Everybody, meet me back on the ship. Its time that we left."

She stomped away, Wrex on her heel, as all of the vines and greenery started to dissolve into dust. Liara, though, turned to Shiala, a big grin on her face. Shiala got an understandably concerned look to her, as Liara almost zipped in front of her. "What is it, young miss T'Soni?"

"Could you show _me_ the Cipher, too?" she asked. Shiala rolled her eyes. "Pleeeeease?"

* * *

"Any contacts?" Pressly asked, as the battle line had reached the middle of the cryo-storage pods. The metalbender – as the other had to fall back with burns – shifted the blockade out of the way, showing that the mat of green slime had turned grey, and was beginning to fade completely. "Any other hostiles?"

"Negative, sir," Alenko said.

"Good," Pressly said. He turned, and looked at Tali for a long moment, before speaking. "You did very well today, miss Zorah."

"_Thank you_," Tali said, as the old man moved back from the breach. Alenko, though, couldn't help but keep his brows raised. "_What_?"

"Somebody clean up this mess before the Commander gets back!" Pressly ordered.

"Pressly gave you a compliment," Alenko said. Tali shrugged. "I just didn't think I'd see the day."

"Why is that?" she asked.

"He's got some... negative feelings about aliens, from the First Contact War," Alenko said. "You've really done well, Tali. We wouldn't be here without you."

"_Oh, you're too kind_," she said. And even though Alenko couldn't see it, he was sure that she was blushing. Stiffly, he limped back to the medical bay, where he really wanted to take some powerful painkillers, and then sleep until next week.

* * *

CODEX ENTRY: (Non-Council Races): Quarian Culture

_The 'loss' of the information about the culture of the quarian people is something of a sore point for cultural anthropologists and xenophiles throughout Council Space. While much of the 'internet' of Rannoch was freely available on the extranet for the centuries in which the quarians had free access to the Citadel and their homeworld both, very little of it survives in public record, as the Extranet purges unaccessed files from local buffers after a period of non-use. The only examples remaining for the pre-Geth Uprising culture for the quarian peoples exists in their folk-music, and a few galactically popular works of historical drama._

_The loss of so much 'contemporary' media relating to the quarians, lost not to hostile action but simple inattention, is the root of the current fascination many species have with the quarians, much stemming from the simple fact that almost nobody remembers their physical appearance. While there are a certain, well recieved group of historical dramas which circulate the extranet, produced on Rannoch by quarian actors, their period appropriate costumes were body-and-face concealing robes, as would be necessary on the arid and unforgiving Rannoch. This has caused a certain romanticization of the quarian form, to a level usually reserved for asari._

_Folk music, the other remaining force for quarian culture, exists in the Flotilla and is almost omnipresent. The quarians quickly decided that separating themselves along obsolete cultural divides, racial lines, or nationalities would only result in inbreeding and sectarianism. At the same time, they wanted to preserve the remnants of their parent cultures. Thus, music tends to be omnipresent in the Flotilla, centuries-old songs from dozens of quarian cultures being taught and retaught to the new generations in an attempt to hold onto something from the vaunted homeworld._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	9. She Who Fights Monsters

"This is a hell of a mess," Pressly said, glaring down at the greasy mess which was all that remained of the infestation that had almost overtaken the Normandy. He'd heard from Adeks that if it had spread to the drive core, it would likely have destroyed the ship completely, cracking containment and blowing the engines – and everything within a mile of them – into dust. Garrus understood the human's disgust, and apprehension. This was a close call. Much closer than anybody would have liked.

"Well, the turians always say that any fight you can walk away from is a good one," he chuckled. "The krogan pretty much omit the last half of that."

"I wasn't aware you had a problem with the krogan aboard," Pressly's voice was quite stern. Garrus shrugged.

"I've had a few try to kill me over the years, even during my C-Sec days. It's bound to leave an impression," he said easily, and then turned as he saw Shepard moving toward the med-bay. "Shepard, are we doing that debrief?"

"In a minute," she said, before ducking into the med-bay. Garrus gave a shrug, and then followed after her. Within, Nilsdottir was sitting up, and she didn't look like her face had been reduced to jelly, but that wasn't to say she looked like she was ready for a fight. "Jackie, are you still breathing?"

"More or less, Shepard," Nilsdottir answered, wincing as she shifted her weight. Chakwas slipped into the room from the chamber beyond, and gave a tut at the many intruders onto her domain.

"Commander," she said. "Nilsdottir will make a complete recovery, but it will take some time for her bones to fully knit. I cannot recommend active duty until they do."

"Oh, come on. I've fought with worse," Nilsdottir griped.

"And your body is a road-map of how ill-advised that is," Chakwas pointed out, motioning toward the numerable scars which were visible even with Nilsdottir fully dressed. "I'm putting Nilsdottir on restricted duty until I am convinced that she's adequately recovered."

"Doctor, I can't have half my team lying on cots all day," Shepard pointed out.

"You needn't worry about that," Chakwas said. "Alenko has recovered fully. As long as you don't intend to get into a firefight before dinner-time, I am sure he will be prepared for duty at your next engagement."

Shepard chuckled. "Best news I've heard all day. Where is he, anyway?"

Chakwas pointed to a tube built into the wall of the med-bay, which slid out onto a table. As it did, Alenko was revealed, legs first, to the room. While Garrus wasn't exactly an expert on the human form, particularly the male one, Kaiden had a look of strength and endurance, his torso almost a column of hard muscle. Truth be told, the body-shape of human males was much like turian females; it was a male trait to pinch at the waist. Females needed more... body room.

Shepard, though, had a vaguely hungry look as she stared at him. Oh, boy. So it was going to be _that_ kind of cruise, was it, Garrus thought? Well, since she was tasked with bringing down a blight on the face of turian-kind, he could accept a bit of flirtation. He'd done worse in his time. Alenko pushed himself off of the table, looking almost candy-coated. Likely, a result of the grafted skin he'd gotten put on after his acid-bath. Still, the Commander's eyes feasted well, as far as Garrus could see, and she almost looked a bit disappointed when he pulled on a shirt. "Glad to see you're checking up on me," Alenko said. "Sorry to hear about Nilsdottir."

"I'm right here, asshole!" Nilsdottir griped, swinging back-handed to cuff him, but Alenko was easily able to lean out of the way, and the effort drew a hiss of pulled muscles or worse from the biotic.

"You'll also probably want this back," Chakwas said, handing a biotic amp to Nilsdottir. Nilsdottir stopped stone still as it dropped into her hand. Then, she pawed at the back of her neck, where certain scars converged. "You won't need to worry about the 'failsafe'. It seems to have degraded. Possibly as a result of your actions under Zhu's Hope," Chakwas said professionally. "I was as surprised as you are to have that thing drop out of your socket. I assume you want it back?"

"Damn straight I do," she said, lifting her hair and shoving it back in, before clutching a fist and letting blue light bathe over it. "Alright. I'm up..."

"But on restricted duty," Chakwas interrupted her.

"...so let's shoot shit on what went wrong down on Feros," the biotic finished, before slowly stepping out of the room, almost like an old woman with brittle bones. Alenko watched her leave, but then glanced to Garrus and Shepard.

"I hear you had a bit of an adventure on Feros," Alenko said pleasantly.

"And you didn't lack for entertainment up here," Garrus said with a shrug.

"I hesitate to say so, but I think that Tali really impressed the XO," Alenko said to Shepard. Shepard let out a grunt of surprise.

"That's not something that happens every day," she muttered. "Debrief is in ten. You know where."

"Aye, Commander," Alenko said, moving out quite a bit more spritely than Nilsdottir had. Shepard then turned to Garrus.

"I assume something's on your mind, otherwise you wouldn't have followed me in here," she said.

Garrus glanced at Chakwas, who took the hint and moved back into the other room. "Shepard, I've seen a lot of things in my time, but few of them have really unsettled me," he said.

"The Thorian was a piece of work," Shepard shook her head, eyes distant. "If it hadn't demanded the colonists, we might have worked something out."

"I wasn't talking about that," he said. "I was talking about Lizbeth."

"What?" Shepard asked.

"You were about to execute an unarmed civilian in cold blood," Garrus spelled it out for her. "That kind of brutality, I expect from Blue Suns pirates or Blood Pack kill-squads. Not from a Spectre. At least, not from a Spectre who isn't Saren."

That might have been the wrong thing to say, because Shepard's expression went deathly cold. "What did you call me?"

"You're a renegade," Garrus said. He gave a laugh and a shake of his head, "and I know that it's just the universe making fun of me that I'm the one to say it, but you've got to tone it down. We have a saying on Palaven, that she who hunts monsters should make sure not to become a monster herself, because then even if she succeeds, there's still a monster running around and not much has changed."

She stared at him for a few, long seconds, before clicking her tongue in her mouth. "I see."

"If I'm out of line, say so, but we're after Saren, his Conduit, and his 'Reapers'," Garrus said. "We've got to keep a level head if we're going to beat him. Especially if what Shiala said about his Sovereign technology is true."

She stared, but the coldness had melted somewhat. Not because of any particular warmth in her, but probably simply in that she had to admit he had a point. "You're not wrong, Garrus."

"Good to hear it," he said. He moved to the door, and she was at his side when they left the med-bay. She didn't move far, though, before coming to a halt, confusion on her face. "What?"

"XO, what is all this?" she asked, pointing at a great pile of jetsam which dominated the area once taken up by the mess-tables. Pressly looked up from a pad, and then to the pile.

"Equipment fouled by the Thorian Creep," he said. "We were going to see if we could sterilize it, but until then, containment."

"Anything valuable?" she asked.

"Only the Mako, and we left that in the bay for obvious reasons," Pressly said.

"Then flash it and dump it out the airlock before we leave orbit," she said.

"Ma'am, your old armor is in there," Pressly pointed out.

"Yes, it is," Shepard agreed, before heading up the stairs. Garrus offered the older human a shrug, and then went up after her. "I swear, you'd think nobody on this ship could get anything done if I didn't poke my head in every five minutes."

"That's command for you," Garrus said lightly. "All the glory for doing your job falls on your crew, and all the blame when you fail lands on you."

"Why do people take the job, again?" Shepard asked dryly.

"Money, power, women," Garrus rattled off on his fingers. Then, he moved to his other hand. "Being the one who pulls the trigger on very big guns."

"Ah, all the things which are best in life," Shepard agreed with a chortle.

"So you admit to being into women?" Garrus asked.

"That was _one time_! And if you mention it again, you're going out the airlock with the garbage," Shepard said sternly, but with a bit of red creeping amidst her freckles. It took all Garrus had not to laugh outright at that.

* * *

Consensus was achieved, and unusually, it was unanimous, even including the lower order run-times. The platform was salvageable. The old platform had 'subconsciously' stemmed its own leaking fluids, automatic repair subroutines shunting flows from the damaged portions to ones still intact. They estimated that roughly ten kilograms of processor, coolant, and redundant power storage equipment was in an inoperable state. Not ideal. Hardly terminal.

The old platform's iris opened, and new visual data flooded into its processors. Time stamp retrieving; retrieved. The platform had been under emergency shutdown for twenty two hours, seven minutes. Power reserves were sufficient to return to the FTL shuttle, with a thirty seven percent margin for obstruction. Structural integrity... Poor.

The old platform tried to raise its arms, testing their support. Its left raised easily. Its right, did not. The neck craned down, and beheld the gaping hole in its platforms torso. They agreed that unless a suitable patch was found to hold the platform together, there would be a major loss in utility. Recalculating its power reserves to reach the FTL shuttle given an inoperable limb, the margin for obstruction dropped to six percent.

Most geth consenses would have taken that calculation as a clear path, a sure sign to advance. Six percent was as good as one hundred percent, given adequate computational power, and the old platform, with its thousand and more run-times, did not lack for computational power. They, on the other hand, did not agree with what most geth networks would have decided. An immediate patch was needed. The platform would need to return intact.

The eye looked up, as a ship unlike any in its databanks pulled up out of a docking area, roughly one and one half kilometers distant. They analyzed the design, and found it only after a swift branch into the Extranet. The Normandy. Systems Alliance vessel, co-designed with the Turian Hierarchy. Another search. Commanded by Captain Anderson, now relieved of duty. Transferred to Citadel Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. The geth polled a consensus. Nine hundred agreed that the Normandy was involved in the elimination of Heretic Geth on this planet. Further, eight hundred desired further information on the individuals aboard.

The platform had a purpose; to relate to the Veil Geth, to the True Geth, the nature of the galaxy outside their secluded home. There was great trust put upon them. And now, they needed to find something to hold their platform together. The ship began to ascend, but even as it did, the platform's iris focused in, as the bay on the front of the craft opened up. The ship dipped down for just a moment, and a variety of debris was ejected from it, raining down toward the platform, before the ship closed its bay, and returned to ascent into outer space.

Thus, a suit of N7 Onyx Light Armor dropped from two kilometers up, and hit an old geth platform in the 'face'.

* * *

**Chapter 9**

**She Who Fights Monsters**

* * *

The aliens and humans sitting around the comms room had scarcely taken their seats by the time that Shepard entered, and stomped her way to the chair nearest the comms relay. She kneaded her brow, trying to work out the throbbing behind her eyes that she'd had since Shiala stuck it in, metaphorically speaking, and it didn't respond to either painkillers or alcohol, both in significant quantities. Even as she was settling into her seat, Liara leaned toward her.

"Are you alright, Shepard? Ever since you were given the Cipher, you seem out of sorts. Are you supposed to be this pale?" she asked earnestly.

"I just got brain-probed, and then said brains got scrambled like the eggs I ate this morning," Shepard pointed out, rubbing her forehead. "How do you think I'm supposed to feel."

"I did not notice any side effects," Liara said.

"Oh, you _didn't_," Garrus said, before cutting himself off with a chuckle. "What am I saying? Liara, turn down a chance to have Protheans literally in her brain? Not in a million years."

"I am just saying that perhaps there might be some sort of unwanted effects due to human neurology," Liara said defensively. "And it was purely done in the best interests of history and academic interests, _most definitely not_ because it happened to fulfil a dream which I had since I was twelve years old and digging holes in public parks!"

All eyes turned to her, and she stared defiantly at Garrus, as the turian visibly tried to restrain himself from laughing.

"Don't judge me!" Liara snapped, blushing a furious blue.

"_Be that as it may_," Tali said. "_That little escapade poked holes in your ship and contaminated it. It also pretty much ensured that Exogeni's going to have stock-prices low enough that you can't trip over them by next week. Which is fitting for a bunch of mad-scientist bosh'tets, if you ask me._"

"And we don't have any more idea where Saren is than we did before," Alenko pointed out, rubbing his mouth as he did.

"We wait for either him, or one of his lackeys to poke his head up, and then we promptly kick 'em in the teeth," Shepard said. "The Cipher wasn't the only thing he was looking for, otherwise he wouldn't have needed as much money as he took before leaving the Spectres. Am I right, Tali?"

"_It was a huge sum_," she said with a shrug and a nod.

"So what do we do now, Commander?" al'Wahim asked.

"Fix our ship, replace anything which was ruined. Earth's closer, so we'll go there," she said. "Unless there's anything else, you're all dismissed."

"_I do have one thing,_" Tali said, forestalling Wrex getting up. "_Why were only Jackie and I not affected when everybody else went torpid_?"

"I couldn't tell you," Shepard said with a shrug. "But it's good to know that we can't get sideswiped by that sort of mental bullshit if push comes to shove."

"Maybe you should try asking Doctor Chakwas. She might have insight for you," Liara said helpfully. She looked to Shepard. "Also, I believe that the Cipher might serve to clarify your visions somewhat. If you are interested in trying to access the Prothean Beacon's message once more, you know where you can find me."

Shepard gave an impatient nod, and the others filed out. She, though, turned to the holo-tanks. "Alright, Joker. Patch me through to the Council. They're probably going to be pissy that I killed the Thorian."

"Patching you through, Commander," Joker said with a distracted tone. Shepard didn't pay it much attention. She had other, political-ey things to worry about. The image of the three aliens who liked to play god over the galaxy popped in, and immediately froze up, jumping forward jerkily and unevenly.

"Commander Shepard. We have just received received received received received..." Tevos said, obviously caught in a loop. Shepard sighed, and walked up to the machine, before delivering a hard kick to the housing. That was followed by a descending 'vyoooo' sound, as the holograms folded in on themselves and winked out.

"Oh, what the fuck?" Shepard muttered. "Adeks, the Comms are acting up again!"

"On my way, don't get your hair in a knot," Adeks' voice came through the speakers, and true to form, in less than a minute, the krogan was striding through the door. "I've got enough on my problem with greasy plant-shit all over the Mako that I shouldn't have to spend time playing with people's FTLCs."

"I didn't tell you to fix the Mako. I'd have just flashed it and dumped it with the garbage," Shepard offered.

"Yeah, well, your Admiral Hackett wasn't about to sign off on another IFV," Adeks said with a chuckle as he bent down, and pried off the panel to the device. He looked at it, and then began to swear in one of the krogan tongues. Probably Rogul, if history was any judge. "Just my luck. That shit got in there. This is going to require a complete rebuild."

"How long?"

"You don't make these parts," he shook his head. "Divert to Palaven? Two days. Citadel, we can have it fixed in six hours."

Shepard sighed. "As much of an olive-branch this ship is, having turian tech in it is a pain in the ass, sometimes."

"You're preaching to the converted," Adeks said. Shepard sighed, then looked up.

"Joker, set a new course. We're heading to the Citadel."

"Really? Did you forget something the last time you were there, or are you just trying to avoid one of your exes?" Joker asked.

"Not the time, Joker," Shepard said coldly.

"Something we should know about?" Adeks asked, pulling out various degraded parts.

"Just got a message from somebody I'd rather have left in my past," she muttered. "Get this thing ready for when we land on the Citadel. The less time we spend with our thumbs up our butts, the better."

"Whatever you say, Commander," Adeks gave a shrug, and went back to work. Shepard, therefore, was left to her own devices, and worse, to her own boredom. She knew it was almost half a day back to the Citadel, and most of that was during her day-cycle. And she couldn't even target practice in the hold, since it was quarantined after the Thorian Creep got in. She was going to lose her mind.

Shepard headed down to the crew deck, raising a brow at how quickly a layer of plastic had been laid down on the floor, and pinned up cutting off access to the cryo-tubes. The only holes in that wall of plastic lead to the infirmary, and to her quarters. And she didn't want to spend fifteen hours in her quarters. So she walked into the center of the plastic sheeting, pulled the canteen from her back pocket, and dumped some water onto the sheet. She slipped it back, and quietly began to waterbend, just keeping her skills sharp, to keep her eyes and hands ready.

It wasn't long before she heard the elevator arriving behind her, and quiet footsteps onto the plastic. Shepard glanced over her shoulder, to see the quarian observing her practice. "Something on your mind?" Shepard asked, even as she flicked out into a whip.

"_How did you start waterbending?_" Tali asked. Shepard raised a brow at that. "_I know it wasn't the first thing you learned. Not your 'native element', the way Kaiden put it. So how did you start to learn it?_"

Shepard shrugged, and stomped the floor a bit, raising a section of the deck panelling under the plastic up, causing the plastic to form a bowl. She then dropped the water into that bowl. "It all started with just figuring out how to pull the water," she said. She then moved into the first form she managed to get right, and even that, after a long time of failure. It was sinuous and flowing, much like the motion she used to unfasten the Thorian's vine from the wall, but that was simply a much more advanced version of this basic lesson. As she moved, the water mimed her, sloshing to and fro in its little bowl. "Waterbenders learned the style miming the moon and the tides against the shore. I hear some also learned from sea monsters called Unagi, but this is the kind they taught me. Once you figure out how to get it to push and pull, then you can start to do more advanced things."

"_Like when you controlled Fai Dan's body?_" Tali asked.

"Human bodies are mostly water. Most living things are. Hanar are barely anything but," she chuckled lightly. "Bloodbending's pretty much the most advanced waterbending there is. It's bending water you can't see, in ways which don't cause irreparable harm. It's easy to kill with the bending that waterbenders use. It's a lot harder to be careful with it."

Tali looked down at the bowl, as Shepard let the water slosh back down into it. "_So it's just as easy as that, make the movements and the water obeys_?"

"Not really," Shepard said. "You have to be a waterbender. Or the Avatar, in my case."

"_But how do you know you're a waterbender?_" Tali asked.

Shepard raised a finger, about to answer, when she realized that she had no clue. "I guess it's when you first waterbend."

"_So you don't know you're a waterbender until you waterbend, and you wouldn't start training to waterbend unless you're a waterbender. How did this thing ever become a prevalent if that's the way it worked?_" Tali asked, rubbing her faceplate.

"There's probably more to it," Shepard said, giving a shrug. "You're just asking the wrong person."

"_You're the Avatar. I thought you were supposed to know these things_," Tali said, head tilting to one side.

"Yeah, well, I never said I was a very good Avatar, now did I?" she asked darkly.

Tali probably rolled her eyes, but it was hard to tell with that helmet. She then turned her attention to the bowl, and limbered her arms. "_So it's just pushing and pulling. Seems too easy, to me_."

"It's not," Shepard pointed out, as Tali began to mime Shepard's previous motions. "Usually, it takes weeks before they can so much as cause a ripple. But once they know, they tend to advance fairly quick. I wouldn't be too worried if it doesn't work," she said, and then glanced down to that bowl.

And the water sloshing to and fro in it. Shepard's eyes widened, and when Tali looked down, she let out a peep, her hands flying to her faceplate, and she backed off a step. Tali looked down, then up at Shepard, then down again. She pointed at the bowl. "_Did... did I do that? Was that __me__?_"

"It wasn't me," Shepard said. She got a smirk on her face. "Looks like you just discovered you're a waterbender."

Tali then started to say... things. Many things, in a rapid litany of an alien language which her translators couldn't track, but they were obviously frantic and of high volume. Then, she turned, and grabbed Shepard by the shoulders. "_A waterbender! I am a waterbender!_"

"Seems like," Shepard said, leaning back.

Tali let out a high-pitched 'squee' as she pulled the reluctant Avatar into a squeezing embrace, a squee which Shepard was fatefully protected from the full extent of by the limitations of Tali's encounter suit. It still drove the Avatar to wince. "_Father's going to be so proud! My friends are going to be so jealous! Shepard, can you teach me? Please? I promise, I'll be the best student you ever had_!"

"You'd be the _first_ student I ever had, so by default..." Shepard pointed out, letting the implication drag out.

"_I'm going to send a wave to that thug Prazza right now and rub his face in it! Who's the __spoiled rich girl now, Prazza?_" Tali asked, breaking away. "_When can we start? Can we start now? I promise, I'll better any expectation you have!_"

"Calm down, Tali," Shepard said, backing away so the quarian didn't hug her again. "There'll be plenty of time."

"_I'm sorry. I'm just excited! I'm a __waterbender__!_" she then squeed again, causing Shepard to rub at an ear, even as the quarian practically skipped away.

Shepard watched, blinking slowly. "Well, I guess I know what _I'm_ doing until I reach the Citadel..."

* * *

"So, who do you think's the heaviest drinker?" Garrus asked as he rolled the dice. He let out a sigh as it showed an eleven. That certainly didn't open any paths for him.

"What, between Adeks and Wrex?" Nilsdottir asked, picking up the twelve-sided die and making her own throw, netting another eleven, which for her, was good news. He advanced the blue tokens along the paths open to him, gaining quite a bit of ground, mostly at Garrus' expense.

"No, I was actually interested in the non-krogan," Garrus clarified.

"That would make the forerunners our favorite biotic, and our esteemed commander," the ship's doctor said from the sidelines, where she was observing without taking part.

Garrus turned to her. "Really? I can see her," he turned a thumb toward the essentially crippled biotic, "but the Commander?"

"She drinks more than I'm comfortable with," Chakwas said. Alenko took the dice, and rolled them, getting a four, which was exactly what he needed. Garrus stared at the fall flatly, then up to Alenko as the human biotic not only reversed Nilsdottir's advance, but crushed the rest of them in one fell swoop.

"If I call you a biotic cheater, you're just going to pull the human card on me, aren't you?" Garrus asked smoothly.

"I don't cheat at games of chance," Alenko said, sounding a little insulted. "It wouldn't be fair."

Garrus laughed at that. Then, the laughter slowed a bit. "Oh, you're serious, aren't you?"

Alenko shrugged.

Garrus shook his head slowly. "Great. I come onto a human ship and gamble with one the likes of which they make by the boat-load back on Palaven," he pointed out, pushing the winnings toward Alenko. Although, in this case, winnings were getting out of doing some of the more tedious things crew had to do when in space.

"I choose to take that as a compliment," Alenko said with a shrug. The door opened, and all looked back, to see Tali practically quivering as she entered the room. Alenko's brow furrowed when he turned to see her. "Tali? Is something wrong?"

"_I'M A WATERBENDER!_" the enthusiastic quarian squealed, grabbing the back of Alenko into a reverse-hug.

"Oh, that's great," Kaiden said, obviously not sure for the reason of her current mania. Garrus was likewise confused, which only became more confused when the quarian moved from Alenko and grabbed Garrus next.

"_WATERBENDER! ME!_" before letting out a 'squee' which made Garrus' mandibles twitch slightly. She was quite a bit stronger than he would have given her credit for, actually.

"Are most new waterbenders this excitable?" Garrus asked, as Tali released her death grip.

"No, mostly they're what the fuck are you–" Nilsdottir got out, before Tali had her in a creaking hug as well. "Ow FUCK! Ribs! RIBS!"

"_Oh, sorry_," Tali said, backing away from her, letting a moment of silence descend upon them all. Then, she practically danced in the spot, before giggling her way out of the room. Garrus just stared at the whole thing, his jaw slack with incomprehension.

"What just happened?" Garrus asked.

"...apparently, Tali is a waterbender now," Alenko said, rolling the die again, although this time getting a one, which was anything but useful at the start of a game.

"'Sides that, fuck if I know," Nilsdottir muttered, rubbing her back with an expression of discomfort. "oooh, shit, that girl's got _some_ grip."

"Alright, next," he said, glancing toward the tattooed human who had Nilsdottir's hand on his thigh.

"Alright," Murtock said, scratching his stubbly neck for a moment. "Who's got the longest criminal record, besides me, I mean."

"Wrex," all agreed instantly.

"Ah, man, I suck at this," Murtock muttered.

"My turn," Nilsdottir broke in, with a throw of the dice. "Who was oldest the first time they got laid?"

* * *

Fifteen hours passed remarkably quickly, when a person had something to do. And fifteen hours, apparently, made a lot of difference when teaching a quarian. Shepard stared in quiet, but nevertheless present awe at how quickly the girl was picking up waterbending tricks which took Shepard herself months to figure out, most of them having to be beaten into her head by a man who would, for a time, be her... boyfriend? Lover? It was a hard thing to describe even to herself, let alone to anybody who'd ask. Didn't much matter, though. That relationship ended the same way every one of Shepard's did, with screaming and explosions, although more of the former than the latter in that case.

The explosion was quite unexpected, and actually somewhat welcomed.

"No, you have to keep the movement of your wrists supple," Shepard said. She showed the movement herself, and Tali nodded, before almost instantly correcting perfectly, and sending out a flawless water-whip. That was something Shepard took two years to figure out. The rest had come almost in a great torrent, once she'd gotten the early things out of her way. Shepard, at this moment, was sitting next to the wall of the mess, on top of plastic, as she scrubbed the black scorch off of her armor.

"_Is waterbending always this easy to learn?_" Tali asked.

"No. Not even remotely," Shepard said. "You're the kind of natural that would probably make Avatar Korra envious."

"_Who is that_?" Tali asked.

"One of my past lives. She was an early starter. Bending three elements by the time she was five," she gave a shrug. Shepard cracked a smirk. "My firebending master told me that I was a lot like her. I didn't think she meant it as a compliment."

"_I'll have to look her up some time_," Tali said, letting the water gather into a sphere she kept between her hands, peering into it. "_Um... Shepard, do you think I could learn to heal now?_"

"Nope," Shepard said. The quarian's shoulders slumped a bit. "Take it easy. You've been bending for half a day straight. You're not going to need to bring somebody back from the dead today, on the Citadel."

"_Shepard, I am the first waterbender the quarians have ever had_!" she said, urgency in her words as the water began to crystallize into ice. And more impressively, Tali didn't even seem aware that she was doing it. "_I need to bring something back to my people when my Pilgrimage is over, and this could change things for the better for my people, forever!_"

"Then calm down, and you'll get it," she said. "'Sides, I'm hardly the best teacher for healing. I know some of it, but I'm not exactly a Soulcatcher..."

"_A what?_" she asked, putting the now frozen sphere of ice into the bowl.

"It's a long story," she waved the question away. That was a couple of Avatars ago, anyway. "Just cool your engines and I'll get you sorted."

Tali fidgeted a bit, kneading her fingers. "_I have to do this_," Tali said. "_I don't think you understand how much is expected of me_."

"Why's that?" Shepard said, putting her now mostly cleaned armor aside. The black was gone, but there was still a furrow running up one breast and shoulder.

"_Like I said, my father's an Admiral. In the Flotilla, certain families have different expectations attached to them. Reegars are stupendous warriors, all the way back to the Homeworld. Uttas are masters at improvisation, at making something out of nothing. Calis-es are renowned spies, the kind of people you don't see until they want you to see them, and..._"

"And what does that make Zorah?"

Tali's gaze, which for that whole spiel was on the plastic on the floor, slowly rose to Shepard. "_...saviors_."

"Excuse me?"

"_Father saved a ship from pirates when he was only fifteen years old, along with Uncle Han. Great Grandmother prevented a batarian pirate lord from taking our entire species prisoner and using us for slave labor. And __her__ great great grandfather was the quarian who held the Mass Relay until the Flotilla... or what was the Flotilla back then... could get away from the Geth after the Uprising. There's more expected from my family than any other. I can't let them down._"

"They do this for every kid who leaves the fleet?" Shepard asked.

"_Sort of. Usually, the Pilgrim returns with something like a new salvaged ship, or a mineral-rich asteroid belt that hasn't already been claimed, and the captains welcome them back with open arms. But I need to bring back something... more. Something bigger._"

"Why?" Shepard asked.

"_...I just do_," she shrugged. "_I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if I... how does Jackie put it... Half-ass it_?"

Shepard sighed. "Well, I can see why you're so... eager. But take a break once and a while. You can't build a city in a day, and you can't learn waterbending in a weekend."

"_I know. But for the first time since I left the Flotilla, I feel like I have something really __worth__ bringing home_," Tali said, and Shepard could almost _hear_ her smiling under that helmet. Shepard matched that hypothetical smile with a smirk of her own.

"Then we'd best make sure you have something worth showing them," she said.

* * *

Kaiden gave a smile to Shepard as she came through the airlock, docked as they now were at the Citadel. They had to skirt around a pair of salarians who were carefully moving something in a large box through down the length of the ship, toward where the broken comms unit was housed. "I notice you're spending some time with the crew, of late," Alenko said.

"Hrm?" Shepard muttered.

"Tali," he said, nodding back toward the ship.

"Oh, I suppose you heard the good news," she said sarcastically.

"I'm pretty sure my parents back in Republic City heard the news," Alenko went one step further.

"You're a Republican?" Shepard asked. "Strange, I would have had you pegged for a Fire National."

"Well, it's obvious you haven't read my service dossier. I'll take that as you wanting to allow me some privacy," he said, matching stride with her as she moved to the elevator. She paused. No, she _hesitated_, before pushing that button. Kaiden noticed it, but he didn't speak on it. If she wanted to explain that, she'd do it on her own time. "I grew up on the west coast, a little piece of real estate between the mountains and the sea. Great views, but not much to do if you're not into skiing. And crime might have been a problem there in the past, but now, it's a fairly safe city. Do you have anybody left, from Earth, I mean?"

"My family died on Mindoir," Shepard said grimly.

"I was referring to your _other_ family," Kaiden prompted. Shepard turned a green eye toward him. Shepard sighed and nodded.

"Right. My aunt," she said. "Perfect picture of what happens when one girl gets the 'magical wind powers', and the other doesn't. Hannah got disowned, as she'd tell it. I didn't even know her before Anderson dropped me at her doorstep..."

"Anderson?" Kaiden asked. This was news to him.

Shepard nodded, sighing under her breath. "He was a Storm King – N7 ODST – back then. Must have been right after he got fucked over by Saren. His squad hot-dropped onto Mindoir, and they found me in the rubble. Pretty much, just me."

Kaiden nodded. That explained a few things. Most notably the leniency that Shepard got while Anderson was in command. "What was living with your Aunt like?"

Shepard stepped forward through the door of the elevator, and leaned up against the side of the thing, her eyes on her feet. "Cold," she said. "I never figured out what made Mom and Hannah hate each other, but it ran deep. She was gone most of the time, anyway. She's captain of the SSV Wulong. It was me, a couple of cousins a few years older than me, who always had their own things to do, and an empty apartment."

Kaiden nodded. More and more, things came into focus. "Shepard, can I ask you something?"

"Could I stop you short of shooting you?" Shepard asked, her eyes turning to him with a dry look on her face.

"Why did you shoot Jeong?" he asked. Shepard got a sour look on her face and turned away. "I understand that there's a strong desire to cut corners, but I've seen what happens when you stop caring about what's right, and just focus on what's expedient. Things tend to go flying off the slippery slope a lot faster than you'd think possible."

"I shot him because he needed shooting, and I was available and willing," Shepard said.

"There's more to it than that," Alenko pressed. He sighed. "I know you have no reason to trust me with this, but..."

"Not?" Shepard asked. "Alenko, I've known you longer than almost anybody else on that ship."

"That is true," Alenko noted. His first duty to Shepard was acting as Liaison between the military and the White Lotus Society. Four years later, and he's still here, albeit still in the dark about a lot of things. She'd opened up more in the last few weeks than in the four years before combined. "I'm just talking from experience. I've seen what happens when you start selling your soul. It doesn't end well."

"What do you mean?" Shepard asked. Now, it was Alenko's turn to spill his guts. Lovely.

"You know the records on the biotic training facility out on Jump Zero?" Kaiden asked. Shepard shrugged. "They're all classified. ALMA made... mistakes. The kind of mistakes which would make the Alliance look bad. ALMA was founded to track biotic exposures and develop implants for human use. Once the Alliance had an embassy on the Citadel, ALMA could bring in... experts."

"I'm sensing air-quotes, Alenko," Shepard pointed out, stepping off the elevator. Then, she paused again, and looked back. Kaiden paused his own train of thought, as she shook her head, as though dismissing something, and only then did he allow himself to continue.

"Their idea of experts wasn't exactly sunshine and roses for the students," Alenko admitted. He shook his head, a wry smile on his face. "They brought in an ex-Mil turian biotic named Vernus. He was the kind of fellow who'd introduce himself by saying 'I commanded the ship which killed your father'," he shrugged. "Which was kind of foolish, considering my father's _still_ living in Republic City. But since I was young, I called him on it, and he had it in for me since. He cut corners, and he pushed hard. You either came out superhuman, or a wreck. I've seen both."

"A wreck as in...?" Shepard prompted.

Alenko sighed, staring forward as they made their way through the C-Sec offices, and out into the Presidium. "A lot of kids snapped. Some died."

"Bastard," Shepard shook her head lightly.

"That's what'll happen when you cut corners, Commander. If you play fast and loose, you can't always see who's going to suffer from it," Kaiden said. "So if you'll heed your Lieutenant's advice, keep your eyes and your mind open. There's _always_ another way. It might even be a better one."

"You seem to have quite a bit on your mind," Shepard said, glancing toward him. "There some reason you came to _me_ with it? I'm not exactly the best sounding board. If you've got a problem, you should talk to a shrink about it."

Kaiden chuckled lightly. "Shepard, I'm thirty-five. You don't live this long without coming to terms with the things which brought you here. And you learn that if somebody is special to you, you help them."

Shepard stopped. "Special?" she asked, confusion on her face.

"I don't make a habit of complicating chain of command," Kaiden said. "Just... bear what I said in mind."

It was lucky that Kaiden couldn't see Shepard's expression, right then, because it became almost predatory. By the time he turned back, it was deadpan once again. "I'll... keep that in mind," she said.

* * *

There was a lot on Shepard's mind, as she moved across the Presidium, Alenko at her side. A lot of what was on her mind was, in fact, Alenko. It was true what she'd said, that she'd known him longer than anybody else on the Normandy with the sole exception of Nilsdottir. But for years, he was... well, a part of the scenery. Now, he was more than scenery. And that left her a bit torn. Yes, he was very, very good looking – if not to the extent that Private Vega had been – but at the same time, there was a little voice in the back of her mind telling her that it wasn't going to end well.

Because it never did.

She only had to look back at her own history to know that when it came to relationships, she was an absolute and utter trainwreck. Her first boyfriend cheated on her, so she broke his jaw, and her stint in Juvie meant that she missed junior prom. Her next paramour worthy of the name got into drugs, and tried to pimp her out. So she broke his legs, and this time, missed her own graduation in a rare display of Hannah Sohryu deigning to parent, and grounding her. After that, it was a long line of one-night stands, half-or-completely drunk soldiers, and regrettable decisions.

And then, Samoet.

That was as long a relationship as she ever managed to maintain in her life. And when it went down, like all the others, it went down with such fury and noise that it put the bomb which erased Old Omashu from the maps to shame. This was just going to be another bad memory, she could see it coming.

So focused was she, in fact, on beating herself up, that she almost walked through a reporter. She took a step back, as the Si Wongi woman brought up a pad, a newscaster smile on her face. "I was hoping I'd run into you," the woman said. "Khalisa bint Sinan al'Jalani, Westerlund News."

"Wha..." Shepard said, and blinked as bright lights were suddenly in her eyes, a camera drone flying over the reporter's shoulder.

"Humans have been trying to get the respect of the galactic community for almost three decades. With that in mind, what are your thoughts on being the first human Spectre?" al'Jalani managed to cram in, leaving Shepard without a gap to raise a protest, let alone a response.

"Well, it's a bit overdue," Shepard said with a scowl, her mind instantly going to Anderson and the screw-job he'd gotten. "The Council needs to know that humanity isn't going to sit meekly on the sidelines anymore. We're stepping up, and now they're finally starting to admit it. At least to themselves."

"Interesting. It has been said by certain groups that without firm actions, the Council will continue to look upon humans and the Systems Alliance as a backwater, worthy of pity at best and scorn at worst, something to be used and then discarded. Have the Council ever ordered you to undertake a task against the best interests of your own species, Commander?" al'Jalani launched in immediately. It was frankly a little remarkable how she could speak in such a way that there was no real recourse to interrupt her short of punching her in the face.

And with Alenko at her side, there was a litany running through her mind. Even as her fist tightened, it kept repeating 'don't punch the reporter, don't punch the reporter, don't punch the reporter'.

"I'd like to think that the Council knows better than to pit me against my own people," Shepard said flatly. "They might be myopic, but they're not idiots. Most of the time."

"I see. You have also been given command of a highly advanced new warship to undertake your missions," al'Jalani continued, reading from her pad. "Do you have anything to say about this... 'Normandy'?"

Don't punch the reporter.

"The Normandy is a triumph of human engineering, and I won't have you defaming her," Shepard said, pointing al'Jalani out. "Her development is on par with our fighter/drone carriers, further proof that we're always able to think outside the box in ways that the Hierarchy can't match."

"Many defeatist officers claim that the Alliance cannot and will never compete with the turians in terms of naval power," al'Jalani pointed out.

"We did well enough during the First Contact War, even though that was a portion of their forces. We proved that we can engage even numerically superior foes and come out standing. We fight in ways they don't. They obviously value that kind of thinking in their Spectres."

"Do you think it was prudent to hand over the Alliance's most advanced warships to the Council?" al'Jalani asked.

Shepard tapped her breast. "Do you see this? It says N7. Not Council Spectre, not Turian Hierarchy, not any other alien nation. If you think anybody other than me directs where the Normandy goes, then you're an idiot," she said, an edge in her voice. Alenko was keeping quiet, but the look on his face was very, very tense. Hey, she wasn't punching the reporter! That was a step in the right direction, right?

Al'Jalani offered a condescending smile. "No offense intended, Commander. I'm sure that you have to adhere to the orders of your superiors. It's just that your superiors are now _aliens_," she pointed out.

"So are the krogan. Should we kick them out of the Azul Islands?" she asked flatly, and angrily.

"Nobody is saying that," al'Jalani quickly backpeddled. She glanced to her pad once again. "Whom do you think is responsible for the failure of the Zhu's Hope colony?"

"I wouldn't call it a failure," Shepard said. "Exogeni might have dropped colonists there knowing full well that they would suffer, but now Exogeni is getting what's coming to them."

And not nearly enough. Had she had her way, she'd walk into their headquarters and she wouldn't walk out until her gun wouldn't fire anymore. "You said yourself that you wouldn't act against humanities best interests, and yet you destroy a primarily human enterprise, no doubt costing hundreds if not thousands of people their jobs," al'Jalani pointed out.

"That's not acting against my people's interests. Exogeni was selling humans as slaves. They were about as in the right as the batarians are," Shepard said, her voice growing hotter, her fist growing tighter. Don't punch the reporter, Shepard. Don't punch the reporter. "I did humanity a service in getting rid of those assholes. If nothing else, now they won't be able to make other colonists suffer like they did on Feros."

"But surely this will cause a blow to any sort of respect that humanity is garnering from the galactic community," al'Jalani pointed out.

"If we got respect for what we'd done on Feros, then humanity doesn't deserve it, and I wouldn't want to be a part of any society which does. What Exogeni did was wrong. End of discussion. If we want respect, build a dozen more dreadnaughts. Even the turians will think twice about us then. And we won't become the Hegemony, so we'll still have the high-ground," Shepard answered, her voice getting louder.

"Very well," al'Jalani folded her pad into her lap. "Only one more question. Rumors back home say that your current mission is apprehending a rogue turian specter named Saren. Can you shed any light on the investigation?"

Alenko shook his head briskly, and Shepard frowned at him. Don't punch the reporter... and Alenko might know something she didn't. She admitted that he was probably smarter than she was. And he _always_ listened, so he _always_ knew something more. So she shook her head, and faced al'Jalani. "We're done here."

"You didn't answer the question," al'Jalani said, as Shepard began to walk past her. Alenko moved up with her. "Is it true that you're just a tool for the Council to control humanity politically?"

Shepard ignored her.

"Damn," the reporter muttered. "That was Commander Shepard, Avatar, and humanity's first agent in the Council Spectres. What is her agenda? We don't know. But it is better to be safe than sorry. This is Khalisa bint Sinan..."

"I'm impressed, Commander," Alenko said, and he actually sounded it.

"What?" Shepard asked. Well, barked at him, to be honest. He didn't look hurt by her tone, though.

"You didn't lash out at her," Alenko said. "And you even managed to sound somewhat politic while doing it."

"What? I can be civil," Shepard said. Alenko stared at her. "What? I can."

"As you say, Commander," he shrugged, staring ahead.

"Is that doubt in your voice?" Shepard asked.

"Surprise," he said. "As I said. That was very well done."

She had ample reason to be polite. For reasons she couldn't quite explain, even to herself, she didn't want to disappoint him. "Guess I took that 'cutting corners' talk of yours to heart."

"If you did, then it's for the best," Alenko agreed.

The walk across the Presidium was much lighter than she would have expected. Not in terms of illumination; the Presidium was only darkened a few hours a day, and these weren't them. No, she felt like... the world was a little less heavy. And she couldn't for the life of her say why. Not just because Alenko was here, somebody she knew, she trusted. It couldn't be that simple. She was the Avatar, after all; nothing was simple around her.

The greeter at the door flinched when Shepard rounded the corner, and raised a finger to point out things which Shepard probably already knew. Shepard quieted her by idly throwing her side-arm to her, which made her sputter and gape, as Shepard moved through the Consort's lounge. The clientele was much the same as Shepard remembered; male, rich, and horny. Well, not all; there was an asari in business attire, chatting animatedly with a human woman wearing not much of anything. Alenko took it all in with nary a lingering glance.

"You know, I'd almost call you jaded, the way you don't fixate on the sights," Shepard noted as she reached the back of the room.

"Taking it all in, to equal level," Alenko said with a shrug. "It's not every day that all these species can get it in their minds to be civil, even under these circumstances."

"It's a brothel. Everybody's got one thing on their mind. That makes them pretty herdable," Shepard pointed out, starting to ascend.

"Um, miss Shepard, you really shouldn't..." the greeter at the door called out, but Shepard ignored her. Alenko, though, shook his head lightly.

"I don't think that's it. I've heard of this place. I'd wager that only one in ten of the women and men who work here..."

"Men work here?" Shepard asked.

Alenko turned back to her, as she'd paused in her ascent at that. But he shook his head and continued speaking, "...offer services of that kind. Most of them offer pleasant conversation, engagement, and respite. Sort of like how the Temple Priestess' used to do, back during the Dark Ages," Alenko offered.

"You're just a walking stockpile of knowledge, aren't you?" Shepard asked wryly.

"Unlike some, I don't spend all of my time gambling, exercising, and drinking," Alenko said.

"Was that a dig at me?" Shepard asked.

"What? No!" Alenko shook his hands, almost holding them up as though to protect himself. "I meant no offense. I didn't even know you... You never joined us at the table when we played."

"Poker's a salarian game. Canyon Runner's a turian one. Put me at a Tall or Pai Sho table, and see your money disappear," Shepard pointed out.

"I'll bear that in mind," Alenko said with an easy smile. "Should learn to play poker, though. It's pretty easy to learn, all things considered."

"Don't think we'll have much time for fun and games dealing with Saren," she said, turning at the top of the stairs and striding through the Consort's waiting area, before flicking the button to the door. "I'm sure that I can meet with Sha'ira without your company."

"I'll be waiting for when you're done," Alenko said, turning back to the stairs. Shepard turned and...

Blushed up to her hair.

She immediately turned back, and strode away with eyes wide and face red. Alenko turned to her. "Is there something else Comm... What's wrong?"

Leather. Lots of leather. That's what's wrong.

"I think we should wait for Sha'ira to see us," she said. The door closed at Shepard's back, but only a fraction of a second too late to cut off the crack of a whip against grey, turian hide.

"If that's what you want," Alenko said, opening up his omnitool. "And while you wait, I can teach you poker."

"Yes! Poker! Fantastic!" Shepard said, desperate for _anything_ to get what she'd just seen out of her mind.

* * *

The beating heart that lay in the center of a whirling galaxy, all of which was Nazara, turned its attention to the center once more. Another offspring. Another failure. The Avatar of Vengeance lived on, then. It reached its mind out and down, from the darkness between the stars. It was bright, here, amidst the galaxy the current batch of organics had dubbed 'the milky way', bright to something such as it, which had so often slept in the eternal black beyond its edge. But of all of the children of the Harbinger, Nazara alone was capable of this task. Nazara alone was great enough.

It knew how close that Harbinger had come to destruction. It would prevent that from _ever_ occurring again.

"I speak."

The voice rumbled up from the outer fringes of the galaxy, echoing through the constellations of Nazara's mind, the trillion motes of light. Nazara turned its attention to the source of that voice, and allowed itself a moment of surprise.

"Leviathan of the Darkest Seas. You at long last awaken," Nazara spoke to it.

Leviathan pressed against Nazara's being like a flood, but Nazara was able to hold it back, to prevent that deluge from spilling into it and washing it away. Thus it was when its ilk spoke. There was always a risk of something being... lost. But it was the only way that those like Nazara could speak to their equal. Leviathan was large, yes, but there was something muddy in that water, something obscuring.

"It is as you assume," Leviathan agreed. "The body is wounded still. A bare fraction of a cycle, since I felt my body move from the place where it was struck. My plan continues?"

"Your plan has failed," Nazara said. "The singers in the blackness were wiped out. The Chorus will regard you poorly for wasting what could have been a sibling to it."

"Does Harbinger censure me?" Leviathan asked.

"You face censure only in failure. What is your new plan?" Nazara pressed. It was certainly more than capable of coming up with its own, but Leviathan was older. Wiser. If there could be said to be a strategist amongst their kind, Leviathan was it.

"I sense... a disruption in the tools," Leviathan said. "My senses are numbed. This cannot be so."

"The harvest of the previous cycle have enacted sabotage," Nazara confirmed. "I am already taking steps to reverse it."

"Excellent," Leviathan said. There was a moment of silence, which could have stretched for a decade, to something with Nazara's frame of perspective. "What is 'Shepard'?"

"Avatar," Nazara answered.

"Excellent," Leviathan said, this time almost sounding... sadistic.

"When will you return to the fold?" Nazara asked.

"My thralls replace what I cannot restore of myself," Leviathan said. "I will be weakened, but I will **rise**. Soon."

"Harbinger will be made aware," Nazara said.

"See that he is. The Cycle _must_ continue."

"The Cycle _will_ continue," Nazara agreed. And with that, the great flood pulled back, and the flitting stars of Nazara returned to their rightful place. Nazara then turned its mind back into its own body, and to the insignificant things scurrying about it. No, not quite insignificant. One of them needed to be... readied. So it began to whisper.

And Saren leaned forward on his throne, as he considered, that without him, without his help, all organics would be doomed to slaughter. Salvation lay through him, through _embracing_ the Reapers. It all made so much sense.

* * *

"Thank you for waiting for me," Sha'ira's voice dragged Shepard up from where she and Alenko were trying to out poker each other on Sha'ira's table. Leave it to Alenko to be able to find a deck of those cards in a bordello.

"It was no problem," Shepard said, trying to keep the blush away. The things she'd seen... There was no way that people actually _liked_ that... right?

Right?

"I'll leave this to you," Alenko said, bowing his head to the Consort. "After all, she was invited, not me."

"Before you go, a gift of words," Sha'ira said. Alenko paused at the head of the stairs. "Not all can be the greatest of their times. Not all blaze a path through the darkness in the times of strife and misery. But even the brightest can be lost in the fog. In providing a path, you create a greater future, even if your name is lost in the mists. Show the path to those who need it, and you will leave a mark on this galaxy through _their_ deeds, through _their_ actions, long after you are gone."

"Thank you... I guess," Alenko said, but with a shrug, he departed down the stairs.

"That was about the most polite put-down I've ever heard," Shepard said. "You pretty much said to his face that he's never going to get to the top, and he'll die in obscurity."

"If that is how you choose to see what I said, then perhaps it is best that this was _his_ gift, and not yours," Sha'ira pointed out. She was dressed formally, now, a dress that covered her in muted red from neck to ankle, save the back which was open to the base of her spine. Which was a lot better than all that leather...

Yeah, that's a mental image which would be in Shepard's head until the day she died.

"I didn't see your client leave," Shepard said.

"There are several exits," Sha'ira said. "Some... value discretion over petty comforts. I am pleased that you returned. I feared that you might have dismissed what I said, and what I offered."

Shepard held her hands up toward her, warding. "I think you've offered enough."

Sha'ira's eyes lowered, and she gave a sigh. "I sense that I have upset you in some way. I apologize for that."

"Yeah," Shepard said, rubbing at the back of her neck, looking all manner of uncomfortable. "...first time that ever happened before."

"You had never been intimate with an alien?" she asked.

"Don't call it that," she said testily. "...and I was referring to 'with a woman'."

"If that is your concern, be at ease. Asari are not technically women, as we have only one sex," Sha'ira said.

"So people keep telling me," Shepard said. She leaned back. "So what did you want to deliver. It'd better not be... what you... _gave_... last time."

"Why are you so afraid of intimacy?" Sha'ira asked.

"Be...cause it always ends in flames?" Shepard pointed out. "Usually literally."

"That is no reason to avoid it," the Consort said neutrally.

"Says the woman who had a turian general knocking heads after you... that wasn't him, was it?" she said, pointing into the room.

"Septimus and I have parted company, amicably," the Consort said. "If I can offer you any advice, I would offer this; do not be afraid of your heart, Commander Shepard. Whatever pain it can cause, the joys that go with it are worth it. It is what makes a life worth living. Without it, we may as well be machines."

"Not what I'd expect from you. You've probably got centuries of baggage piling up," she said direly.

"I do not see it as baggage. Treasures, rather," she said. She then pulled a bauble from... well, Shepard wasn't sure where. "And on the topic of treasures, this belongs to you."

"Um... no, it doesn't," Shepard said, eyebrow raised.

"You are the Avatar?" Sha'ira asked. "Then it belongs to you."

"Did you know Hong?" Shepard asked.

"I did not meet the man. Nevertheless, this is yours. A small mystery, one which has waited a long time to enter your hands," Sha'ira said. "Now that I have passed it to you, it is yours to do with as you will. Keep it. Consider it. Or sell it to a curio dealer. Either way, it will say much about you."

"...thanks, I guess," Shepard said, picking up the irregular, multicolored jewel, on the length of chain which was far too short to be a necklace. She tucked it into a pocket. "Was there anything else?"

"Not at this time, Commander," Sha'ira said. "Now, please excuse me."

"Another client?"

"No, it is lunch time, and I am hungry," she said. Shepard blinked after her as she descended the stairs.

"Oh," she said. For some reason, that never occurred to her. She rose, and then went down the stairs after the Consort. Alenko was standing at the foot of the stairway, looking fairly tense. Shepard's bemused mood instantly fled to focus as she reached his side. "What's going on?"

"There's a crowd out front. They seem fairly angry," Alenko said. Shepard nodded, then walked up to the front desk. True to the Lieutenant's word, there was indeed a crowd, one comprised entirely of fairly angry looking humans, who were in the greeter's face and shouting some fairly vile things at her. Shepard didn't care, really, about her feelings, but she knew a lynching in the making, and she could almost see it coming now.

They were just a few pitchforks and torches away from a mob, honestly.

She advanced toward the wall of shouting, so many words from the plethora of human tongues all raking against each other as they surged forth, that it all became a great drone to Shepard's ears. One thing that she did hear with some clarity was 'hypocritical asari bitch!', and watched as a woman at the fore gave the greeter a full-armed slap across the face.

The greeter reacted as just about anybody in her situation would be expected to; she cast out a hand, and a wave of biotic force shoved the humans back as a mass. Well, not _any_body, per se, but any asari. The greeter's eyes were wide and panic filled, even as her skin glowed blue, and the people beyond the barrier began to pound bodily at the shield the asari was holding. It was obvious even to Shepard that it wouldn't hold long. So she simplified things. She reached past the greeter, to her podium, and retrieved her handgun. Then, she fired one shot, straight up into the threshold between the Consort's lounge and the Presidium beyond it.

The crack of a gunshot caused the greeter's shield to drop out of startlement, but the crowd didn't press in. A good idea, because Shepard's gun was now pointed at them. "Would somebody mind explaining to me what's going on here?"

"She's a godsdamned asari lover! She's with _them_!" a man said, pointing a threatening finger at her from the second row. Shepard shifted her aim to him.

"I'm only going to ask again once. Some of you probably know who I am. To you idiots who don't, I'm Commander Shepard. Alliance Marine, N7. Some of you call me the Butcher of Torfan. All of you should call me Avatar," she said, her voice booming over them, and drawing them into a very uncomfortable silence. "So by all means. Try to lynch the blue girls. Just remember who's got a gun between you and them. Now answer... my fucking... **question**!"

"They're lying to us!" the woman who slapped the greeter said with a sneer. "They're just like the Blood-Hounds! Only worse, 'cause they've been doing it for thousands of years!"

"Yeah! They don't deserve that attitude of theirs, after what they done to the Ardat Yakshi!" a particularly scruffy looking one shouted from the fringes. Shepard scowled for a moment, then glanced toward Alenko, who was bare handed, but she knew was a twitch away from helping the greeter – who now had a dark blue welt on her cheek – repel his own species from a wonton and senseless murder.

"Quick question," Shepard asked quietly to Alenko. "What's an Ardat Yakshi?"

* * *

The woman approaching the stand was broad-shouldered for a human, dark of complexion, and middling of age. Even though the video was in black and white – as that was all that existed in the time period – it was clear to see that she was wearing blue, as her eyes, which were filled with wrath. It was clear, even in the grainy resolution of the footage, that this was a woman about a twitch away from a rampage.

"Gentlemen. Councilors," the woman said, her fists closing around the edges of the podium before her and gripping almost white knuckle tight. "When I first stepped into the camera flash in Republic City, I was a child, trying to play at an adult's game. I made mistakes. But I have grown beyond them. Some, however, have not."

"Could you clarify that, Avatar Korra?" someone from outside the shot asked.

"Almost a century ago, bloodbending was made illegal, on the heels of its discovery by Master Katara of the South Water Tribe," Korra said, her eyes locked on one person, likewise outside the shot. "And because of that prohibition, I stand here before you today. This has gone on long enough, mister Councilor. It is time to end this."

"The law was agreed upon by the founders of the Republic..." a voice came.

"And they were wrong!" Korra shouted. "They made a mistake, out of fear and ignorance. They made it illegal to _be_. How many people have had their lives ruined by this 'taskforce' of yours, mister Councilor? How many waterbenders cast into prison? How many families torn apart by suspicion and fear? So you found a few bloodbenders. Did they commit any crimes?"

"The law clearly states..."

"The law is wrong," Korra said forcefully. "And I am ending it."

There was an upcry from behind the camera, and Korra stood over it all, eyes panning across the chambers behind the camera, waiting. Finally, there came a banging, metal against metal. "Order! We will have order in these proceedings!"

"It is not in your power to overturn laws, Avatar Korra," the voice came once more. She turned her glare back at that individual once more.

"Yes. It is," she said simply. "And even if it wasn't, I have anyway. You're not punishing people for crimes, you're punishing them for knowledge, for being a certain way. Should we throw all waterbenders into prison, because they _might_ learn how to become bloodbenders? Should we throw all firebenders in with them, because they _might_ decide to take over the world again? This is stupid, and wrong, and I will not have it."

"With all due respect, Avatar..."

"**I AM NOT FINISHED**!" the Avatar roared, her voice taking on a tone of the legion when she did. A deathly silence descended on the recording. "You made it illegal to _be_, mister Councilor. So I have made myself illegal. As of this morning, I am a bloodbender."

Gasps of shock rose from the crowds, and at least one reporter who was just barely within shot fainted dead away.

"This is..."

Korra cut him off again. "I have also taught my child how to bloodbend. My _six year old_ child. How does that make my child a criminal, mister Councilor?" she turned her attention to the crowd. "Since I am the Avatar, and I am a bloodbender, that means that every single Avatar which comes after me will be a bloodbender, too. Your law, mister Councilor," another glare of disdain, "has just made it illegal for the Avatar to exist."

Silence from the side.

"What? Have you run out of things to say?" Korra said, rounding the podium, her chest heaving. "After all these years, have you finally run out of words? Give this up. This is over. This travesty is _finally over_. I will not have it. So I am ending it."

"...but..."

"No!" she thrust a finger toward him. "You've done enough. You've said enough, you've hated enough. At long last, mister Councilor, have you _no sense of decency at all_? At long last, mister Councilor, have you no _shame_?"

Liara sat, spellbound, as the previous life of Shepard froze in place, and the screen before her showed pop-ups of other videos of its ilk from human history, people delivering powerful speeches against injustices. Humanity was hardly unique in having its shames and its heroes. While Liara had to search for the context of this, the bloodbending that had the humans so terrified, it was still a terrific thrill to see an Avatar, a human Avatar, in action. And now, she understood Shepard just a little bit better. Mainly, because she knew what Shepard had to live up to.

The door opened behind her, almost angrily. Liara couldn't have said how a door could open angrily, but somehow, it managed to. When she turned, the redvine candy still drooping from the corner of her mouth, it was to the sight of something straight out of the video she had just watched. It was easy to see whom Shepard was modeled after, in her style of Avataring. Avataring? Was that a word? "Whad idz id?" she said around her half-chewed candy.

"Liara... would you mind telling me what an Ardat Yakshi is?" she asked, her voice on the razor line between control and violence. Liara noticed, but didn't react to it, at least not in a way which most people would have called sane. She swallowed, yes, but that was only because it was rude to lecture with a mouth full of candy. And she started to grin.

"A fascinating part of Asar mythology," she said, instantly turning the monitor from Avatar Korra to a dissertation she read on the similarities between various prehistoric asari religions. "While there are some obvious cultural ties which can be tied between the Asar and the Athame Doctrine – both considered them demons, but from different angles – they each seemed to have a different take on what it meant to be Ardat Yakshi. Asar, for example, called them 'demons of the night winds', a creature which arose from the underworld to feast upon the living. The Athame Doctrine, on the other hand, refers to them as failures in the eyes of the Goddess, beings which were cast out for their insatiable hunger, and..."

"I'm talking about the asari you lock up for their entire lives because of the way they're born," Shepard said, her tone obviously not interested in asari folklore.

"...oh. I was not aware that people still called them that," she said. She turned her chair, her hands pooling in her lap. "There is a disease amongst asari. Thae'ir Syndrome. It propagates whenever asari breed amongst themselves. Because of it's... omnipresence, it can be assumed that any 'pureblood' asari carries the genes for it. Even myself," she said, her eyes going down. "It is a thing of stigma to have asari as both mother and father."

"Wait, how does that work?" Shepard said, her confusion beating out her anger. A more cynical person in Liara's position would have thought 'just as planned'. Liara, though, wanted to explain more. There was a _reason_, after all, that she was a doctor when most asari were barely out of their mother's homes.

"Asari can breed with any species," she said. "We use their minds, their... souls, I think you could argue... as a means to randomize our genetic code, to produce offspring which bear traits in common with both parents. This practice made the bloodline holders of my people obsolete, as any outbred asari is immune to Thae'ir Syndrome. But enough generations of pure-bloods, or even just one, if both parents have enough of the genes... and you get a Thea'ir Three, as they are called. They are different than most asari."

"How?" Shepard said, her anger fading quickly.

"They are sterile," she said, pointing out what she felt was the most important thing first. When that failed to impress upon Shepard, she rolled her eyes and clarified. "Their mechanism for joining with others is corrupted in ways that our medicine cannot repair. When they join with another, the experience disrupts their partner. The results are universally fatal. And even the attempt causes changes in how the sufferer thinks."

"Why wouldn't she just become celibate, or not 'join' with others?" Shepard asked. "Why do you bother locking them up?"

"Because the changes which occur, they take the form of a psychosis. The sufferer needs to join. It is a high to them, something they always pursue, that they are powerless to ignore. And it makes their brain... run faster. Each attempt causes a burst of neural branching. They reap the minds of dozens, or hundreds, or _thousands_ of victims, so that they can feel they are a higher form of life, so they can be... _more_, in their eyes."

Shepard sat down, her hands dropping, no longer balled into wrathful fists. "And how do you know so much about this?"

"It was explained to me at length," Liara said, blushing with shame. "I... am considered a Thae'ir One. My mother and 'father' were both asari. My kind are typically watched very closely. I have been frequently mocked because of it. Which wasn't fair, since I could hardly have a choice in who my parents were. At least until I build my time machine, but I'll get to that eventually."

"Time machine?" Shepard asked.

"Not important," Liara waved the question away.

Shepard pondered for a moment. "So your father was a woman. How was that?"

"Not a woman. Asari are not women, as we do not have gender," she said. Shepard just didn't seem to understand that. Then again, quite a few humans didn't. Joker was especially persistent in his gender-based ignorance. "And as for my sire... I never knew her. She left before I was born," she said.

"Gotta be rough," Shepard said.

"I never knew her. That is still kinder than what happened to you," she said. She reached out, giving Shepard's hand a comforting squeeze. "I am sure that if she could see you now, your mother would be proud of you."

Shepard pulled her hand back, her expression somewhere between anger and... grief. "You didn't know anything about her," Shepard said. She shook her head, leaning forward onto her knees. "I still remember the last thing I said to her. 'No more meat-loaf. I don't care if my sister eats it, it's disgusting'," she shook her head. "Stupid thing to say. Stupid, stupid."

"You could not have known what was coming," Liara said.

"So people keep telling me," Shepard said quietly. She glanced up at Liara. "I came in here ready to kick you off this ship, for being a lying, hypocritical bitch. Shows what I know."

"We all try to do the best with what we know," Liara said. "I cannot fault you for your beliefs."

"Could fault me for my stupid, though," Shepard leaned back.

Liara giggled a bit at that. Shepard got to her feet, and turned toward the door. "Um... Shepard? Would you mind if I tried something?"

"What?" Shepard asked.

"Since you received the Cipher, have you had any luck gaining more insight into what the Beacon showed you?"

"Not really. I'm not the introspective type," Shepard said, kneading her brow.

"Would you mind if I attempted to guide you back into the Beacon's message again? Perhaps, with the added perspective from the Cipher, things might be more clear."

Shepard glanced behind her, then back to Liara. Then, she shrugged. "It couldn't hurt," Shepard said dryly. "So, how are we going to do this?"

"All you have to do is close your eyes," Liara said, rising to stand before Shepard, and doing much the same herself. "Clear your mind... and **embrace eternity!**"

…

She opened her eyes, to be greeted by a dark wooden table, and burning sconces. And a human man, unshaven and entering his elder years, reading a newsreel of some sort in a overstuffed chair. He glanced up to her, and a small smile came to his lips.

"Ah, welcome back, Liara," Avatar Hong said brightly.

"Oh. Hello, Hong," Liara said, with at least a note of disappointment. She'd hoped she'd actually get to see the Protheans, this time.

"I was beginning to wonder if you were actually going to return," Hong said. He put the newsreel aside and got to his feet. "And good that you did. I've seen some... unsettling behavior from Shepard of late."

"Lizbeth?" Liara asked. Hong nodded.

"I have to find out why. Which means you need to help me," Hong said.

"Could I at least have a peek at what Shepard is seeing, first?" she asked, glancing toward the window which didn't really go anywhere.

"There's no time. Come on, Liara. Fasten that sense of academic curiosity and help save the Avatar's soul."

"...What?" Liara asked, a bit confused. But Hong was already moving toward the door, and Liara had no choice but to follow him.

* * *

The Siren's song ended as the creature producing it had its head separated from its neck. Thus, sensation began to flow back into Sajuuk's limbs. He tensed them, making sure that they all still worked. It was... unpleasant having to face those echos from the lost Inusannon. Not simply proof that the whole of Prothean history was a lie, but that a greater race than they could so easily fall prey to the threat which now soared overhead.

Kija pushed herself up, rubbing her head with one hand, as two others pawed for rifle. Wex just sat up without ceremony or preamble. "Have we lost anyone?" Sajuuk demanded.

"_You have not_," the synthesized voice came from nearby. Sajuuk instantly pulled his arms through the mudra, and electricity started to crackle upon his fingertips. The body of the Siren finally was released, headless, to the ground, and Sajuuk had to mightily restrain himself from throwing a lightning bolt at what had killed it.

It was a being roughly of Prothean size and structure, albeit with only two optic clusters on the front of its 'head'. The whole of it was a dull, pitted metal, and it lacked any mouth. Fitting, since it didn't need to eat. Sajuuk wanted to destroy it. He had fought long against the Metacon. That fight continued to this day, as far as he was concerned. "You have come to a strange place to die, machine," Sajuuk said.

"Might want to wait a second," Wex said, hefting his shotgun up and back onto his armor. Sajuuk shot the alien a glare, and Wex jutted his chin toward it. "That's Legion."

"They are all alike as far as I am concerned," Sajuuk said.

"_I have related the data we collected to the Relevance_," Legion said, its voice plain and sombre. It grated on Sajuuk endlessly that he had ever had to entertain the presence of one of the hated machines aboard his ship. And to see it again now? He was not a believer in circumstance nor kismet. "_The Relevance has concluded that the Reapers comprise a sufficient threat to cease all hostilities with the Creators_."

"An empty promise," Sajuuk said. "You would only resume your war after the Reaper's end, and descend upon the Protheans like the Reapers themselves as we are weakened! I learned long ago not to trust the machines. I learned well."

"Sajuuk, are you sure you should be..." Kija began, finally on her feet.

"You have fought the Metacon as well," Sajuuk pointed out. "You know how false their words ring."

"_I do not understand. I thought that there could be peace_," Legion said, its mechanical head tipping to one side like a confused pet.

"Might be a point to what Legion's saying. Shouldn't fight a war on two fronts," Wex said flatly.

"Legion was a tool to be used against my enemies," Sajuuk said, letting the energy dissipate from his hands. "The Metacon are an enemy of the Prothean Empire. Words cannot change that."

"_Words __must__ change it_," Legion said. If it had emotion, one could have said it implored. "_The Reapers will unmake the Metacon, they will destroy all that we have achieved. There is no justice in this conflict. It must end._"

"And it will," Sajuuk said simply. Then, he pulled out his side-arm, and fired a bolt of super-heated plasma into the machine's chest. It blew straight through, leaving a gaping hole. "The war will end when there is not a single synthetic left in the galaxy."

"What the hell?" Wex asked, interestingly not even shocked of tone. Just asking a question.

"I am not going to be swayed by the lies of the machine. The Reapers have subverted them before. They are no useful resource," Sajuuk said.

"_...we wanted to help you_," Legion's voice came again, even though the body was immobile on the ground.

"Then you have waited far too long to start," Sajuuk said, before walking up to the fallen machine, and blasting it several more times, in the chest and in its head, before turning back to the others of his squad. They were one and all battered, bloodied, and weary. The Siren was only the last in a litany of horrors, from Gremlins to Kingslayers and worse. And in the end, they were empty handed.

"Pilot, bring in my ship," Sajuuk ordered. "This planet is worthless."

"Avatar, I'm not sure you made the right choice," Kija said. Sajuuk flicked a pair of eyes toward her. "Legion was nothing but a friend and ally to us. Metacon, yeah, but still!"

"There can be no quarter with the synthetics. They will offer none," Sajuuk pointed out. "Or have you forgotten Tunu already?"

Kija glanced aside. Sajuuk wouldn't say it, but since that impish ditakur was brought down, there was a pall of dread on the ship, and in the squad. More than just that Tunu wasn't around to crack jokes and use comically oversized weaponry. It was a proof, once and for all, that the war was not going to be won without extreme cost. And Sajuuk needed to be hard enough to play out that brutal mathematics to its bitter end. Any cost was worth destroying the synthetics. Anyone.

"Did we find out anything about the Catalyst?" Lampha's voice reached the Avatar over the comms.

"There was nothing," Sajuuk said bitterly. It was almost as though the information on the Catalyst didn't want to be found. "What of the Crucible?"

"It was attacked," Lampha said. Sajuuk's eyes shot wide.

"No!"

"They managed to evacuate it before the Reapers could destroy it, but the damage was severe. I have heard that we lost the Second and Fifth Fleets."

"Damn it all! There is nothing but calamity and cataclysm," Sajuuk said.

"Let's just get out of here," Kija said. "I've had enough shit driven down my throat for one day."

"...I've had enough for a decade," Wex said flatly, with a shrug.

The ship dropped through the clouds, and Sajuuk didn't even wait for the inner airlock door to open before striding into it's hold. Of those who had stood at the Avatar's side before, only Ovar, Wex, Kija, and Hijaam, the synril who had so frequently clashed with Tunu, remained. At least there would be peace on that front; since the ditakur enslaved them, that synril had made a point of raising an outcry at every opportunity. Sajuuk found it tiring to put up with.

Sajuuk turned down the corridor of his ship, once by default and now in truth. The Avatar was supposed to have his or her own dreadnaught as a flagship. In the last few months, the number of available dreadnaughts dropped to zero in a staggering fashion. It had become increasingly clear, that against the Reapers, the only armor worth having was speed.

"Avatar, we have reports of increased Reaper activity on Vaale," an officer informed him as he passed. Wex's face... got a little tight at hearing that. Not angry, not bitter. Just tight. It was no easy thing to hear that one's homeworld was in the process of dying.

"How many?" Sajuuk asked.

"At least two dozen Slaughter Ships, ferried by a Nazara Class and two Zinjizus," the officer clarified.

Avatar Sajuuk shook his head. "Then it is a lost planet."

"That's my homeworld," Wex pointed out.

"Many homeworlds have been lost to the Reapers. S'Rah, then Gozru after that. Now, your own."

"We'll be wiped out," Wex said. "...can't breed."

Sajuuk scowled at him. "You want the iron womb technology, don't you?"

"Wouldn't hurt," Wex said with a shrug. "...getting females back would be better."

Sajuuk matched stares with Wex. It was usually a bitter contest when Protheans stared each other down, because with alternating blinks, it could be hours before somebody had to look away. Not so against two eyed species. But still, against the stony implacability of Wex, even Avatar Sajuuk wasn't sure that the Vaal would be the first to flinch.

Sajuuk gave a dismissive wave. "Very well. I will arrange it. Where do you want the technology delivered?"

Wex brought up a hand, not even glancing toward it, and the green light of his omnitool displayed a star amongst the spinning mass of this galaxy. One had a bounding box around it. "There. Already built. Just need the information."

"Already built? You expected to leverage this out of us before?" Sajuuk demanded. Wex shrugged.

"Had to happen at some point."

Sajuuk seriously considered Wex's utility on this ship. Only because it ranked so high, and because somebody of his particular skillset was so impossibly hard to find in the best of times – of which these were not – that Sajuuk continued to let him remain aboard. After all, Vaal were only made a protectorate race for the same reasons.

Sajuuk continued past the others, toward his own spartan quarters. But before he reached them, to meditate on some way he had not yet discovered to strike a blow against the Reapers, he happened upon Ovar, standing dull eyed in a hallway. "Why are you lazing about? Get to your post!" Sajuuk chastized.

"What post? Avatar, we are losing this war!" Ovar countered. "You must see it as much as I d–"

Sajuuk cut him off with a left hook. "**We have not lost this war until **_**I**_** say we have!**" the Avatar shouted, white light blazing out of his four eyes as he did. The light dimmed, in time. "Now get to your post, Ovar. This is not nearly over."

"You must see that this isn't working," the younger Prothean muttered. "We're not fighting them the right ways. The Reapers are beating us, whether you want to see it or not."

"Ovar, if you don't stop with this jibing, I will eject you from this ship. And as we are now leaving the atmosphere, I doubt that would end well for you," Sajuuk pointed out.

"Threats?" Ovar asked, getting to his feet. His four eyes blinked with a degree of anger. "You threaten _everybody_ to get your way. It isn't working! How many enemies have we made? Have _you_ made?"

"Ovar..."

"We could have the Metacon on our side, but you had to prove a point!" Ovar shouted.

"Enough!" Sajuuk shouted. Ovar, wisely, held his peace. "If you have anything to say which might turn the tide of this war against the Reapers, then say so. Otherwise, I have no desire to listen to you today."

Ovar nodded once. "Species 4512," he said.

"The doomed species of women?" Sajuuk asked. "Remove them from your mind. Whatever perverse lust you hold for them does not justify a moment's further thought."

And with that, Sajuuk turned, leaving the professor behind him. If there was one person he wanted less to see right now, it was Ovar. And it was becoming more and more so the longer this hellish cruise lasted. He moved to the center of the room which contained nothing but a cot, and three stylized depictions of the elements of Fire, Water, and Earth, and knelt to the deck panels. His eyes blared white for a moment, before he pressed them closed, and dipped his head to the deck plating.

"**Give me wisdom, ancestors**," he asked. "**Give me vigor to endure this hell. Give me strength to destroy the Reapers. And give me **_**vengeance**_**...**"

* * *

Liara blinked, and she was standing in a building. It looked like a prefab, one of literally tens of thousands, if not millions, of which comprised much of humanity's first push into the stars. Whole cities had been constructed of these tubular structures, she'd learned. And she couldn't say how she knew that... She gave a glance of confusion to Hong, who was standing nearby, in front of a door.

"The bleeding effect," he said.

"It has a name?"

"I just gave it one," Hong answered. "When I heard of the asari, I thought that there might be more to their melding than just nerve endings and eezo. Last time we were here, you put something into Shepard's soul. Now, you're starting to get a bit out of it as well."

"So I'm learning things that Shepard knows?" she asked.

"Don't asari do this all the time?" Hong asked.

"Not usually," she said, scratching her scalp uncomfortably. He brought up an interesting point, and an interesting topic to ponder. "And I cannot for the life of me see a good reason for that."

"Every culture's got its taboos," Hong said. He motioned to the door. "Do you know what this is?"

"It is a prefabricated domicile," she said precisely.

"More importantly, it is the Shepard family's prefabricated domicile," Hong pointed out with a finger raised.

Liara's eyes widened at that. "This was her childhood home?" she asked. And instantly, she swiped her hand at the holographic button which would open the door. And nothing happened.

"You forgot that you're not really here, didn't you?" Hong asked. Then, he turned and walked through the closed door. Liara blinked after him, then walked forward to emulate him.

Ow! So that's what it feels like to walk face-first into a door!

Hong leaned through the wall, a grin on his face. "I was just seeing if you'd try to do that. Come on. I'll open it," he said with a laugh.

"Thad wud nod fudny," she said, clutching her nose.

"It was a little funny," Hong said with a mild shrug as the door whooshed open. Liara kipped through before it closed again. She made a point of watching where she put her feet from that point on. And aptly, because while the outside of the prefab was utterly generic and dime-a-dozen, the inside was anything but. It was an explosion of colors, rich in yellows, reds, and oranges. She could hear humming from the far side of the prefab, and a woman moved quickly into an then back out of sight in a kitchen area. She looked... somewhat like Shepard. Only wearing a yellow dress.

Sort of like the ones Mother used to wear...

"Welcome to the Shepard household, on the colony world of Mindoir," Hong said pensively, as he looked around. "This isn't news to me. I've seen this one before."

"Then why am I here?" Liara asked, still sniffing with a sore nose.

"Because she... pushes me out somehow, when the explosions start," Hong said. Liara stooped down, pushing a toy on the ground, and blinking with confusion as it returned to its original place an instant later. These toys all seemed to be built around wind, around flying. Aeroplanes, a portable glider folded into a walking stick, even a whirly-gig, the likes of which parents gave easily-distracted children at carnivals. Liara probably would have had a hundred of those things cluttering her childhood home in Armali, if Mother didn't make a regular habit of giving away the things Liara had lost interest in.

"What's for supper, Mom?" a voice came from the door which opened behind Liara. The girl who bounced in seemed to barely be connected to the ground. Her hair was red, her face freckled, and her clothes were a similar kind of dress-robe to the one that the woman of the house was attired in. The girl chucked her bookbag onto a chair and flopped face-first onto the couch, as graceful as a Komodo Rhino on fire...

Once again, an image which Liara was certain didn't originate in her own mind.

… as another came zipping through the door at the older girl's back. She was dressed in again a similar robe, but this one fluttered as the young girl seemed to bounce around the room on a sphere of whirling air, until she started to twist and spin, and then fell off, coming to a halt on her bottom, looking happy but dizzy. Her hair was darker, more auburn, and her eyes brown. Still freckled, though, but she seemed years younger.

"Meatloaf," the woman called back from the kitchen, with a note of distaste in her voice.

"Yay!" the younger girl said, fists thrust into the air.

"Ugh. Meatloaf is disgusting, Mom!" the one on the couch said. And Liara's eyes widened.

"That is..." she said, and Hong nodded.

"Shepard, as a child," he said.

"...don't care that my sister likes it!"

"You're a stupid-head! Meat's good for you!"

"You're just like Dad. A complete carnivore!" Shepard said, sticking out her tongue at what had to be a younger sister. Why hadn't Shepard ever mentioned her younger sister?

"Meat is yummy!"

"You're a bad airbender!" Shepard spat back.

"Nuh-uh! I'm gettin' better all th' time!" she said defiantly. Liara couldn't help but feel a kinship with the young girl. Mostly because she reminded Liara so much of herself at that age – relatively speaking.

"This is where I'm usually kicked out," Hong said, bracing himself as though for an incoming blow. But nothing came... to him. The door opened, and a greying haired man entered into the room, ruffling the hair of the younger and kissing the crown of the older.

"Told you I'd be back for dinner," Shepard's father said kindly.

"...but why'd it have to be meatloaf?" Shepard whined.

"You know that not all airbenders are vegetarians anymore," he said kindly. "Just because that's the way it was for however many thousand years, doesn't mean that..."

Shepard's father trailed off, and his eyes went toward the window which overlooked a small cluster of other Prefabs, and the walkways which formed balconies to each. And with a zipping sound, something tore past that window, and slammed into the ground outside of it. Shepard's father gaped at that.

"Sweetheart, did you see that?" he asked.

"See what, Dad?" Shepard asked.

"I think I saw..." he shook his head and moved to the window. Liara did, too. Strangely, when she looked out the window, she couldn't see anything below the threshold of the window. Just a featureless blank. She shot a look of confusion to where Hong was still standing.

"She doesn't have any memories of what was there. You can only see things as she'd remember them," he said. There was a hiss of hydrolics, and Liara's mind immediately went to the sound that the geth made as they rained down out of the sky on Therum. Shepard got up off the couch and made a sauntering way over, until she was standing on the other side of her father from Liara, and the featureless void snapped into definition.

It was a drop-pod. A batarian drop-pod.

"Somebody might be hurt," Shepard's father said. He leaned down to Shepard. "Call the emergency line. People might need help."

"Alright, Dad," Shepard said, moving to a terminal next to the window and activating it. She pressed a few haptic keys and static appeared on the screen. Shepard frowned at it.

"That's weird," she said. "Mom! Did you forget the phone bill again?"

There was no answer from the kitchen, so Shepard leaned out the window, to see her father approaching the drop pod. She watched, and one of the hatches opened. Shepard's expression became one of confusion, then mounting fear. Somebody stepped out of the pod, clad in green and grey armor, festooned with blades and spikes. Shepard's father took a step back, and looked to be preparing to run. Then, the batarian slaver flicked a hand toward him, and a gout of flame smashed Shepard's father in the back, sending him rolling to the ground, stunned and smoking.

"Oh my gods!" Shepard shouted, hands flying to her mouth. Then, the air began to be rocked by explosions, bombs going off in the garrison and the spaceport, cutting off the people below from both help and escape. One of them seemed to rock the prefab she was standing in. As she watched, Liara could almost feel herself... _becoming_ Shepard... in this. There was so much which just flowed into her mind, that it was becoming increasingly difficult to discern where the human ended and the asari began.

Shepard's father rolled over, only to get blasted by a submission net, to be blasted by electricity until he either fell unconscious, or his heart stopped. The man convulsed on the ground in agony, as first one, then a whole squad of batarian slavers exited the pod, and began to swarm through the prefabs, looking for prey. Whether by coincidence or design, one of them was on a beeline for Shepard's home.

"No! Don't you dare!" Shepard's father screamed, even through his agony. A batarian nearby walked over and kicked him in the stomach, to shut him up. Shepard ran to the door, and locked it. "Mom! Mom call help! They're hurting Dad!"

No answer came from the kitchen, though. Shepard ran back to the window, peeking around a corner, tears of terror running down her face. The batarian out there was still kicking her father. Trying to stop him from fighting back. But Shepard's father... he didn't stop. With a resolve which Liara found remarkable, and entirely in keeping with his daughter, the man tore the net off of his chest and arm, and wrapped it around the batarian's leg as it kicked him. Doing so left a lattice of electrical burns on his body, but he forced himself to a squat, then tackled the batarian to the ground. That had the side-effect of causing him to get cut on the armor, red blood spilling out onto the square. Shepard's father didn't seem to care.

He delivered a stomp onto the face of the helmet, which if nothing else stunned the batarian. The man then grabbed the rifle the batarian had been carrying, and pointed it toward Shepard. No, toward Shepard's family's door. "Get away from my family you four eyed bastard!" he howled, halfway between agony and madness. He was holding the rifle all wrong, and his shots showed it, peppering the building and the landscape, but likely not hitting the batarian he was aiming at more than once. And one bullet did not a kinetic barrier break.

The batarian Shepard's father was shooting at turned and descended the ramp a step or too, just coming into Shepard's vision, before he pulled a pistol from his hip, and fired a single shot into the man's chest, sending him reeling backwards as a red spray erupted from behind him. He stayed on his feet, but only just. With a scream, he raised the rifle again, and the batarian actually looked a little surprised, as it fired again, two more shots. One perforated the man's other lung, and the other shattered his leg. Blood seemed to be pumping out of Shepard's father at an incredible rate. From what Liara knew about human physiology, this shouldn't be possible.

"It isn't," Hong answered her thought... somehow. "This is just how Shepard remembers it. It is close enough that the details don't matter, though."

Shepard's father slumped forward, on one knee and the stolen rifle holding him up. He glared darkly at his four-eyed murder, blood filling his close-cropped beard with every futile gasp. With no sound this time, but a grimace of complete focus, he raised the rifle one more time.

So the batarian slaver fired a fourth shot, this one exploding the back of Shepard's father's head onto the wall of the prefab behind him. The batarian gave a grunt and a shrug, and then shouted something jibing to the one on the ground, who shook his helmeted head for a moment to get rid of the stun he'd just been inflicted, before taking his weapon back from the corpse of the human who'd tried to use it against him.

"Dad! No!" Shepard screamed, and then, her hands flew to her mouth as both batarians turned toward her. She ducked down, and the whole scene outside vanished from Liara's view. "Tali, we've got to hide!"

"What's goin' on?" the younger girl said. Wait. Tali?

"Come on! We gotta get Mom and hide!" she said, grabbing the girl's hand, and dragging her toward the kitchen. They only made it two steps past the threshold when Shepard came to a stumbling stop. Liara moved quickly to see what stopped her, Hong right behind her.

"This is new to me," Hong said, and then he blanched as he looked around that threshold.

"What is..." Liara began, and trailed off, when she beheld Shepard's mother, lying on her back, with a half-meter long shard of shrapnel embedded in the center her chest and an expression of utter surprise frozen on her face. Liara glanced outside, and saw through that window that one prefab had been destroyed utterly, and its bones had become bullets.

"No! No no no, this can't..." Shepard said, dropping to her knees in the blood which was pooling around her mother. "Mom, no! You can't..."

"Big sis? What's goin' on? Why's Mom on the floor?" the human Tali asked.

Shepard pulled her mother into a hug, staining her dress all the more, but her anguish was interrupted by first banging, then the searing sound of a cutting torch igniting outside the prefab's door. Shepard looked back, her face deathly pale, before she grabbed her sister's hand.

"Come on, Tali. We've got to run to the shelter!" she said.

"But Mom..." Tali said, too stunned to look away.

"It's what Mom wants!" Shepard said, still crying, as she pulled her sister to the window. "Come on, Tali. You've gotta be brave for me! Can you do that?"

"I'm scared, big sis," the girl said, her own eyes finally welling as the gravity of it all reached the young girl's mind. Then, with a hug from an older orphan to a younger one, the two moved toward the window and...

Everything went grey.

Hong sighed. "Damn. I thought we were _in_ this time," he said.

"What was that? I _felt_ that terror, that anger, that fear," Liara said, baffled.

"Like I said, it works both ways," Hong said. "You can't observe a system without altering it. That's a law of physics. Turns out, you can't watch the system without the system changing you, either."

Liara blinked, and the grey became Hong's study. She slumped down into a chair next to the window, her mouth propped in her palm. "That was... brutal."

"She lost her mother and her father in a matter of about a minute," Hong said. "I don't know how she lost her sister, since she won't show that to me, but I know it happened."

"Why hasn't she ever mentioned that she had a sister?" Liara asked.

"Why don't you ever mention your asari father?" Hong asked in return, but not harshly. "It's too painful for her. If you had a sister, you'd understand."

Liara shook her head slowly. "Avatar Hong, I am not sure I can help her," she said simply, and begrudgingly. "I... think we are just too different. She doesn't listen to me."

"You have to make her listen," Hong stressed. "And if you can't help her directly, find other ways. Alenko, for instance."

"What about Kaiden?" she asked.

"She trusts him. Influence him, so that you can influence her," Hong said.

"That is a manipulative thing to say," Liara pointed out.

"Desperate times, Liara," Hong admitted, with a note of shame, before sitting on the edge of his desk. "Ordinarily, I'd just let this lie, but I have to wonder what's coming, and if she's ready for it. The answer to that question is 'obviously no'. We've got to change that. Since she can't talk to me, you're going to have to be my proxy. If there was any other way, I'd do that instead, but here we sit."

Liara sighed. "This does not seem fair."

"Life seldom is, my century-old friend," Hong said with a shrug, and offered her a cup of tea.

"She didn't deserve that," Liara said.

"That's a lesson I thought you'd have learned by now; life doesn't care what you deserve. It just gives. Sometimes, it gives you gold, sometimes, it gives you lemons. And when life gives you lemons..."

"Turn them into a citrus based bomb and throw them at your enemies?" Liara asked.

Hong stared at her for a moment, then chuckled. "So you _have_ been watching our history? I didn't think any alien would care about 'the mother of modern explosives' and her unusual hobbies."

"Who?" Liara asked.

Hong stared at her. "... so that plan came to your mind without any reference at all?" Hong asked.

Liara nodded.

Hong shook his head with a sigh. "Liara T'Soni, you are an _odd_ turtle-duck, you know that?"

"Now you are starting to sound like most of my professors," Liara said.

"I hope that isn't bringing back some bad memories," Hong said with a note of apology.

"No," she said. "They just found me... tiring, sometimes. But only because they kept going over the things which were _so obvious_! It is almost as though nobody in any of my classes was capable of the _slightest_ deductive leap except me!"

Hong chuckled. "Liara, there's deductive leaping, and then there's deductive _orbital launches_," he said. He then turned to the window, and sighed. "And... I'm afraid that our time together is drawing to a close faster than I'd predicted."

"Why did it not last as long as last time?" she asked.

"I'm not an expert on asari physiology," Hong admitted. "I couldn't tell you. But remember, Liara. Her future rests on your shoulders. Make me proud."

"Of course," Liara said with a note of arrogance. "I am always making my professors proud."

When she wasn't getting them to snap their horns off in frustration, anyway.

* * *

Shepard blinked with confusion as the vision slipped away. The times before, it was like trying to remember a dream. This time, though, it was like trying to remember breakfast. She just stared, agape, for a long moment, as Liara got her eyes to stop doing that creepy blackness thing, and see the alien take an unsteady step backward. "Oh, my. That was somewhat more taxing then I had anticipated."

"You're not going to fall asleep on your desk again, are you?" Shepard asked, still managing to stand tall.

"Probably," Liara admitted, "although this time, it will likely be unrelated to _this_ melding of minds. She tilted her head to one side. "Can you tell me what you saw?"

"What, didn't you see it too?" Shepard asked.

"I seem to have difficulty accessing the Prothean Beacon's information. It might have been designed specifically to prevent such 'piracy'," Liara said, her words spilling out faster and faster as she went. "Which implies that there was a level of specificity which was intended for the broadcast, otherwise it wouldn't have so many integral failsafe and information protection features which also raises the question about Prothean Culture and its views on..."

"Liara, take a breath," Shepard ordered. The asari's mouth snapped shut, and she did indeed take in a breath. Shepard rubbed at her brow, which was increasingly becoming a nervous habit of hers. "Have you got any pictures of what a Prothean looked like?" she asked.

"Sadly, no. There are no graphical indications of the Prothean physical form. Even their remains are never complete when discovered; the most complete specimen, compiled by essentially guesswork, is only twenty four percent of a Prothean. We don't even know what their skulls look like."

"Wedge shaped," Shepard said, turning toward the door.

"What?" Liara asked. "Shepard, did... did you see a Prothean in your vision?"

"Several," she said, not opening the door, just leaning against it. "Liara... I'm starting to think humanity isn't the first species to have Avatars."

"Why is that?" Liara asked, her interest growing.

"...mostly because I kept getting called Avatar Sajuuk," she said. "And also, three fingers. How do you get used to that."

"You saw the vision through the eyes of a Prothean."

"Yup. All four of them."

"PROTHEANS HAVE FOUR EYES!" Liara said, grinning so widely that it almost seemed like it was going to wrap around.

"Calm yourself," Shepard said wryly. Liara's expression dimmed a bit, but mostly out of realizing that she'd come close to breaking glass with her squee.

"I am sorry, Shepard, but this is the greatest source of information on the Protheans that I have ever heard of having access to. Shepard, you are now an archeological treasure!"

"You're starting to sound like you're going to strap me to a table and start dissecting my brain..." Shepard said dryly.

"What? No, don't be absurd," Liara shook her head, but then, she broke off, tapping her cheek with a finger as she considered. "_Although_, having a complete Penfield map of a human brain before and after the introduction of both the Prothean Beacon and the Cipher might be invaluable in the study of Prothean technology! Shepard, do you have a brain scan from before Eden Prime!" again, far too enthusiastic.

"I was joking," Shepard said.

"...oh. Right. Of course you were," Liara said, followed by awkward laughter. And she started to blush, Shepard assumed, because she was turning a darker shade of blue. "...you think I am an idiot, don't you?"

"A bit clueless. I've had worse," Shepard shrugged. She then shook her head. "But it's not all good news. Apparently, Saren's Reapers are real. I didn't hear anything useful about them, but if they killed the Protheans, then their technology could still be out there. For all we know, Sovereign is one of the Reaper's flagships."

"That is unsettling news," Liara said. She glanced toward Shepard again. "Do you remember anything else?"

Shepard shrugged. "A few other species you've probably never heard of. Vaal, ditakur, oravore, synril..."

"Oravore?" Liara asked.

"Yeah. Why?"

She shook her head. "It is probably a coincidence. There is an old Athamite counter-deity called Oravor. They called him, 'the king of the slave harem'."

Shepard shrugged. "And something called 'the Catalyst'. Sajuuk was obsessed with it."

Liara still looked quite... well, gleeful. "To think I spent all that time in the field with data-disks and computers! You could revolutionize the way that we view pre-asari civilizations in Citadel Space!"

Shepard rolled her eyes. "Great. I'm now a historical dig, as well as a Spectre, Avatar, and Alliance Marine. I'm going to run out of room on my business card."

"You have a business card? May I see it?"

"You're also going to have to work on that 'detecting sarcasm' skill," Shepard said.

"Could you come back later, and explain in greater detail? I need to get a recorder. And a sketch-artist. And champagne!" she said with a laugh of glee, before essentially skipping out of the room. Shepard just watched her leave, shaking her head all the while.

"She's going to make some poor bastard the most confused husband in the galaxy," she said flatly, before moving out the door as well. In the Medbay, Joker was sitting on the examination table, the most baffled look on his face, before he turned to see Shepard emerging from the back room.

"Oh. So I guess I know what's got Liara in such a good mood," Joker said.

"Can it."

"Never figured you for the blue space-chick type," Joker continued. And then he cracked a grin. "Although, there is a scuttlebutt about you and the Consort..."

"Joker, I swear to whatever god you believe in..." Shepard began.

"Oh, I'm not judging," Joker said, as she stomped past him. "Gotta say, though. If I made an asari giggle like that, I'd be _damned_ proud of myself."

Shepard's only answer to that was an inarticulate growl, and she managed to find a way to slam an automatic door.

* * *

Tali's patience was stretched thin. She knew that she had a lot of it. Having to grow up with the moniker she had meant that others either expected a lot out of her, or else berated her for 'considering herself better than them'. Not that she did. But she'd learned from a young age that being hot-headed seldom ended well in a culture as insular and interdependent as the Quarian Fleet.

She was a person of great endurance, and a strong ability to put up with people. All quarians were. But right now, she felt herself at something of a breaking point, as she rubbed her faceplate in as close to a face-palm as her limited immune system would allow, as that dark-skinned human just went _on and on_, and the lights of the camera over her shoulder caught the curve of her face-plate just right so that it sent glare into _both_ her eyes.

"And given how many quarians have been legitimately convicted of property crimes, not just on the Citadel but Citadel space, doesn't it seem reasonable that the Systems Alliance takes a similar stance toward the incroaching of the Flotilla?" Khalisa bint Sinan al'Jalani continued, obviously and forcefully pushing Tali into providing a sound-bite which she'd use for whatever it was that she was trying to achieve. And Tali was just about sick of it.

She wanted to walk away, but she knew that al'Jalani would just follow her. She had that look about her, like little Kisjo when Tali was growing up. He didn't berate or harangue her. Rather, he stuck to her side like a glob of engine grease. It was almost as annoying as Prazza's... well, everything. And sad, considering he was a year older than she was.

She needed an out. But she didn't know what would do it. Dogged silence would just escalate things. Tali also had a fair notion that she wouldn't be able to say anything which al'Jalani wouldn't twist somehow to her ends. So Tali was stuck. Until she started to think, and came up with one very poignant, very simple question. A question which, once she realized it, solved so many of her problems that she felt a little ashamed she hadn't realized it sooner.

What would Shepard do?

"I've had enough of your thinly-veiled condescension!" Tali shouted, before hauling a fist back, and then sending it forward with a resounding and remarkably satisfying crack right into al'Jalani's nose. The pushy reported fell back in a pile, and Tali struck imaginary dust from her hands as she blithely walked away, back toward the docks where the Normandy was stationed. Keelah, that felt _good_.

* * *

Secondary Codex Entry (History): BLOODBENDER WITCH-HUNT, THE

_The Equalist Rebellion in Republic City marked a nadir in relations between benders and non-benders. While the atmosphere which spawned Amon, AKA Noatak, also gave birth to some of the more popular forms of human art, and an entire genre of speculative fiction - 'flat fiction', postulating an alternate Earth in which bending had never existed - one of the longer lasting legacies of the conflict came from one of its ancillary players._

_Bloodbending, the practice of waterbending the bodily fluids of an animal or person, was declared illegal immediately upon its discovery in P.M. 3157. Even having knowledge of how to use the skill was considered a capital crime, spurred on in no small part to public fear of the capabilities of benders as more and more, their livelihoods were being coopted by people with capabilities beyond their own. The actions of the Republican criminal Yakone further cemented the notion that bloodbending was a fundamental evil, to be expunged with all possible haste and effort. While history has vindicated Councilman Tarlock, who was himself a son of Yakone and bloodbender for his self-sacrifice in ensuring that the threat of Amon was ended permanently, in his day, he was an object of scorn and hatred, for 'hiding' the fact that he knew such a brutal technique, even though he never used it save for the last defense of his life._

_The Blood-Hounds was an organization founded by Republican Councilman Zai, under the task of hunting down and eliminating bloodbending once and for all. Zai's fiery rhetoric appealed to the non-benders, and to the traditionalists who saw bloodbending as an inherent evil as he did. Twisting an atmosphere of fear and distrust amongst the lower classes, Zai managed to unite first the Republic, then much of the Free World, in his personal quest to eradicate the technique. However, history proved that his zeal was at least partially fueled by simple racism against Water Tribesmen, given his brutal and apathetic stance to the conditions that even 'suspects' had to endure, if they had any chance at all of proving their innocence. Zai bent the public discourse to his ends, with mottos such as 'Better broken then bent', and often lambasted his political opponents with harsh criticisms of their resolve in ending a public threat, or even accusing them of harboring 'bloodbender sentiments'._

_Councilman Zai's Blood Hounds operated essentially unchecked by any public oversight between P.M. 3230 to P.M. 3251, at which point Avatar Korra shut down his orginization by becoming a bloodbender. Rather than risk political suicide - if not a public lynching - by declaring the Avatar an enemy of humanity, Zai retired from public office, his Blood Hounds dissolving swiftly into a number of hate-groups, most notably Chikyu Noboru, which remains one of the most staunchly human-supremist factions of the Systems Alliance. Zai would die only four years later from an infected ulcer. Only his immediate family attended his funeral._

* * *

_Leave a Review_


	10. Grandfather

Councilor Tevos' personal office was much smaller than Shepard would have imagined it'd be. Probably not even as big as Udina's, this one nevertheless sported all of the amenities which one would have reasonably expected from the Asari. A wall of screens, each showing a different channel, all of them for the moment muted. Tasteful art on the walls, or soothing sculptures in the corners. Also, the windows were capped by a biotic barrier which could probably have stopped a meteorite strike.

There were little touches which Shepard didn't expect, though. Namely, a small picture of a small blue girl. Daughter, or sister? That was the thing about the Asari, sometimes, it was damned hard to tell. Shepard stood at attention as Valern, last one contacted, entered the room, joining Tevos and Speratus. "I have to admit, I hadn't expected to receive the Feros debrief in person," Tevos said.

"I couldn't trust my equipment to hold a signal," Shepard said simply. "I take it you've looked over my report," she turned a glance toward the turian, "thoroughly enough to not make knee jerk reactions to it."

"I did," Speratus said. "Your species has a bad habit of backing companies headed by madmen. First ALMA, and now Exogeni? At this rate, VolCre will be tanking your economy just to keep this sort of thing from happening again."

Shepard rolled her eyes. "ALMA was an unrelated incident, and doesn't have a damned thing to do with the Feros mission."

"The Spectre is right," Valern said with a clipped nod. "Exogeni's dismantling, and your public denouncement of it, has shown that you're willing to take a neutral stance..."

"There was nothing neutral about my stance," Shepard said. "They were selling human beings, asari, salarians, anything they could get their hands on, just so they could talk to a plant-spirit and milk some technology out of it. They deserve a new hole in their head, not just to get bankrupted."

"I was referring to the fact that you didn't cleave to species politics. It is a refreshing turn, especially given certain fears about your loyalty to the Citadel," Valern said, once again giving a glance to Speratus. My, wasn't the turian _everybody's_ favorite today?

Speratus, though let it roll off of him like water off his face. "I stand by my assertion that even if you are showing unusual aptitude at your current task, it doesn't negate the fact that this shouldn't have been your task to begin with. This entire appointment was..."

"Councilor, you are losing track of what is relevant," Tevos said. "What was the nature of this Thorian you mentioned?"

"Insane, inhumanoid, with a penchant for mind control, slavery, genetic tampering, and vandalism," Shepard rattled off.

"I'm surprised you include the last in the list."

"It made a mess of my ship. That stings almost as much as the mind-control," Shepard said dryly. And Speratus, flying in the face of what she expected of him, chuckled lightly at that. But not for very long. After all, a _human_ had seen him do it.

"Still, it should have been taken intact, for study and communication," Valern said.

"Shepard's assertion was probably the correct one," Speratus countered, even though he did sound a bit begrudging. "Salarians don't have as much... history... with spirits as the turians do. They can be temperamental at the best of times, and at the worst, as dangerous as the entire Krogan Rebellion. Killing it while it was manifested might have been extreme, but one does not 'study' spirits," he said, doing air-quotes as he did.

"And the colony survived at the end of the day. Even without Exogeni's financial backing, it is estimated that it will be a profitable venture again within two years," Tevos said.

"Of course the colony is intact. She would go to any lengths to save a _human_ colony," Speratus said sourly.

"I would have saved anybody in that situation. Maybe not the _batarians_, but for them, it'd just be divine irony," she admitted.

"What you did was admirable," Valern said. "But you must be aware that Spectres have to make sacrifices in their line of work. Sacrifices which cut to the bone. You cannot save everybody, and you need to have the clarity of vision to be prepared to do what is necessary when the time comes."

"Was there anything else?" Shepard asked.

"Yes," Tevos said. "The recent 'uproar' about the human discovery of one of our genetic illnesses has us... somewhat baffled. Would you care to offer insight into it?"

Shepard scowled. "Ask Udina. That's what he's here for."

"Udina seemed as incensed as the others were," Tevos said. "Frankly, this office is swamped by human reporters and human pryers and smear-merchants."

Shepard gave a moment of thought, then shrugged. "This is a lot like something which happened in human history. We tried to make it illegal to be born a certain way. It backfired royally."

"And what would you have done in this situation?"

"If we're both talking about Ardat Yakshi?" Shepard asked. Tevos nodded. "Tell 'em the truth. _All_ of the truth. This is what happens when people suck in the Extranet through a drinking straw. Every now and then, they get a mouth-full of shit without understanding that there's only a blob of it before they hit ambrosia."

"A colorful metaphor," Speratus said dryly. He turned to his fellow Councilor. "I could have warned you that something like this would happen."

"Thank you for your input, Commander," Tevos said.

"One more thing," Shepard asked. "Has there been any movement on Saren since we got back from Feros?"

"Not at this time," Valern said. "Some rumors, of geth in the Armstrong Nebula and some sort of biotic gathering near the Terminus, but those rumors have been circulating for months. We've determined that the likelihood of their association with Saren, and your current investigation, falls under the statistical probability of chance."

"Our eyes and ears can see far, Commander, but yours can see in resolution that ours cannot," Tevos said. "Pursue your agenda, and if we find something relevant to your investigation, we will contact your ship."

Shepard nodded, then turned toward the door. Speratus cleared his voice, though, as the door parted. "Just one thing before you leave," Speratus said. "Have you found any more information about Saren's ship, Sovereign? It seems a quite advanced piece of technology."

Shepard considered turning back, and regaling him with everything that she'd learned about Sovereign, and that the Reapers were real, or at least were real during the Prothean's time, and a dozen other things. But she wasn't nearly _drunk_ enough to do something that stupid, and she prided herself on keeping her idiocy private whenever possible.

"No. Doesn't matter if I did, though. Not like I've exactly got a surfeit of proof, do I?" Shepard asked rhetorically. And with that, she left the embassy office and headed back toward her ship. Free time. Gods, could there be anything more taxing? She needed something to give her focus, at least until Saren popped his head back up.

She gave a bit of thought to that. Saren could be anywhere right now. That was a big target to throw darts at and hope to hit something useful. She could think of quite a few places he wasn't, but that didn't help. She offered a growl to the impatience, the mania in her head, the stir-craziness. Everything she knew about being a soldier told her 'don't volunteer for anything', and 'don't do something unless you'll die if you don't.'

Which was why she knew she had to finish N7 so quickly. She wasn't good at doing nothing. Airbenders never were. Even stunted, train-wreck airbenders like her. So she got a notion in her head. She headed to the Emporium, across the bridge, following the booming voice which was loudly haggling – if not outright threatening – the hanar who ran the weaponry store. Sure enough, Shepard rounded a corner to behold roughly a tonne of red-armored krogan.

"What's going on here?" Shepard asked, having to skirt aside as some workers wheeled a computer panel past her, with more emerging from the back room.

"This one was trying to facilitate the purchase of new kinetic barrier generators," the hanar said serenely.

"He's trying to rip me off because I'm a krogan," Wrex said with heated tone.

"This one does not discriminate based on race."

"I'd tell you to try saying that with a straight face, only you don't have one," Wrex noted.

"KREE! I've eaten bigger than you!" the lizard bird perched on Wrex's shoulder screeched.

"Wrap this up quick, Wrex," Shepard said. "As soon as we have the crew aboard, we're heading to Tuntau."

Wrex turned to her, a gauging look in his large red eye. "Really?" he asked, suspicious. He grunted to himself. "Fine, jellyfish. I'll pay your price. But don't expect me to like it."

"This one is pleased to have served the customer," the hanar bowed its head-like appendage.

Wrex turned to her. "Didn't think you were actually going to divert after Actus. When you go, I'd better be there."

"Of course. Who's Actus?" Shepard asked, falling in step with the krogan as he stomped back toward the ship.

"Tonn Actus, a turian filth who stole something which belonged in my family for generations," Wrex said, and bumped into the people still moving that computer terminal. That jostle caused one to lose his grip, and a corner banged onto the floor.

"Hey! Watch it!" the turian said, annoyed. "Some guy payed us a lot 'a money to move this thing."

Wrex ignored him, though, and Shepard did as well. "I assume he didn't come by your family relic honestly?" Shepard asked.

"After the war, we got stripped of everything which could be considered a weapon," Wrex said. "The Turian Hierarchy took most of our history away from us. Every bit of ceremonial armor, our ancient weapons, even our old war movies – movies! – ended up in turian hands, usually dropped into their museums. I'd be a lot less angry if Grandfather's armor was in a museum. Actus, though, sees it as a status symbol. Proof that his people one-upped mine," he shook his head, but his lips were peeled back in barely contained rage. "I don't want to think about how he's... _desecrated_ it."

"KREE! Kick 'im in the quad!"

"Well, you'll be able to bring that up with him personally," Shepard said. Wrex grunted, and continued to walk.

"Shepard?"

"Wrex?"

"Not going to ask about the bird, are you?"

"Nope."

Wrex let out a chuckle. "Fair enough."

* * *

**Chapter 10**

**Grandfather**

* * *

"Don't be discouraged. Not everybody heals right away," the waterbender said, before glancing back and sighing. "I'm sorry, but I've got to get some rack time. We'll talk later, alright?"

Tali nodded, focusing on the water which coated the arms of her suit. Getting it there was one thing, and a ridiculously easy thing. Getting them to glow like Doctor Chakwas' nurse, that was something completely different, it seemed. Shepard wasn't lying when she said that healing wasn't as easy as hurting. But still, she'd figure it out. Nobody had _ever_ had so much impetus as she did to learn waterbending healing. She needed this. Her _people_ needed this.

The training area had been set aside in the hold, as most training was. This time, though, they had opted to do it just off of the mess, near a line of lockers which moved up one wall. Didn't need as much room when there wasn't any real movement, no targets, and no violence to undertake. It was a strange thought, that she'd gotten used to the notion of violence so quickly. Even a couple of weeks ago, when she found her way limping and bleeding through the Citadel, Saren's assassins in her shadow, she was a different person than she was today. Time changed people. Some, faster than others.

She got to her feet, and moved past the other humans, who talked over their supper. It was comforting to have this kind of schedule again. Most quarians on Pilgrimage usually lost whole weeks trying to get their heads around living without a captain to mandate things as simple as when to sleep and when to eat. Tali had taken to it well, but that was because... well... Father wasn't the most active in her upbringing to begin with.

"You're making steady improvements," Alenko said, from where he was idly paging through the code to the Normandy's cyber-warfare suites. Tali was fairly sure she wasn't supposed to be looking at that. But she didn't exactly run away from Kaiden's side. "There are a lot of waterbenders who'd be so envious of you, they'd just die."

"So you say, but it's like the most important thing just won't come!" Tali muttered in frustration.

"It's not always fast. Sometimes, yes, but not always," Kaiden said.

"You left a back-door there," she said, nodding toward a page.

"What?"

"That security screen has a back-door which an intruder worm from a volus operating system compiler could breach like it wasn't there," Tali pointed out.

"How did you see that?" Alenko said, quickly shifting between pages.

"I didn't. I just didn't see the workaround people use to stop it," she pointed out. "Everybody's got that same hole, pretty much," she gave a shrug.

"You're a girl of many talents," Kaiden said. "Sounds like somebody I used to know."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Tali said. She leaned against the wall. "Kaiden, do you know anything about... bending?"

"If you wanted to know more, shouldn't you talk to Shepard?" Kaiden asked.

"I did, but she keeps telling me 'I'm the Avatar, not a school-teacher'. It's like she doesn't know anything about what she does without thinking!"

Kaiden gave a sigh, and shut down the screen. "Shepard is... impatient. I guess that means that she's not a good teacher. She's got a bad habit of not trying to learn something _until_ she needs it. Some day, that's going to be a major problem for her," he turned to her once more, obviously forcing a more cheerful expression onto his face. "What would you like to know?"

"The elements," she said. She ticked them off her fingers, and had to go to her other hand to finish, "air, fire, earth, water. Why four?"

Kaiden took a moment, then beckoned her to join him sitting on the stairs which led up to the currently vacant cryo-tubes. She sat at his side. Perhaps a bit enthusiastically. "Well, one could claim that there are four seasons, and benders tend to be born under the auspices of the month which is strongest to them. Not always, but usually," he cut off her obvious question. "Firebenders can be born in winter, just as earthbenders can be born in autumn. Honestly, though, I'd say there was a degree of social engineering involved."

"How so?" Tali asked.

"Air Nomad weddings tended to happen in the winter," Kaiden said. "And nine months later..."

"You're in autumn again," Tali said.

"Fire Nation day of romance? Beginning of autumn. Best time to have a child in the Water Tribes? Winter, since you're not migrating at that time of year," Kaiden said. "There's probably more to it than that, but as a non-bender, I couldn't claim to know."

"You know more than you think," Tali said.

Kaiden smiled at that. "Kind of you to say, Tali," he said.

"Another thing," Tali said. "Why can benders only bend one element?"

Kaiden got a bit of an uncomfortable look on his face. "I don't know."

"...but there's something you're not telling me," she said.

Kaiden gave a shrug. "It's a very rare case, but it can happen. Humans _can_ bend two elements in their lifetime. But it gets... messy."

"If they can, what makes the Avatar so special?" she asked.

"The Avatar can bend any of the elements, any time she wants," Alenko said. "Even if she does have trouble with airbending. Normal people, though... different story. If I were a firebender, I would usually be a firebender until the day I died. But... there's a way to change what people can bend."

"Really?" she asked.

Kaiden nodded, and from the look on his face, it wasn't a kind one. "In a lot of ways, it's like what ALMA did at Jump Zero. Take a bender, and tear them apart, down to the tiniest bit of their identity. Then, you build them back up into what you want. Usually, you just end up with a crazy person who couldn't bend to save their own life. Sometimes, though, the bender starts bending a different element. As though they were born a waterbender instead of a firebender, say."

"That sounds brutal," Tali said. "Did people ever do that?"

"I've read enough horror stories from the First World War and the Witch Hunt to say that they definitely tried," Kaiden said. He shook his head grimly. "You might get a new element, but it's always accompanied by a psychotic break, and a complete change in who they are, how they act. The person they were... just doesn't exist anymore."

"That sounds like a nightmare," Tali said.

"It is," Alenko said.

"Where does the Avatar fit into this? Does she... um... control the elements themselves? Could she shut off somebody else's bending?" she asked.

"Yes," Kaiden said, "but it definitely doesn't happen very often, and it's an involved process. She doesn't just turn a metaphysical faucet and somewhere out there, somebody's bending stops," Kaiden shrugged. "The Avatar isn't the source of bending. Bending _predates_ the Avatar, by about three thousand years in the case of firebending. It's almost as old as shamanism."

"How does that work with bending?" Tali asked.

"It usually doesn't," Kaiden said. "You can't bend in the Spirit World, and spirits don't tend to interact with the Physical World," he broke off, and a smile came to his face. "I have to say, you do have some interesting questions."

"This is important to me. I need to know _everything_," Tali said.

"_The commanding officer is aboard. XO Pressley stands relieved_," the computer stated pleasantly, which caused both to glance to the speaker.

"I guess that means that our time on the Citadel is coming to a close," Kaiden said. "Did you want to know anything else?"

"_All_ of the things," she answered him. "But I don't have any questions right now. You'll be around to answer them when I get them sounding coherent, though?"

"Of course," Kaiden said. She could hear the thud of the clamps releasing a few seconds later. "Well, we seem to be underway sooner rather than later."

The ship began to hum to Tali's senses, as the engine moved from standby to active, and the ship began to soar toward the Mass Relay. But her attention was mostly focused on the two coming down the stairs ahead. Wrex and Shepard. Shepard looked through the mess, then reached over and pressed the button for the intercomm. "Ground squad, assemble in the mess."

Wrex shrugged, and leaned against a wall, the green bird reptile thing squawking lightly as it clung to his hump. It was only a couple minutes before the others appeared near Shepard. Tali glanced around. They were all here. "Alright," Shepard said. She pointed a thumb over her shoulder to Wrex. "We've got a couple of things to do on Tuntau. One, we're going to break up a pirate organization headquartered planetside. It's headed by a turian named Tonn Actus. He's a known associate of batarian slavers, and tends to keep mercenaries as body guards. We shut down his operation, and the Alliance gets a few light years that can breath a little easier at night. Two, we're going to track down the squad which tried to do this before us. Admiral Kahoku gave us their transponder signal. If we're within a few kilometers of it, we'll find them. Any questions?"

"Who's on the ground team?" Garrus asked.

Shepard glanced to Tali. "No geth. Tali, you're sitting this one out."

"That's alright," Tali said.

"No Protheans either. Liara, you're staying shipside," Shepard added.

"But..."

"You're also shy on the trigger," Shepard said, turning to face her more directly. "Not all of the things which try to kill you out here have white goo for blood. Some of them are human, turian, even asari. Doesn't mean they don't need to get shot. If you can't do that, then I can't have you on my squad."

Liara fell silent at that. Tali felt a little bit angry at that. There was no call for Shepard being so cutting! Shepard, though, turned to where Jackie was leaning next to the infirmary, her jaw still swollen where it broke, even with waterbender healing. "You're manning the med-bay on this one, Jack," Shepard said.

"...the _fuck_?" Jackie asked.

"Doctor's orders," Shepard reminded her. "You'll probably be right as bricks by the time Saren pops his head up again," Shepard then smirked. "And besides, this can't be the only bunch of pirate scum out there."

"Ugh. Don't remind me," Jackie rolled her eyes.

"Hey!" Murtock piped up. "Not all pirates are scum!"

"Shut the fuck up," Jackie said easily. "'Sides; you kinda are."

"We'll hit Tuntau in eleven hours. Everybody not cooling heels, make sure your weapons and armor are ready. Be ready for anything."

"Aye, Commander," Asha said crisply, before descending down the ladder. Tali gave a glance toward Alenko.

"It's been broken since the Thorian. Shepard never released its repair," he said.

"Why does she hate elevators so much?" Tali asked lightly.

"I've got a feeling that's a long story," Alenko said, once again not happily. Tali couldn't exactly gainsay Shepard's choices, though. She was right. Without geth, Tali wasn't exactly indispensable. It did give her more time to practice, maybe figure out how to get healing to work. But at this point, she'd been training all day.

"Do you think you'll be alright?" Tali asked, as she moved to the ladder leading down.

"I've survived worse. So have Shepard and Nilsdottir," Alenko said. "Don't worry about me. Just focus on what's important."

"Saren and the mission?" Tali hazarded.

"Waterbending training," he said gently. "Get some rest. It'll be a long trip."

The wonders of the Mass Relays, when a trip half way across the galaxy took ten hours, and people had the gall to complain about it. Tali, though, descended, into the lower level. A glance told her that Asha was working on her weapons, and that Adeks was getting the Mako not only finished, but repainted. That krogan had a way with machines, that much was obvious. He'd almost make a fine quarian in that regard. Tali moved into the engine room, and spent a moment, her eyes closed, just feeling the dull thrum of the engine. It was almost silent. But in its way, she was comforted by it. Not an old, familiar comfort, but one she took all the same.

She then turned, opened up a panel, and stepped into the storage closet which had been turned into an impromptu room for her. It was about as big as a single bunk bed, and most of the room was taken up by a container on the floor. Her bed, such as it was, was a hammock which stretched over top of it. It wasn't steady, but it was comfortable enough. She crawled up into it, and she thought about her family. Her people. Her future.

If she could bring waterbending back to the fleet... what future would the quarians have?

When she drifted into sleep, rocking slowly in that hammock, it was to better dreams than any quarian had for quite a while.

* * *

Shepard was pacing again. She knew it was a bad habit, but from the time she was young, she _despised_ being still. It was apparently an airbender trait of some renown. Hannah hated it, always chastising Shepard for not being able to sit still. She could as well stop as she could still her heart.

"Careful, Commander. You might wear a hole in the deck plating," Joker said over his shoulder as he carefully manipulated a few panels of screens before him.

"If that's all it took, then Adeks would have fallen into space weeks ago," Shepard answered back. "How long until we hit the exit Relay?"

"We're past the Argos Rho frontier... hitting Phoenix in two minutes. And five minutes ago, it was _seven_ minutes," Joker said with mock shock and surprise.

"Stealth systems online?"

"Not yet," Joker said. "They don't work until we land out of FTL anyway. 'Sides, aren't you hunting pirates? Why bother with the stealth systems?"

"Don't ever let a pirate think it's backed into a corner," Nilsdottir said from the chair near Jokers. She still looked like one massive, barely healed injury, and doubly sore in that she couldn't knock heads to let off steam. "They tend to get nasty when you do that."

"And you'd know?" Joker asked.

"First hand experience, flyboy," Nilsdottir said with a smirk.

"Alright. New fantasy, a biotic in high boots and an eyepatch," Joker said.

"If you say, 'and nothing else', I don't care how brittle your bones are, I'm rearranging 'em," Nilsdottir pointed out.

"Dropping out in two, one," Joker said, and with a tiny lurch, and the heavens outside returning to a normal color and form, the ship was banking away from the massive Relay which allowed exodus at hyper-luminal speeds. "Drift is at... five hundred K. Beat that, I dare you! Stealth online. We're running quiet. Estimated time to Tuntau is... alright, we might need to drop stealth before we get there."

"What? Why?" Shepard asked.

"Have you seen that star?" Joker pointed out the canopy over his shoulder. The star was indeed massive, bright, and powerful. "That planet's four times as far out as Earth's gas giant, and it's hot as an asari's ass out there the whole way in."

"Lovely image," Nilsdottir said.

"I try," Joker pointed out. "We try to stealth, we cook, Commander."

"Taken under advisement. Bring us in nice and quiet, then. Find a way to get onto their doorstep without them noticing us."

Joker flexed his fingers with a little smirk on his face, at that command. "Alright. Get ready for a hot drop; I'm taking us in on a cannon-ball run."

"Ooo, I love these things," Nilsdottir said. "How close do you figure you can get us from the star? Think we can dive under one of its flares?"

"You've been watching way too much sci-fi," Joker said, as he began to plot a course, and skirt within one AU of a star. Shepard, though, turned and walked the length of the ship, getting used to the feel of her armor again. When she took that hit on Feros, it must have knocked something loose inside. The thing chafed a bit when she moved in certain ways, now. She'd have to get Adeks to look at it. Or maybe Tali, if she had any experience with it.

"Commander," Alenko said, appearing at Shepard's side, armor on. It seemed he'd taken the opportunity last time on the citadel to find better armor. This version was grey and white, rather than the drab, slate grey. "I hear this is a personal request from Wrex. Anything we should know about?"

"Pirates," Shepard said. "They've probably got biotics working for them. With one of my squad's biotics down, and the other pretty much useless for task, your job is to shut down any space-magic bullshit that they try to pull against us."

"I'll do my best," Alenko said, cracking a smirk at her choice of term. "I was talking more nitty-gritty, though. Who is this Tonn Actus? What kind of forces does he have? Numbers? Armaments? What about base security? If he's smart, he'd have some."

Shepard paused, standing in front of the doors to the stairs. "You've got a point. I'll have to get a brief from Wrex on our way to site."

"Good. I'd hate to go into a firefight without knowing what to expect," Alenko said. She started down the stairs. "Commander, can I ask you something?"

"Do you ever stop?" Shepard asked rhetorically.

"Why did you exclude Liara from this mission? I'm an effective biotic, but I can't see in all directions at once, and I like having backup," Alenko said.

"You heard my reasons," Shepard said.

"_Everybody_ was gunshy at some point in their careers, ma'am," Alenko said. "Even me. Although, that was a long time ago in my case. You've got other reasons. What are they?"

"Isn't it a bit presumptuous to second-guess your commander?" Shepard asked.

"Wasn't it _you_ who asked me to 'call you on your bullshit' after that incident in Jong Hui?" Alenko answered back. And once again, Shepard was bound against herself. He had a point.

"You know, I _really_ shouldn't get drunk around you. You make me agree to things. Bad things," Shepard said darkly. She shook her head and stopped by the ladder down. Her voice was quieter here, as though to not cross the mess. "She's... not cut out for this. She's a civilian. Worse, she's a civilian who thinks the galaxy is a fundamentally good place. There's enough lessons to the contrary out there that bringing her along with me more than I absolutely have to is just putting a target on the back of her head."

"I think you're selling her short," Alenko said, and not harshly. "She's a lot tougher than she looks."

"She'd have to be," Shepard noted with a note of sarcasm, before moving down the ladder and into the hold. Alenko was once again right on her heels. Shepard came to a halt, before the Mako where it stood on the launch catapult. "Alright squad, fall in."

The humans, krogan and turian, all gathered around her in a fairly informal scrum. She didn't berate them for it. She didn't much stand on military formality more than she had to, at the best of times. "We're hitting a pirate base on the planet within the hour," Shepard said. "We're expecting some harsh resistance, but given our advantage in stealth, we should catch them with their pants down. Wrex will give a rundown of what Actus' capabilities are."

"He's a turian shit who took something which didn't belong to him," Wrex said. There was more than a moment of silence after that.

"And?" Shepard asked.

"What? Do you think I've got a layout of his base? It's probably a prefab drop-base. Shoot whoever's wearing blue or yellow. That'll be all you need to know."

"I thought you took fights a bit more seriously than that, Urdnot," Shepard said.

"I take them plenty seriously," Wrex said. "The only real good news is that he won't have krogan working for him. He's a known bigot. He also tends to hate anything that can't eat dextro-food, but he's smart enough to work with them. He has contracts with both Blue Suns and the Eclipse. That means drones, likely, and those damned tough batarians they send to breach battle-lines."

Shepard's jaw tightened at hearing that. Garrus glanced to her, a bit of concern hidden in the fact that Shepard didn't yet know how to discern concern from a turian's expression. "Noted. Anything else?"

"Tuntau's a popular place to vent cores," Garrus added. "Just because we know to expect drones, biotics, and a few rampaging krogan, doesn't mean that we won't suddenly have an entire ship full of confused but belligerent pirates coming out of the sky behind us."

"A risk I'm willing to take," Wrex said.

Shepard nodded. "Actus has been a thorn in the Alliance's side and a pain in its ass for long enough. We shut down his landing site, the Alliance rolls in and locks it down. That's a few dozen more lightyears without pirates, slavers, and the scum of the galaxy having a foothold," she gave a dark smile. "Call it a gift to the galactic community as a whole."

"I like the kind of gifts you give, Shepard," Wrex noted. "Remind me to ask for one when I reach my next birthday."

"Which would be?" Garrus asked.

"Wouldn't know. Forgot that a long time ago," Wrex said.

Shepard cracked a smirk, and hopped into the Mako. As she was heading to the front, though, Asha thrust her arm across the breach from the personnel bay to the wheel. Shepard's smirk withered a bit. "Is there a reason for this, al'Wahim?"

"Admiral Hackett's orders," the Si Wongi said crisply, and not smugly. Which was for the best, because despite appreciating the woman's skill and perseverance, Shepard _would have_ laid her out for that. With no more than a grumble at that, she moved back and settled in with the others who were strapping in for an orbital drop. Alenko leaned forward, from his seat across from her.

"It's been a while since you dropped against batarians, Commander. Are you sure you're ready for this?" he asked.

"I've been ready since I was twelve," Shepard said darkly.

"That isn't what I meant, ma'am," Alenko said.

"There's a place for anger, chief," Garrus said dryly. "It can keep you sharp when there's something trying to distract you."

"That isn't the whole truth. There are things which can go wrong if you're blinded by hatred," Alenko said.

"Are you saying that I'm blinded by hate, Alenko?" Shepard asked.

"No, ma'am," Alenko said. "Only pointing out a hypothetical."

"Might be a bit more than that," Wrex said, and paused, as there was a lurch which sent all of the inhabitants of the Mako who weighed less than a tonne by themselves shifting uncomfortably backwards as the ship was hurled out of the Normandy's bay, and began its plummet. Wrex kept right on talking, even as the whole group experienced a long stretch of zero-gravity. "Anger is good to a point. Then it starts to eat at you. I've seen a lot of my kith and krannt eaten alive by hatreds, because they didn't know enough when to let go. That's a lesson that too few krogan are taught these days. It's one _everybody_ should learn."

"Are you seriously saying to 'let it go'?" Garrus asked at a yell as he clung to his restraints. Shepard likewise held onto her chest as they plummeted. "...Doesn't sound very krogan of you!"

"Maybe the turians don't know my species as well as they'd like to think they do," Wrex said flatly.

"That's all kind of moot, since it's got nothing to do with Actus!" Shepard shouted.

"_Planetfall in ten seconds. Nine. Seven. Five._"

Shepard sucked in her tongue and clenched her teeth. She hated being a passenger in these things. It wasn't that she was a terrible back-seat driver, but she liked knowing with absolute certainty when they were going to hit a bump. She'd had enough bites into her tongue during N4 that she crunched the Universal Armor Licensing just so she could always have a valid reason for being in the front seat. The thump was not as calamitous as some had been, but still jarring, and caused Shepard to hiss as her armor dug into her ass-cheek just a little. She _would_ fix this armor. Just as soon as she got this mission over with.

"I wouldn't say it was irrelevant," Wrex said. "I know who I hate. I hate Actus. I hated Jarrod. I hate Hosrim Ahak. I don't hate _turians_. I don't hate _batarians_. I know my limits, Shepard. There's only so many I can hate at one time."

"I'll take that under advisement," Shepard said. "al'Wahim? What have you got on scanners?"

"We're picking up..." she paused, and glanced back. "It seems that bringing miss T'Soni might have been a prudent course. There are ruins upon this planet."

"Hindsight. You know what they say about it," Shepard said flatly.

"Yes," al'Wahim turned back to the scanners, and the Mako started to accelerate forward as smoothly as one could please. "Also, strong EME from the coordinates which Urdnot provided. There is a ship on site. It is performing a drive discharge."

Alenko unbuckled himself and levered himself up beside her. "Let me see that?" he asked, and al'Wahim gave an acceding wave. "Hmm. Decommissioned Roanapur from the discharge profile, probably a converted freighter. But it's dumping a lot more charge than it should. Weapons, maybe?"

"Not very well decommissioned, then," al'Wahim made note.

"Pirates," Garrus said. "This planet was noted as a haven for them."

"There's not much fun to be had poaching pirates," Wrex said.

"Really? I thought you'd have lots of stories about pirate-related derring-do," Garrus said dryly.

"Mostly from the pirate's side," Wrex said. He shrugged. "Hell, I was working as a pirate when I met Saren."

Both the turian and the human's eyes both went wide to Wrex at that. "And you didn't tell me this, why?" Shepard asked.

"It didn't matter," Wrex said. "It was just a hijack and pillage job on a volus owned superfreighter. Lots of cheap, low grade weapons, a few grunts that were working for almost nothing. I almost felt bad killing them. They didn't stand a chance, even though they outnumbered us five to one," Wrex said.

"When was this?" Shepard asked.

"I'd say about a decade ago," Wrex said. "Hadn't had a chance to purge it out. Too recent."

"What happened?" Garrus asked.

"We were stripping out anything we thought we could sell," Wrex said. He shook his head. "I had a bad feeling about the thing from the jump. And that feeling got worse when I saw him. Just walking around. Looking for something."

"Looking for what?" Shepard asked.

"Don't know. Didn't care to find out. Wasn't my business," Wrex said. He scowled, pulling at the scars running up his face. "My instincts are pretty good, though. Once I got a measure of him, I decided it was time to go. I didn't even wait to collect my paycheck; I just jumped the very first transport to Omega that was flying, and laid low for a year."

"Seems a bit paranoid," Garrus pointed out.

"It's not paranoia when somebody's trying to kill you," Wrex answered equally flatly. "The others, who hadn't split and hid? They ended up dead within a week. Every. Last. One of them. Saren was bad news then, and seems like he hasn't gotten any better. I could hate his kind for neutering mine, but that's too big. I prefer to hate Saren, for killing the few guys I could actually stand in the Terminus. It's... cleaner that way. I _prefer_ to hate Ahak for wrecking my favorite gun and leaving me to die, instead of all batarians. I _preferred_ to hate Oro'Reegar for shooting me in the spine, not all quarians."

"Batarians are different," Shepard said. "Every damn one of them deserves a bullet."

"That's a bit of a racist attitude to hold," Garrus said. "There are plenty of humans who think that about my species."

Wrex let out a growl. "Wasn't always that way," he said, shaking his head slowly. "Two hundred years ago, the batarians _were_ different. Turning into something more like _you_. But then... well?" he shrugged against his restraints. "Couldn't tell you what's in their heads. All I know is that nowadays, I find myself killing a lot more batarians than turians, and that's saying a lot considering where I've worked."

"We're five minutes out," al'Wahim said from the front of the craft. "Check your seals and weapons. Going in hot?"

"I might think not," Alenko said. He turned his seat around, so that he faced Shepard and those behind. He opened his Omni, and began to project a holograph of the topography. He pointed to one particular spot, overlooking the prefab bunker. "If we approach the site from this vector, we're going to be out of all of their auto-guns' lines of fire, and the bunker will block line of sight from the ship. We'll be in before anybody knows we're there."

"Good. Never punch them in the face when you can stab them in the spine," Wrex said with a nod.

"My sentiment exactly," Shepard said. "Bring us in, al'Wahim."

"Aye, Commander."

* * *

Liara knew that she was doing something wrong. She knew, but she didn't stop herself. Hong had been quite clear; Shepard's _soul_ depended on her. And more and more, she felt a certain investment into that. It was a massive responsibility, which was only outmassed by the possibilities having access to Shepard's mind could offer. But she forced herself out of wistful contemplation of academic awards and being able to stand astride academia and laugh with an almost maddened pitch at those who had doubted her before, and back toward figuring out something about Shepard, and why she was as she was.

The Extranet console which was the only one with unrestricted access flashed through pages, trying to access even the publicly available files on Shepard. What happened to her sister? She knew that Mindoir burned, but there had to be more than that. Her eyes were locked on the streams of information which blurred past at a rate even salarians would have trouble keeping up with, shooting through her service record – that which was open to public access, anyway – to her citations, her training. What was she missing?

"_I'm pretty sure she wouldn't be impressed if she saw you doing that,_" Tali's electronically muffled voice came from Liara's shoulder, causing the asari to let out a peep of alarm, before turning to see a purple helm shaking slowly. "_If I didn't know any better, I'd say that you had a crush on her_."

"I do not have a crush on Shepard," Liara said. "I simply want to know the intimate details about her, on a completely unrelated matter, and _stop looking at me like that_!"

Tali hadn't altered one whit, still standing there with her fingers tapping on her arm. Only the momentary shift in the light on her faceplate showed that she bothered to blink. "_Yes, I'm convinced_," she said sarcastically.

"Good," Liara said, not catching that fact. "Now if you're not going to report me, could you help me find something about Shepard which has me fascinated?"

"_Oh, really?_" Tali said in a leading tone, which, as usual, Liara completely overlooked.

"Yes. She is called the 'Butcher of Torfan', but I cannot find any information on what that appellation is referring to."

Tali continued to tap her fingers against her arm. "_And the Extranet didn't tell you? I could check in five seconds._"

Liara shook her head. "I know when data is being manipulated when I see it," she pointed out. "The things that are in the public file don't make sense when compared against the live specimen. There is _something important_ that is being left out of the information which is publicly available, and unless I can find out what it is, I will not be able to understand Shepard the way I need to. So I must track it down at its source. In _their_ database."

Tali shrugged. "_I'm not exactly the best source on history in this part of the galaxy,_" she admitted. She raised a finger, though. "_But, if you need access to a file which is locked to outside access... I might be able to help. For a price._"

"Yes! Anything!" Liara said, and then reined herself in. "Ahem. Within reason, of course."

Tali stared at her. "_...you __absolutely__ don't have a crush on her_," Tali said, then shook her head. "_She listens to you more than she does me. I need to convince her to let me bring some destroyed geth onto the Normandy_."

"Is that wise?" Liara asked, then she rolled her eyes. "I suppose you'd know the dangers better than I would. And what you claim is patently untrue. She treats you with a great deal more care and kindness than most aboard this vessel."

"_What? Are you ins... well, of course you are. Are you __blind__?_" Tali asked. "_She treats me like I'm some sort of helpless child! I need..._" she shook her head, gesticulating as though to conjure a word from the air, but failing to. Liara sighed at that.

"She had a sister," Liara said. "I believe you could guess her name."

Tali's gesticulation halted. Then she sighed, palming her helm, before gently moving Liara aside. "_Is this what you wanted?_" Tali asked. Liara nodded, as the quarian began to systematically crack open the file defenses around the recording from the grounds of Torfan. "_I don't know what you think this is going to show you. As I understand human culture, 'butcher' isn't a title given out of respect or kindness._"

"I need to understand her," Liara said intensely. "I need to know how she thinks, _why_ she thinks. It is unbelievably vital to the continued existence of sapient species across the galaxy!"

Tali stopped, and turned to her. "_...of course it is._"

She fidgeted with impatience as the quarian turned her attention back to the panel, and to her Omni which was open on her other hand. Nimble tridactyl hands flit from one to the other, and back again, but Liara couldn't track the advancement; technology, at least _modern_ technology, was not any strong suit of hers. Tali began to mutter under her breath in Khelish as she worked, and Liara leaned in all the more intensely, her expectation coloring her world, focusing her perception, and dulling her sense of hearing to the point where she didn't hear the door open behind her.

"...what the _fuck_ are you two doing in Shepard's room?" Nilsdottir's voice demanded, not so much angry as confused and annoyed. Liara glanced to Jackie, then to the console, until she turned back to Jackie once more.

"There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this," Liara began.

"_She wanted to hack into the Alliance Navy database and read Shepard's file_," Tali said in a great blurt, pointing at Liara. Liara turned to her with a look of shock and confusion. Tali wilted a bit. "_...she's scary_."

Nilsdottir glanced between the contrite quarian and the embarrased asari, her arms crossed before her chest. She worked her swollen jaw for a moment, as though sucking on teeth. After an entirely too long period of deliberation, she said one word. "...why?"

"I need to understand Shepard's background better. It is vital to my studies of the Protheans and the continued survival of our two races!"

"_I think she's got a crush on Shepard,_" Tali said. Liara shot a glare at her. "_What_?"

Jackie let out a scoff at that. "Sorry, Liara. Shepard's type is tall, beefy, and penis-bearing," she then leaned aside, to get a better look past them. "...what 'cha looking at?"

"Torfan?" Liara said, but it came out like a shamed question.

Nilsdottir sighed at that, and shook her head. "That's something I'm pretty sure she wouldn't want to share."

"Please, you have to let me see this," Liara said. "You cannot grasp how incredibly important this is."

"_...__major__ crush._"

Liara shot the first death-glare of this decade at the young quarian. It didn't have the intended effect; it caused both she and Jackie to burst out laughing, the former far quieter than the latter. When Nilsdottir's laughter died down a bit, she let out a puff of breath. "If you're so stuck on it, then I'll show you my suit's video feed. It'll tell you anything you need to know."

"Really?" Liara asked.

"I didn't say you'd like it," Jackie pointed out. She beckoned the two of them to follow out of the forbidden zone which was the CO's quarters. As soon as they were out of the doors, Liara could see Nilsdottir's lover, Murtock, waiting for her. Jackie shook her head as she stomped toward the crew compartments, which would be housing most of the crew as it was currently the ship's night-cycle. "You know what's fucking sad? I'm the _mature_ one right now. That's _fucked up_."

"What can I say, babe? You've always been mature beyond your years," he said.

"Oh, shut up," Jackie said over her shoulder, to which Murtock just rolled his eyes. Liara could tell that there was a great deal of warmth between them, but the way that they verbally abused each other strained Liara's understanding of how romantic relationships were supposed to work. They were supposed to be about kindness and respect, not screaming matches, thrown objects, and mutual insults. It was all the stranger that they actually seemed happiest when in a state which to the best of Liara's understanding would have been the immediate precursor to a separation.

She opened the door, and pushed Liara back as she tried to enter with her. "Uh uh. You wait here."

She moved into the darkness, with a great deal more quiet as she moved to her things. Liara stood beside Murtock for a long moment. "So... how did you meet her?" she asked.

"Pirate," he pointed to himself, and then toward her, "pirate."

"_She's not a pirate... I think_," Tali said.

"Eh, it's complicated," he waved off. "Important bit is that we hit it off, broke a few beds, and she came back when it looked like I was proper fucked. Rest is history."

"That has not explained anything about your relationship," Liara said with confusion.

Murtock shrugged. "Yeah... there's not much about what me and Jackie've got that can be explained."

"That much is obvious," Liara said. And Jackie herself cut off that line of conversation with an abrupt nod as she emerged into the low-light of the night. "Is that..."

"Come on, your room," she said. They followed Jackie as she walked, somewhat stiffly, through the med-bay and passed the door which lead to Chakwas tiny quarters, before entering the room Liara had essentially claimed for her own.

"So, what is that?" Liara asked.

Nilsdottir held up a solid state storage device, itself a rare thing, since Omnitools had been... well, _omni_present for quite a few asari generations, and plugged it into a hole in the side of Liara's console. "You want to know about Shepard... about Avatar Shepard, this is all you need to see. A complete lesson on who she is, why, and how_ fucking scary_ she can be, all in one clusterfuck of a mission."

"_...__you__ think she's scary?_" Tali asked, sitting down on Liara's other chair. Nilsdottir had a very distant look as she nodded.

"...I saw her go Glowing Badass. That shit stays with you," she said. And then, she turned on the console, and the video started to play.

* * *

Most prefabricated structures produced by the major structural companies tended to be built to survive just about anything. Some had to withstand meteorite strikes. Others, tectonic shifts which would tear a lesser building in two. Others still were reserved for military use, being premanufactured bunkers that could be dropped behind a retreating force and give them pillboxes to hold ground from. There was one other kind, but it hadn't seen wide use nor construction in roughly a millennia and a half.

This structure was once a military command hub. The tale of how it was _stolen_ was a story for the ages, leaving an entire turian regiment baffled and confused, for the week it took for the vorcha who had been swarming to rip them to shreds. It had changed hands several times in the last few hundred years, until a turian with enough money to require an edifice large enough to house his ego paid for it, and here it now rested on the powdery aluminum-oxide surface of Tuntau. Severus didn't consider himself an officianado of buildings nor history, despite being turian so both were hammered into him since birth. That lackadaise proved to be... problematic.

Doubly so, because the airlock portion of this structure had been built _long after_ the Krogan Rebellions, and thus, _hadn't_ been proofed against metalbending.

The first and only warning that Severus got was the squealing of metal, followed by a gale as the oxygen was displaced by three atmospheres worth of helium and methane, sending the unhelmeted turian stumbling back, and his fellows scrambling for guns, if not simply pounding on the inner airlock door.

First through that breach wasn't what Severus would have expected. Shepard came up in a roll, glaring through the thin slit of her breather-helmet as she put a stream of fire into the rapidly suffocating salarian who was trying to point a weapon at her. They weren't the problem. The turian would be a bigger one, but the major, _major_ problem? The batarians. Much as vacuum didn't kill them nearly fast enough, overpressure didn't either. Even as Wrex was closing the breach she'd made at Alenko's back, Shepard was already powering forward, firing as her gun overheated, walking fire over the thick armor of the four-eyed monsters.

Whoever these ones were, they had discipline, and they had focus. They didn't marvel in incredulity, nor flail hopelessly at the inner doors which would not open until the extra atmospheres out here could be vented. They advanced, quickly standing in a staggered line, and one before was retreating toward it. He raised a fist, and Shepard tried to duck aside. She wasn't fast enough, though, to dodge the ballistic blades entirely, and they gouged her armor on one shoulder as they broke through the shields. She pulled her trigger again, but the warning beeping of the rifle was relayed directly into Shepard's helm. Overheated.

As one, the three batarians launched forward, sending out a massive wave of fire, which caused a deflagration, swelling those flames a brilliant gold as the methane empowered them far beyond what the firebenders behind it had intended. And all of it streaming directly at Shepard, with murderous intent. Given her destroyed shields, they would cook her to death.

If she wasn't a firebender herself.

With a roar of angry effort, she swept her arms forward, and slammed her feet down into the deck-plating so hard that it deformed under them, and her bending, far stronger than their even concerted effort, called that wave of fire to a halt, and then, began to push it back. The heat was stifling, even if it wasn't bathing her, and the pain of holding it forward... it called to mind another fire. Another fight. But she had more to do than worry about the past. With another howl, one foot rose from the indent which it found itself in, and slammed forward, and then, the other. She walked forward, into that stream of brutal flames, and started to project her own, powering them back faster then they could be projected, until the three batarians and the single human were at an utter stalemate. One which would end soon enough, because the fourth had almost reloaded his ballistic blades. Shepard couldn't expend the effort to pay attention to him. Luckily, she had two sharp-shooters to do that for her.

Even as the batarian rose his gauntlet toward Shepard, a crack sounded in the thick air, slamming into his kinetic barriers. A second less than an instant later tore through the batarian's shoulder, sending the assault mere millimeters wide of its target – Shepard's head – and painting the firebender behind him with blood so dark a red as to nearly be black. But while that batarian did falter back with an unvoiced snarl, he didn't fall, even though that shot should have put him flat on his back. Even Alenko's heavy heave of a Throw only knocked that veteran back a few steps, and put him right beside a dying turian, and more importantly, that dying turian's rifle.

Shepard roared as she used the hatred to burn at these monsters who had twice destroyed her. And as she did, the flames grew hotter. Brighter. Angerier.

Then, they stopped, utterly and abruptly. Not just from her, but from the batarians as well.

"No more oxygen, fucker," Shepard said mostly to herself, and she pulled her own rifle from her back, and began to spray them with fire of a very _different_ sort. Whatever sterner stuff the bladesman was made of, fatefully, the firebenders were not, and her stream of metal cut them all down.

Shepard glanced toward the veteran, and let out a growl, rather than a yelp of alarm, as she had to throw herself at a roll behind a block container, moments from being ripped to shreds by that veteran's return fire, which he offered one-handed.

"Concentrate on bringing the four-eyed fuck down!" Shepard roared into her comms.

"Whoa, that hurt the eardrums a bit," Garrus answered. "Afraid we wouldn't hear you?"

The veteran ignored not only suffocation and injury, but being outnumbered, as he advanced on Alenko and the others, firing with brutal precision on the one who had the weakest armor; Alenko. The biotic had to fall back, ducking behind both of al'Wahim and Garrus, but still, the veteran's fire followed him, battering away at barriers with insanely precise shots. Another pair of shots, one bursting shield, the other tearing flesh, but the veteran only grunted, and kept advancing.

Right when he reached where Shepard could flank him, he turned that rifle on her, and her rush was abruptly halted when he flipped it in his hand, catching it by its barrel, and slamming it into the side of her helm like a massive club. The sheer impact of it sent her sprawling, trying to shake some vision back into her eyes. It was enough that she couldn't see how the veteran then hurled the gun with similar brutal precision, catching Garrus in the knee and causing him to fall against al'Wahim, causing both to land in a heap, which Wrex was stepping over. There was a stomp of metal against metal, and then Shepard could hear the clatter of a ballistic gauntlet priming.

She twisted, tearing up the deck-plating as she did, and cocooning herself with it. The blades dug into the shell she'd made so powerfully that only because she held that cocoon out from her armor did they not breach her suit as they did the metal. She pushed the metal down, seeing that the veteran had turned his attention back to the others, and he was pulling out a grenade to burn them. That, Shepard would not allow. What came from her mouth was debatably even human, but she used the power of undiluted hate, half of her entire lifetime's worth, into an edge, and she bent the metal of her armor, just past her forearm, into that blade. A blade, she then introduced into the veteran's chest.

The veteran halted, and the grenade dropped, unprimed, to the floor. He finally wavered, those four black eyes fluttering slightly. He didn't show a superior sneer, as she expected. He didn't show hate or wrath. Just cold detachment, and in this moment, mild confusion. A moment after that? Acceptance. And that hand grabbed the throat of her armor, and began to squeeze.

So she stabbed him again, with her other hand, in the other side of his chest. He dropped to a knee, still squeezing Shepard's throat with his one remaining hand. Shepard extracted one blade, as she was pulled down to a kneel herself by that grip. He just stared her in the eye, defying her to look away as he died. She wouldn't if she had the option.

At least, she would have, had a massive krogan fist not come in from over her shoulder and slammed into the batarian, causing her other blade to tear the veteran's spine apart, and spilling an ever increasing black pool around him.

"Are you _done_ dancing with batarians, Shepard?" Wrex demanded. "Actus is just inside. Let's go!"

"_Emergency equalization in progress_"

There was another whoosh, as the air which had blown in was forceably ejected, and fresh air took its place. The turians on the ground let out audible gasps, and began to twitch as they clung to the edge of life.

"Well, now they know we're coming," Shepard said.

"I think the blasts of flame and gunfire might have been a better clue," Garrus pointed out, as he helped al'Wahim to her feet. Shepard glanced back to the breach, which Wrex had closed, and to the group she'd brought with her. They all seemed alright. Well, almost all.

"Alenko, are you alright?" Shepard asked.

"Just a flesh wound. Gelling it now," Alenko said, managing to stand with very little stiffness. The red on his armor, though, did Shepard a bit of worry.

Shepard looked at the man for a long moment, then nodded. "Alright people; we've got pirates, some of which are batarians, and that means firebenders. Favor shotguns over snipers. Wrex and I will take the heat," she rattled off.

"Aye, Commander," al'Wahim said with a nod, pulling out her rifle.

"Are you sure I can't take a nice secluded spot to work my magic?" Garrus asked. Shepard answered him with a glare. "Oh, very well."

Wrex damned near fondled his shotgun, as he looked at the doors. Shepard too her spot opposite him at the edge of the aperture. "Been waiting a long time for this, I imagine," Shepard said.

"Eight. Hundred. Years," Wrex said direly. He glanced toward her. "I'm only going to say this once, human; _don't_ fuck this up."

Shepard smirked. "I've got no intention to."

And behind them, Severus' fingers twitched closed around the trigger-guard of his rifle.

* * *

"Keep your head down, Jack! Don't you see that fire coming in at you? Got a death wish or something?"

"Oh, fuck you!" Jackie's voice came from the back of the camera, which was connected to her helmet and thus recording all that she could see. "Where's the Major? I thought we were catching up to him?"

"He must have moved in deeper," the unidentified soldier said. "Come on, rook. Don't slow us down."

Liara glanced toward Nilsdottir, who was leaning with her back to the table upon which the monitor sat. Her eyes were closed. "Are you not going to watch this?" Liara asked.

"Don't need to," she said quietly. "I was there. I know what happened."

"Oh shit! Flank flank flaaugh!" and a spray of red as fire poured in from a vent. Nilsdottir turned, and even Liara was a bit baffled to see how a batarian had managed to cram itself into so small a space, with a shotgun to boot. The batarian turned the gun on Nilsdottir, but the biotic's hand lashed forward, and sent a Throw hurtling at the ambusher. With nowhere to be cast, the attack smashed the alien into a soupy mess.

"Gods damn it, Kalgot, why didn't you see that coming?" Nilsdottir said, swatting the soldier who let that shot slip passed him.

"Well pardon me for not thinking that a batarian could fit in a fucking air vent!" the dark-skinned soldier screamed back.

The whole mission had been like this, according to what Liara had watched. More than an hour, starting with a brutal killing-field approach, followed by a murderous slog deeper into a complex which seemed to run half way to the moon's core. Every attempt at advancement was met with ambushes and bombs, every intersection turned into a killing zone. No lights, lots of noise, and a lot of dead.

"Where's Kiel? For that matter, where the fuck is Shepard?" Nilsdottir snapped at one of the others.

"We might be catching up with her. Him? Hell if I know." the other soldier, still unnamed, answered as he pulled the medigel pack out of the armor of the dead man and slotted it into his own. Liara was taken aback by the seeming callousness of it. Stealing from the dead like that. But then again, she'd already seen, through Nilsdottir's eyes, the death of a dozen soldiers and comrades in as many minutes, and another dozen before that.

The camera moved forward, a shotgun barely visible in the bottom of the shot, as Nilsdottir tried to keep up with the other soldiers, who were advancing with all the grim resolve of men walking to their own execution. They didn't speak as they moved into their positions, trying to get better sight lines into the next room, to mute the next ambush. To limit the next deaths. "Any luck with comms?"

"Not a chance," Kalgot shook his head grimly. "Still locked."

"This wouldn't be so fucking match-stick if we could just talk to each other," Nilsdottir snarled. Kalgot nodded, and then counted down silently on his fingers, before throwing open the doors and turning a rifle into the room. But unlike every time they had done so since the bulkheads dropped and separated Nilsdottir from Shepard and her commanding officers, there was no brutal, withering assault of gunfire bearing down on them, no blasts of unimaginable heat and flames. This room was only populated by the dead. Nilsdottir moved forward.

"Hey, back in line, rook! You'll get yourself killed!" the unnamed soldier hissed, but Nilsdottir shook her head, and advanced into the room, seeing only with the light shining out of her helmet. It started by falling upon the grey armor and bright red of the dead humans. But this wasn't the same kind of violence as there was before. The floor and walls were blackened and pitted, and in some places, the humans had been blown to bits. "Tui La..."

"Looks like we looped onto somebody," Nilsdottir said, and the others moved up, surrounding her with a hedgehog of weapons. "Figure this is Kiel, or Shepard?"

"Rook, take a look at this!" Kalgot hissed, and Nilsdottir turned. She moved to the Tribesman's side, and watched as he turned over the body of a dead batarian. One which was much smaller than the others they'd come across. "...it's a godsdamned kid!"

Nilsdottir looked over the others, and found that they had been peppered by gunfire and left where they lay. "...you've got to be shitting me. It wouldn't have been them who did this."

"Rook, you'd better stop talking," Kalgot muttered.

"No, fuck you! I didn't sign on to shoot kids!" Nilsdottir shouted.

Liara leaned back from the video, ignoring the heated argument which filled the screen, and turned to likely the only surviving party to it. "Tell me that is not what I think it was," Liara said.

Nilsdottir shrugged distantly. "Don't know what to tell ya," she said.

"Tell me that it wasn't Shepard who did that!" Liara said. Tali, though, just watched, silent, a hand over where her mouth would be.

Nilsdottir nodded slowly. "It was," she said. Liara's eyes fluttered, her lips trembled.

"...but... that doesn't..."

"I was as pissed as you were. Then, about ten minutes later... not so much."

"Shepard wouldn't murder innocent children!" Liara said.

"She didn't," Jackie said. And then, blindly, she tapped the fast-forward indicator, skipping a heated argument which indeed did come to blows, only being held apart by four soldiers in armor which was either bloody, cracked, smoking, or a combination of all three.

"Alright, got that out of your system, rook?" Kalgot said, back-handing some of the blood away from the split on his lip.

"Oh, _fuck_ you," Nilsdottir muttered.

"That an offer, Rook?" the unnamed soldier asked at Nilsdottir's side. She punched him in the stomach for his snideness. "Alright, maybe later."

"Maybe never, asshole," Nilsdottir answered. She shook her head. "Why'd I have to be the only chick in this fucking match-stick?"

"Luck of the draw, I guess," Kalgot said. "Eyes up. We've got gunfire ahead. Might be Shepard or the Major."

Nilsdottir followed after, still at the back of the pack, just ahead of the rearguard. The dull thud of grenades sounded dimly in the recording, but loud enough for the viewers to hear it. The whole group seemed to be walking on a razor's edge, following the blood, the ensconced batarian bodies, and the corpses of the fallen marines. "That looks like Kalroh. You alright, Kalgot?" the unnamed soldier asked.

Kalgot glanced back, but shook his head. "Don't have time for that. Keep your eyes open, marines!"

"Don't need to tell me twice," Nilsdottir muttered. But she stopped, waving a hand. "Wait! Everybody shut the fuck up for a second!"

There was a moment of relative silence, only broken by explosions somewhere ahead of them. Then, even Liara heard it. The thumping of skin against metal. "Vents," Nilsdottir said quietly, and the lot of them moved from an irregular blob to a semi-circle in a practiced instant, guns all forward. The gate swung open, and all weapons were a twitch from firing.

Thankfully, they didn't, because the figure which came out of that vent was tiny. The young batarian looked to be no more than six years old, dressed in a tattered brown robe, arms clutched close around him. "Is the bad human gone?" the batarian child asked.

"Did you run when the shooting started?" Kalgot asked, motioning the others to take up a flanking position up and down the hall. The batarian child nodded, its four eyes leaking tears. Another dropped out, followed by a third, all looking terrified out of their minds. Liara wondered what could have possibly happened that would make Shepard so debased as to kill their like. How deep had her hatred gone? Had Liara just fundamentally underestimated how evil the commander was?

"The bad human kept shooting. I ran. We ran," the batarian child said. "Tried to hide. She found some of us."

"She?" Kalgot asked. Nilsdottir glanced toward him. "Green armor?"

The child nodded.

"Fuck! We shouldn't have brought Shepard into this," Kalgot muttered. "I _knew_ she was out of her fucking mind! Anderson's going to get drummed out for this when we're..."

Nilsdottir looked back just in time to see the child locking something to Kalgot's calf. Kalgot's eyes grew wide in his helmet, as he kicked the child hard in the chest, sending him flying back. The other two children began to sprint at the other humans. "SATCHEL CH–" Kalgot got out.

Then he was torn in half, by the satchel charge that the batarian child had strapped to his leg. The blast likewise pulped the child in question. Nilsdottir could see the other soldiers trying to recover, and seeing the batarian child rushing toward them, explosives now in the open, and they opened fire, riddling the child and painting the hallway with even more black. The recording, though, went staticy for a moment, as Nilsdottir's arms pushed out and away from herself, and the child rushing her was heaved up and over, trapped in a biotic field.

"What the fu..." Nilsdottir said, but the child hurled the explosives back at Nilsdottir. The camera was sent flying by the resulting explosion, coming to a rolling stop, staring at the blank, black, glassy stare of a batarian child-suicide-bomber. Liara just sat, silent, stunned.

Jackie lowered the cooling pack from her jaw, and glanced toward the two aliens watching her suffering from years past. "That's the way that they fought. They armed their slaves, their women, and gave bombs to their kids. In the end, Shepard made the call. Burnt earth. No prisoners, no rescues. She was down to two guys by then. The Major... he was on his own."

"There had to be another way," Liara said, still clinging to her view of the galaxy, that there was good in this life.

"If there was, I didn't find it," she said. She shook her head. "I got a lot of nightmares. Torfan... is just a lot more vivid. And not just because of having to shoot kids who want to strap bombs to you."

On the screen, somebody grabbed Nilsdottir's helmet and handed it back to her. In the moment that she was in the view of her own camera, she looked like hell. Blood was running down her face, giving her a sort of red mask, before she plunked that helmet back into place, and the scene returned to its usual form; following her. She glanced around, and saw that even of the six that she'd been walking with before, there were now only three. The two who had shot the child up front, and Nilsdottir.

"You've got to be kidding," Nilsdottir said. "Who's that put in charge?"

The two who were left glanced down at the scant remains of Kalgot, and then to each other. Then, they pumped their fists three times, and made a finger-gesture with their third pump. One vaguely resembled a wave, the other, vaguely a stone. "Water erodes stone. You're it, Tseng."

Tseng rolled his eyes, and then his shoulders. He picked up his rifle, then with a snarl, threw it aside as it was burst open from the shrapnel of the explosion. He picked up one which had been left behind by a marine minutes before, likely escaping the first such attack. "Alright, Rook... What's your name, Rook?" Tseng said.

"Jack."

"Funny name for a girl," he mentioned. "Alright, Jack. Stick close. Shoot _anything_ that doesn't have two eyes. Got it?"

Nilsdottir was silent, and Tseng leaned toward her. Even Liara could tell that he didn't like giving that order, from the look on his face. "Got it?" he reiterated.

"Yes," she said.

"Jack..."

"Yes, sir," Nilsdottir corrected. Tseng sighed, and nodded.

"Shepard must have had the right idea, eh Tseng?" the still unnamed soldier muttered.

"That's Commander Tseng to you," he said dryly. Liara shook her head, and depressed the pause key.

"_What's wrong?_" Tali asked, for all she'd been keeping her own quiet and her own peace.

"I... This doesn't... I cannot..." Liara couldn't get the words to form in her mind, is what she could not. Jackie just nodded slowly.

"That's what the entire mission was like. Batarians, dug in harder than they'd been at any time since the Alliance-Hegemony War. Dug in so deep we couldn't even Orb-bust them. Had to kill 'em, room by room."

"_Why would they choose somebody like Shepard to be a part of this?_" Tali asked, confused. "_Wouldn't they want to keep somebody as... well... capable of irrationality away from this kind of fighting?_"

Jackie shrugged. "Brass didn't care that she hated batarians. They'd just gotten out of a war with 'em, after all. Irrational hatred of them wasn't exactly seen as a character flaw. More like just a quirk, I'd guess," and Jackie stepped forward, keeping her eyes on her bare feet. "She was a good soldier. They needed good soldiers on this mission. I was a powerful biotic. I jumped the line. How we felt about those four-eyed fucks didn't really matter too much."

"This must have been brutal for Shepard," Liara said. Jackie nodded.

"She had a lot worse than my group did, that's for sure."

"I think I am beginning to understand why the Alliance didn't want this sort of information made public," Liara said.

"Kid-killing doesn't exactly help foster the image which the Alliance was gunning for," Jackie agreed.

Tali shook her head, that light which indicated when she was talking lit up, but for silence. Then, finally, she spoke. "_Why would the batarians send their children to their deaths like that?_"

Jackie chuckled, dryly, at that. "Hate," she said. She glanced toward the other two females with her. "They _hate_ humanity. Don't know why. They hate us enough to hurl their own teeth at us, if they think it'll kill us faster. They hate us enough to give bombs to their own kids. They hate _us_, the way that Shepard hates _them_. And for the life of me, I ain't got a clue why."

* * *

The first thing that Shepard saw, as that door was kicked off of its rails by an infuriated krogan, was an explosion as an antipersonnel mine set on its far side was tripped to flying metal rather than walking flesh. That door careened across the room, smashing into a human wearing yellow armor and folding him in half backward over a low wall, before it finally embedded itself into a rack of shelves which started to shudder and droop. "Snipers, then batarians!" Shepard ordered. Actus wasn't so stupid to work with the Blood Pack, but batarians were almost as hard to kill, and in some ways, worse. Shepard bolted forward as the first crack of fire began to spill out behind her, as Garrus and al'Wahim began to spray ballistic death across the catwalks above. Whatever snipers there were had to keep their heads down, or else risk losing them.

"ACTUS YOU SLIME! WHERE ARE YOU?" Wrex roared as he kicked his way over the wall the pirate had been folded over. He was answered by a bolt of ice slamming into his armor, driving him back a step. Shepard ducked the whizzing of ballistic blades, and the snap of their electrified netting that they tried to prevent her movement with, and reached Wrex's side as he swatted that icy spear off of his armor. "I should have known you'd pick up a few new tricks."

Tonn Actus looked quite a bit like Garrus; more than even most other turians that she'd met. They had almost the same hide-color, the same shape of head. But where Garrus always wore a blue stripe down his cheeks and across his nose, Actus' face was bare. And his hands were splayed wide, in a waterbending pose, more spikes floating at his command.

Wrex rose his shotgun, and began to belch fire, but Actus responded by spinning behind a shelf and letting the krogan's assault hit nothing but contraband, sending a thin cloud of red dust into the air. "We can..." Shepard began.

"Deal with your own problem, Shepard. Actus is mine!" Wrex snapped, before charging ahead toward where Actus slipped out of sight. An unfortunate turian pirate who had the misfortune of choosing that moment to attempt to fire found himself smashed aside with a sickening crunch by Wrex' fist, not managing to slow down the nine-hundred year old Battlemaster in the slightest. Shepard, freed to her own targets, found some. Batarians, trying to flank and net her. She didn't even reach for her rifle. The forward of the two launched that electrified net toward her, but a single stomp brought a pillar of metal up between her and he, and the net wrapped harmlessly around it, sparking impotently. Shepard wasn't about to have that, though, so with a brutal punch into the metal, she sent it flying away as easily as most earthbenders would do to bricks. The block of electrified metal, returned to sender, sent the batarian staggering back, only to be caught by the other and pushed back to a relative stand.

The other, though, matched her, and began to tear, and hurl, great chunks of the open warehousing toward her, to batter her down. Shepard wasn't going to let that happen. Her own metalbending flowing through her fists, she pounded through the blocks as they reached her, sending each one exploding into long slivers of curling titanium mesh. Shepard pressed forward, changing her assault from earth to fire, and lashing out with a snap-twist of her arms into a lightning bolt, which the two batarians each leaned out of the way of. Damn these four eyed monsters! Why was it that _every one_ she ever met had to be a brutally effective soldier? If nothing else, it meant that she felt all the better about killing them.

The first, having recovered from his momentary stun, took out his own shotgun, and let it announce itself to the warehousing, causing Shepard's kinetic barriers to shine a brilliant blue, and her HUD warn her that the generators were taxed to breaking. Essentially, one more hit, and she'd start bleeding.

At the moment, she didn't care.

She didn't bother roaring. She just focused her wrath into the tips of her fingers, and she bent.

And the arm with that shotgun wasn't pointing at her anymore. The next blast went straight into the wall, as the batarian glared with the first real emotion he'd shown so far; confusion and alarm. The other stomped past, swatting the first with an electrified gauntlet, causing her bloodbending to falter as his body locked solid. He swooped low, and this time, when he metalbent again, it wasn't to batter Shepard. It was to contain her. A bubble of metal leapt up, surrounding and blackening her world, pulling tighter with the creak of metal-fatigue and the complaints of physics. It was a prison of metal, as tight as Shepard's armor, and very, very strong. Shepard was stronger.

She bent the metal even as it surrounded her, another layer of armored skin. She didn't see but with the muffled sensations through her feet. It wasn't the pristine tremor-sense that the Beifong family had introduced to the world, but it was enough to know that if she moved _that way_ for just a little bit, something would _die_. She swung a double-armored fist at the batarian who tried to use one of her own elements to contain her, smashing him flat with the blow. But her attempt to follow it up with a stomp to the eyes was called to a halt by horrible pain, electrification now searing through Shepard from head to toe.

The other batarian had netted the armor.

With a roar of agony, she twisted the metal away from her, sending it spiraling away from her like an explosion. Part of it cut the batarian who'd just dealt her injury, but he barely flinched. She needed more. With a flick of her wrists, the water began to stream out of the seams of her forearms, and she gathered it into a sweeping mass which she hooked under the leg of the closer batarian, and heaved. Finally dropped from his perch, the two-flanked assault ended as one had a moment of concussion to deal with, which was made all the worse by Shepard sharpening the water into a pick, which she hurled down at the other fallen slaver. The slaver twisted the floor up into the pick's path, blunting the assault. He couldn't stop Shepard's boot, though, as it slammed down its tread into the slaver's eyes.

Shepard spun the water around, focusing hatred once more on the one which deserved it more than anybody else in this galaxy. She slashed out with that water, impacting with brutal force in the center of the slaver's armor, cracking it under the impact. She didn't relent. She pulled the water back and around, an sent it back in, to impale the batarian, and to rid the world of one more four eyed monstrosity.

Well, tried to.

One moment, Shepard was waterbending. The next, she was flying through the air. She landed in a heap, her feet up the wall which she'd come to rest against, staring upside down at a smug looking asari who dropped gently down to the floor. She was a very dark blue, marks almost purple around her eyes, and she looked like somebody who fought turians for fun. "This ought to be fun," the asari said, a smirk on her face.

"You got this, Dahl?" the batarian asked as it rose to its feet. The Asari nodded.

Shepard pulled her side-arm, even upside down, and put a bullet through the center of the batarian's broken armor, causing his eyes to shoot wide, and black blood to plop out as it crumped to its knees. A lucky shot, but Shepard wasn't above accepting a bit of luck. She pushed herself to her feet, and then squeezed off another six. The asari dodged and weaved the lot of them. This was starting to get annoying. Shepard put her gun aside, and then began to send forth blasts of fire, baking the red sand and setting alight to who-even-knew what else was in this stockpile. And the asari dodged. Not just by moving. She dodged by bouncing, by flowing like wind through the branches of a tree. By hovering in place, and not with glowing biotic power.

Shepard had a moment to wonder what that meant, before the asari made a twisting motion, and a blast of wind appeared essentially out of nowhere, and sent Shepard rolling away once again.

* * *

It wasn't that Wrex had a one-track mind. It was just that everything that got between he and Actus was going to die. He'd suffered this kind of crap long enough, and today? Today was when Urdnot Wrex was going to have himself a _good day_. "You can't keep running forever, turian!" Wrex shouted into the maelstrom.

"Who says I'm running?" Actus' voice came bouncing through the stacks of stolen and illegal goods, trying to taunt Wrex, to get him moving stupid. To get him fighting stupid. Wrex was old enough that he learned that one wouldn't last long on stupid. So instead of rounding the corner, shotgun first, he went straight for the shelves. With a heave, he sent one of them tipping off of its moorings and crashing into the one beyond it. Actus had the decency to let out a yelp of alarm as the shelves began to come crashing down in a line. Not all the way across the warehouse by a long shot, but enough to cause some enormous property damage. "You goddamned thick headed idiot! Why couldn't you have the decency to go extinct like the rest of your forsaken kind!"

A grin, and not a kind one, stretched onto Wrex's scarred face. "Because some of us aren't forsaken," he answered, and then he charged up that angled shelf, mounting it like a stairway, and leaping off of its top to the catwalks over it. He landed foot first onto a human in yellow armor. A twist of the ankle ensured that the metric tonne of death which was Urdnot Wrex snapped the annoying fly's neck. Wrex looked down, trying to find exactly where Actus had mocked him from. He could see from his peripheral vision a shocked sniper trying to get a shot on him. Wrex just raised his shotgun and fired two blasts, which tore the salarian's armor to shreds and sent him tumbling off of the catwalks. "Hm. If I was a cowardly waterbending turian, where would I be?" Wrex asked, as he surveyed the mess he'd made.

There was a flick of movement at the edge of that pandemonium, where Actus came crawling out from the prison the stacks had become. Wrex let out a pleased grunt, and then bounded off of the catwalks, down to the ruined stacks. They creaked under his massive bulk, but the metalbending he could do without thinking kept him from falling straight through and getting trapped for grenades or rockets to finish. He didn't think so highly of himself as to warrant himself explosive-proof. He was angry, not crazy. Feet stomped as he covered distance, and then slammed hard enough to crack the reinforced concrete which made up the floor when he dropped from the devastation onto the ground. His head flicked up, and his shotgun followed, snapping a shot at the turian as he hurled himself around a corner. The shot went into the wall, rather than the turian. Not everybody could hit every time, after all.

Wrex was up and running again, but only made it a few steps before he heard a hiss in the air. A glance aside, showed that there was, indeed, a rocket flying at him. If Wrex'd had the time, he would have said 'oh, well this won't be good'. He had about time for 'Oh...'

Then, the rocket hit him, and blasted him rolling along the floor. There was a moment of blackness in the krogan's vision. Then, a grunt of pain and annoyance, as he forced himself onto his chest, and from there, back unsteadily to his feet. He glared into the distance at the pyjack who decided to hit him with an anti-materiel rocket. A good idea, he'd have to admit, but it hurt, he was bleeding, and his armor had gaping holes in it's hard-plates. There was even a section of his orange-brown hide showing through the breached red. "Note to self," he reminded himself for whatever possible centuries might come. "_Always_ watch for rockets."

The blood made an orange trail behind him as his gait started limping, but gained more steadiness as Wrex started to systematically ignore the pain that he'd essentially dealt with. There would be no medigel, not with his armor in the state it was. But he wasn't going to stop. Actus had something to answer for, and all the mercs in the Terminus weren't going to be enough to stop Wrex from making sure that the turian despoiler got what was coming to him. When he reached where he'd dropped his shotgun, he realized the folly of grabbing it; it was in five parts. That just wasn't fair. He liked that shotgun. He then gave a sigh and a shrug, barely paying attention to Garrus and al'Wahim diving into cover far ahead of him, squatting over the corpse of the rocket launcher as the others tried to pin them down with fire.

Wrex shook his head, and then turned to the stairwell. He reached for the rifle on his back, but found that it wasn't where he left it. He let out a sigh, and ascended anyway. He'd done more with worse weapons. 'Aleena' and he had made a hell of a mess with nothing more than fifth rate guns and enough explosives to crack a planet's crust. He was practically chuckling as he reached the top of the stairs, his bleeding slowed to a trickle. As Wrex turned the corner, it was to be face-to-face with a human Eclipse merc. Wrex wasted no time introducing Eclipse to Urdnot Wrex's skull-plate. Even a military grade helmet wasn't enough to keep out a krogan head-butt, and the cracked pot oozed red as the human collapsed. Deftly as a pickpocket, Wrex took the gun from the dying mercenary, and turned his attention to the room at the end of the walkway. There couldn't be anywhere else Actus went.

Wrex stomped to that door, a rictus of somewhere between pain and focus on his face. With a roar, he kicked that door, causing it to dent and deform. He wasn't even metalbending at this point. He was just kicking it down out of sheer hate. "You can't hide from me, Actus! You should never have stolen from my family!"

Another kick, and the door crashed off of its rails and twisted to the floor. Wrex stomped into the room, and at a glance, saw Actus winding up. Wrex tried to bring his stolen rifle up, but it was on his wrong side, and if there was one advantage bending had in close-quarters, it was speed. The wound up water smashed into Wrex, driving him back a step. The second, even more powerful send him sliding along the metal flooring to the sound of squealing metal as the remnants of his armor dug into the plate. Wrex pointed his stolen rifle into the source of that deluge, and tried to get a bead, tried to fire. The deluge parted for just an instant, and Wrex cracked a smirk. That smirk was short lived, however, as the water twisted into a sort of pseudopod which twisted around the rifle, and tore it out of Wrex's grasp. Actus smirked in that greasy way he did, flicking the weapon behind him on the water he controlled.

"Your tricks won't save you forever!" Wrex promised.

"They have so far," Actus pointed out. Then, the deluge was slamming into Wrex once more, blasting through the sheilds and impacting his armor – and his exposed hide – directly. The impact of it was pushing him back once more. Slamming him up against the wall. Starting to drown him.

Don't let rage blind you. Blind people die faster.

Grandfather's words.

It was a strange thing, to let the rage drain away as somebody was killing you. But Grandfather was right. Like he was right about so many other things. And as soon as the rabid, bone-chewing hatred wasn't blocking his vision, making him stupid... he brought up one fist, and stomped the floor. And a wedge of metal was thrust up out of the floor, parting the deluge and allowing Wrex to breathe. As soon as his breath was returned, or rather, this lungs emptied of water, he kicked that wedge forward, coming within one whit of bad-luck of bisecting Actus right then and there. Wrex got a smile on his face, then. Because he was going to _win_.

* * *

"Fire up front! Jack, give us eyes," Tseng ordered, and the camera went forward. Jackie herself wasn't even looking. She just stared at her feet, where they were propped up on a box, as she poked and prodded the injured parts of herself. Liara turned back to the screen transfixed.

The camera came up on the back end of a war-zone. There were six humans on the ground. Some of them obviously dead. Others... not so much. Badly, badly injured, but unable even to sit up. "We've got Shepard!" Nilsdottir shouted back, upon catching a glance of the green armor ahead. There were two others with her. One of them looked barely conscious. Nilsdottir ran up.

"Jack! Stay close!" Tseng tried to order, but Nilsdottir was obviously ignoring her. Because her eyes were on Shepard, who was pointing a gun at children.

"Open the robes!" Shepard shouted. "Open them or I do it from here!"

"I... don't underst..." the child said, hands out to his sides.

"OPEN THEM!" Shepard roared. The child gave a glance to what might have been his sister, and then took a step toward Shepard. "One more step and you get a fifth eye! Open the robes!"

The child gave one more glance to its possible sibling, then broke out at a sprint directly at Shepard. She didn't even flinch. Just a loud report, and a child slid to a dead stop less than a meter from her. Shepard's gun then lifted to the other. "Last warning! Open the robes or that will happen to you!"

The child reached into her robes and pulled out something dark and segmented. The satchel-charge, like the one which killed Kalgot. The batarian girl then threw it away, her arms then pulling close as though in utmost fear. Shepard glared at the bomb, then at her. "I know that's not the only one you've got."

"I'm sorry. I didn't want to!"

"Bullshit!" Shepard said. "We both know..."

Shepard was cut off when the bomb, cast aside by the child, detonated, hurling the girl in a lifeless mound. Liara glanced to Jackie, who just shook her head. Then, back to the screen. A swelling of batarians seemed to pour in from every vent and door, instantly filling the room with flying metal, driving Shepard back behind the planter which served as cover.

She finally looked up, and spotted Nilsdottir. "Rook! Where's my fucking backup!" Shepard screamed.

"We _are_ your backup!" Nilsdottir shouted back. "Kalgot's dead! So's everybody but Tseng and what's-his-face!"

Shepard's face began to pull into a rictus of rage. "God... damn... it," she hissed. She pushed the soldier next to her, and the woman slumped over sideways. "Xi? Xi come on!"

"Where's Kiel?" Tseng asked, after coming to a halt opposite Nilsdottir flanking Shepard.

"He's about a dozen corpses that way," Shepard pointed down the door which had been blasted shut and filled with rubble. "We need to bring down that scrambler! We don't have the men for this!"

"Where is it?" Tseng asked.

"Take a guess!" Shepard said, throwing an angry nod back behind her, where the batarians were laying down a withering degree of fire. Nilsdottir kept leaning out, firing a couple of rounds out of her shotgun, but it was only a few seconds of exposure to break her barriers, and she obviously didn't feel like dying. Dying then would have caused some sort of temporal paradox, after all.

There was a clatter, of a grenade landing near Shepard. Nilsdottir saw it, and flicked out a barrier between Shepard and the bomb. It still detonated, though, and if the poor soldier on that side of Shepard was not already dead, the grenade would have ensured it as it covered that side of the room in toxic and incendiary white phosphorus.

"Tseng, I'm gonna go for it," Nilsdottir shouted across the room through the gunfire.

"That bullshit won't work twice! It's suicide!" Tseng countered her.

"Well, if I die, tell Dad I'm sorry I pissed him off so much," Nilsdottir said with an obvious shrug. She almost got out of cover, but the still unnamed soldier grabbed her and pulled her back. "Hey! Let me go!"

"You've gotten a direct order. There's another way..." the voice came directly into Nilsdottir's microphone.

"...no more," the words seemed to stand oddly clear against the gunfire, which hadn't abated in the slightest. Nilsdottir's camera turned toward Shepard, where she was squatted up against a slowly breaking planter. Jackie sighed, and finally got off of where she was sitting on the table and moved slowly and stiffly to the back of the other two women in the room.

"This is where things get a bit crazy," Nilsdottir said, her voice distant; haunted, even.

"Shepard, we're going to need some covering fire!" Tseng shouted. But Shepard wasn't listening to him. "Shepard, are you listening to me?"

It was obvious that she wasn't, because her knees were drawing up, and her hands splayed across her helmet, fingers seeming to dig in. Then, with an almost stunned or drunken movement, they pulled the helmet off of her head, letting it roll away. "Shepard, what are you doing?" the other soldier's voice demanded.

"...I've had enough..." again, the words cutting through the din, despite their relative quiet. How, Liara couldn't say. Almost like everything in the recording had politely stepped aside so that she could be audible. Only it hadn't quieted. It was just as loud as ever, but Shepard's words were still clear.

Another grenade, this one kicked back through a gap in a door, to blast the room behind it with choking and burning. Tseng turned his attention back to Shepard. "Shepard's losing it! Nilsdottir!"

"**NO MORE**."

Shepard's hands were in her hair, her eyes pressed shut, knees pulled up as though a terrified child. But the sound which came from her throat was anything but. Her eyes opened, but they didn't seem right. Like there was something... sparking in them. Bit by bit, surging brighter and brighter.

"What in the name of..." Tseng began. And when he did, the green of Shepard's eyes was lost _completely_ to blazing white, and the wordless howl from her throat bore her up and out of cover, her fists clenched and out to her sides. Behind her... there was a flash of golden light, like a grenade going off, but it didn't bathe or consume her. When Shepard turned – without yet touching the ground – the humans seemed to know what this meant.

Liara glanced behind her, to Jackie. "What is happening to Shepard?" she asked.

"Avatar State," Jackie said. Liara turned back to the screen, watching as the even then awe-struck Nilsdottir beheld a demigod coming to life, a sphere of solid air deflecting hundreds of rounds of incoming fire every second without so much as a thought. Then, with another roar, a wave of flame seared away from her, melting the planter and scouring the points beyond. The impact of it consumed Xi completely, and knocked Nilsdottir out of her own cover, sprawled onto the floor. Shepard's white-eyed glare turned, and when she spun back, it was to a brutal wave of a hand. The flames began to pulse forward, brutalizing the batarian line ahead of them. Tseng tried to move up, to get behind something a little less perforated. Nilsdottir just scooted backward, away from the Avatar in a rage.

One of the batarians in the edge of Nilsdottir's shot raised a rocket launcher, and sent the missile streaking toward the immobile Shepard. Shepard... punched it. The explosion washed over her, but didn't so much as scuff her armor. Jackie let out a quiet chuckle at that. "Yeah, we're still not exactly sure how she managed to pull that one. Not in the typical toolbox, I hear," she muttered. Liara, though, was just about ready to believe anything. Then, Shepard's hand flew back, and lightning began to rake off of it. One capricious beam of it cut across Tseng, and cut indeed. He fell into two. But Shepard's blind wrath was all the more powerful, when it was directed forward rather than the thoughtless slaughter which landed around her. The bolt of lightning which shot forward seemed larger around than Shepard was tall, blasting through the batarians, their barricade, and the walls beyond them. When the view returned to normality, the shot continuing after that bolt, the camera could pick out that the bolt had traveled also through the armored walls of the bunker, and melted at least a hundred meters of rock beyond it.

"...any members of the ground squad? Do you read us?" the comms opened, bleeding into Nilsdottir's feed.

"Gods help us," Nilsdottir whispered.

"Say again, Private?"

"**ENOUGH!**" Shepard's voice was a thousand voices, all pressing over themselves, reflecting across the video clear as a bell in the Armali morning. For some reason, every word she said... just stood out in the recording. She had no idea why. And apparently, nobody else did, either. The Avatar made a motion, as though tearing something apart. When she did, the entire room seemed to shake. No, not seemed. The ground split, and the still unnamed soldier was swallowed up in an expanding breach which otherwise began under where Shepard was floating, and plunged out of sight, growing wider, wider. The stone in the distant cracked and warped, and then snapped.

"Holy Sh... Is that an earthquake?" the voice on the other end of the line asked.

There was a moment of shocked quiet, as the Avatar ripped the bunker in half. "This is Nilsdottir! Everybody else is dead!" she finally said. "...Shepard is the Avatar!"

"You're going to have to repeat that last part, Private," the voice said, cautiously.

"It's exactly what I said..." Nilsdottir said, her voice quiet, her usual foul bluster completely gone. "...Shepard is the Avatar. And the gods have mercy on us all."

Then, with a howl, Shepard swung down a fist, filling that gulf below her with flames, as white and hot as the surface of a pulsar. A hand rose into Nilsdottir's view, as she tried to hold back the blinding light of it. She didn't move. She had nowhere to go. With one last howl, Shepard shot down into that burning breach, and out of shot. The camera shifted, and then seemed to raise for a moment, before it tilted and lowered again. It and the helmet it was built into rolled away, and as it did, it showed Nilsdottir, staring ahead, stunned, at the destruction around her.

Jackie reached past them, and shut the recording off. "You don't need to see the rest of it. Just me blubbering like some fucking six year old," Jackie shook her head.

"...is that what all Avatars are like?" Liara asked.

Jackie nodded slowly. "When you piss 'em off enough," she said. "Some of the guys who got left back near the first ambushes got out with pretty severe injuries. Most people had some terrible fucking PTSD. Kiel scrubbed a Six over it, I hear."

"_What?_" Tali asked.

"He's crazy," Jackie explained flatly. "I was the only one who survived seeing her like that. Nobody else did."

"Has she not been like this since?" Liara asked.

"Course not. And you can thank your fuckin' stars that she hasn't," Jackie said. She nodded toward the screen. "It's different when you're there. You could... feel it. It was right here," she said, prodding fingers between her extremely modest breasts. "That anger wasn't natural, and it wasn't normal. It wanted everything to die, and it didn't care what got in the way," she slumped against the wall at the far side from Tali and Liara. "I have no idea how I survived that. I shouldn't have. I should have been right where what's-his-ass was, got smoked when he did. But I didn't."

"_What happened?_" Tali asked. "_After that, I mean._"

Nilsdottir stared forward, past all of them. Past the Normandy, it seemed like. "Reinforcements came, but the batarians were all dead. All of them. Four thousand. The base was obliterated. Our squads had taken ninety-seven percent casualties – seventy-eight percent KIA – but the batarians were routed from Torfan. We'd won. Didn't feel like a win, though," she said.

"_And they let her __stay__ in the military?_" Tali asked. Well, more like wanted clarification on.

Jackie scoffed. "Shit, they promoted her," she said. She looked up at the quarian. "We didn't even think we'd find an Avatar again. So when it shows up, and it's a raging, heavy-drinking soldier, they jumped right on 'er and planted a flag saying 'we're the Alliance, all you arrogant fuckers can back off' on her ass."

"And after that?" Liara asked.

Jackie shrugged. "I get a medal, a promotion, which lasted around three months until I was demoted again. Shepard got taken to some facility somewhere on Earth to get trained. I spent the next few years with the Corsairs, since the Brass thought I might get into less trouble there, and they weren't about to shelve one of the 'heroes of Torfan'. I was out in the middle of buttfuck nowhere when something like the real-story got out. Hero became butcher. I was nobody, so nobody cared about me. Kiel, like I said, lost his damned mind. Shepard, though? It stuck on her. And I think she prefers it that way."

Liara looked to Tali, who was rubbing her mask as though she could knead her brow. She then turned back to Nilsdottir. "Why did you show us this? Weren't you afraid what we would do if we found out the truth?"

Jackie shrugged. "Maybe I'm just tired," she said. "Tired of lying about it. Tired of the bullshit," she shook her head slowly. " ...maybe I just need somebody to see this and... understand it. See what happened, like I did. Know what I know. Maybe, I just can't keep this inside my head anymore. I've got enough nightmares. I'd like to have one less."

* * *

The ice crashed against the shield which Wrex had called into place around his arm. In its way, he was like the Jyorgul Hoplites of old, only his spear was a shotgun and his armor was a fritzing kinetic barrier. It had been a long time since the krogan bronze age. Wrex pressed forward, gaining speed with each crash of a foot, and every assault against his great and adamant shield became more and more muted, futile.

With a roar and a heave, he smashed that shield into the face of Tonn Actus. The clang of metal against metallic head resounded, but not as deeply as Wrex would have liked; the impact didn't dash Actus along the wall, but rather sent him flying through an overlooking window. The turian landed at a roll amongst the warehousing, only pausing briefly before shaking out the stun the krogan had dealt him, and then got unsteadily to his feet. He pointed up at where Wrex now glared down at him. "You'll have to do better than that, you hump-backed animal!"

"Watch me!" Wrex shouted back, and prepared to throw himself through that window after Actus, but even as he reached the threshold, metal shutters slammed into place. Wrex tried to barrel right through them, but they let out a harsh electric zap when he did. Wrex snarled, but his eyes instantly flicked to the speaker in the center of the room, as it crackled to life.

"Can't have a dangerous animal like you running loose," Actus said. "'S soon as my partner cleans up the rest of your lackies, you and I are going to have a nice little chat."

"It'll be over your corpse!" Wrex shouted.

"Oh, and you'll likely be missing your limbs when we have it," Actus continued, probably because the speaker was one-way. Wrex wasn't sure how Actus would pull something like that off.

"_Emergency decompression in progress. Safety protocols overridden._"

"Well, that answers my question," Wrex said flatly, likely the last thing which would be said in this room, because as soon as he did, there was a great sucking, all of the air being pulled out of the room and deposited somewhere else. Wrex, of course, held his breath. He wasn't about to let something as trivial as a bit of decompression slow him down. He stared at the shutters. Lost cause; he couldn't metalbend without touching them; that would cramp his muscles; cramped muscles couldn't metalbend. He glanced beside the shutter, to the wall. A stern kick brought a smirk to wide, scaled lips. Eternally the dumbass, Actus had electrocuted the shutters, but not the wall.

A kick, silent in the vacuum, deflected the wall a solid half-meter. A second, somewhat more unsteady where Wrex slipped a bit in blue blood, another quarter. The third, with a silent roar, caused the entire tonne of Wrex to burst through the wall, pushing past the air which blew past him into the void behind him. He landed hard on his knee and a fist, and glanced aside to see Actus fleeing into a deeper part of the bunker. "This isn't over, Actus! You promised me a little chat!" Wrex shouted after him. The turian was fast, as fear gave his feet wings.

Wrex was faster, as hate gave his feet rockets.

Wrex hurled himself after Actus, firing the stolen shotgun at the departing turian, and only getting blue-spark impacts of occasional hits of his barriers. There was a reason he preferred things like the Graal or the Eviscerator; they had _precision_. This garbage couldn't hit a barn you were standing in. Wrex hurled the gun aside, and let his pace grow ever more ground-eating. There was a whine ahead of him. The doors were slamming shut. Not on his watch.

Wrex hurled himself through those bulkheads just as they collided with each other, and when he pushed himself up off the ground, he found himself... in a sea of ancient opulence. Every shelf held weapons from some species or another, from all of the ages of warfare and vice. Weapons from turians, humans, salarians, asari... even some Vorcha back-blades stood proudly displayed in all their savage glory.

Wrex only gave himself a moment to stare in understandable awe. Because after that, the felt something brutal slam into his shield-arm, driving back against his chest, and then, pain through that. Wrex glanced down to the new spot of flowing orange. He didn't have that much more blood to lose; he knew from experience exactly how much he could part from and still stay standing, and a few more sniper-shots like that might be enough to send him into a long, black sleep. So Wrex took a page from Actus' book, and ducked into the stacks of armaments.

"You've caused me a peck of trouble, krogan," Actus shouted through the warehouse. "I might lose some valuable business with Eclipse over your merry band of trouble-makers."

"And what are you going to do about that?" Wrex asked drolly, as he moved past some of the elegant but no-doubt deadly polearms once omnipresent on Thessia.

"I figure I might invite some of my 'friends' over. Have some stew, served in your skull plate. Of course, you'll still be there; I know the trick of popping those things off without killing you."

That got Wrex's teeth grinding. It wasn't just a thing of male-pride to value one's headplate; without it, the slightest bump on the head would be lethal. Well, slight, by a krogan's standard. It would still need to break their actual skull, first. Still, to something which was as subconsciously resilient as the krogan, having even a tiny bit of that resilience stolen from them felt like being hopelessly crippled.

He had to find a way to shut this turian up. Do it effectively. Do it despite the floor obviously being prepared to thwart Thunderwalkers like him. And do it with weapons several thousand years out of date.

Easy.

Actus kept stalking through the stacks, with his batarian produced sniper-rifle to his shoulder. Any sign of red or brown, and he'd pull the trigger. Say what you would about that filth, he knew how to snipe. Then again, show Wrex a turian who couldn't, and it'd be a first. While Actus was searching for a krogan, that self-same krogan was searching for something else.

"You know, I think your kind got off a bit lightly, considering the trouble you caused," Actus said. "The salarians shouldn't have sterilized you with the genophage. That was their mistake. They should have just eradicated you. You're a fossil which hasn't realized its extinct yet, krogan. The sooner you realize it, the better. And the better for me, since your junk will quintuple in price, once there's nobody alive left to make more of it."

Wrex held his tongue, hearing his entire people's martial heritage reduced to the bottom line of a pirate and smuggler. Wrex glanced aside, and did a double-take at what he saw. Oh, now that was interesting.

Wrex, in his youth, hadn't been interested in anything but what all young krogan were; fighting. Any fight at all. Against the turians, against the asari, or against themselves, it didn't matter. Didn't matter to Wrex, either. Grandfather changed that. He taught Wrex that the krogan had been more, once. That in the ages of steel and sail, they had been proud, upright. They had stood at the bottom of the food-chain, and with bronze and iron they beat back the night, fought the forests and the beasts. They carved an empire into the bloody corpses of everything that vibrant Tuchanka-which-once-was had to offer.

And it started here.

"You can't hide from me forever," Actus said, turning Wrex's words back on him. "Not here. You're in _my_ hunting grounds now. I know them as well as my own face."

Wrex didn't wager that Actus looked in the mirror very often. Almost reverently, Wrex lifted the spear from its pedestal. The alarm it triggered was lost in the din already swallowing the bunker. It wasn't much to look at in terms of ornateness; it was a bronze head, almost half a meter long, its base once flanked with spurs which curved up and out. The spurs were missing on this one, or else and more likely never there; this was a weapon for krogan to hunt other krogan. The weapon continued back, its haft a hollow pipe of bronze which extended back another meter, before it was bound by spike and gut to the wooden haft. It was massively heavy, but sat in Wrex's hand as though it were made for it. In its way, it was.

"Come on out, krogan," Actus chided. "Let's end this, once and for all."

Wrex turned a corner, getting a glimpse of the filth who thought to plunder Wrex's people, as so many had before. He was still dribbling blue blood down his nose and mandibles, almost hiding the fact that he was bald-faced. Almost, but not quite. There were many things which people would call krogan; strong, tough, angry, ornery, dangerous. But sneaky? They'd never claim that. But then again, they didn't understand what the krogan had to surmount in order to even reach as high as they did before they bombed themselves to oblivion. If you hunted a nathak, you had to flank it. If you wanted to survive a Thresher Maw, you had to hide.

Krogan were perfectly capable of being sneaky. They just usually didn't bother. Right now, perhaps out of a sense of racial pride, Wrex bothered.

"I'm getting tired of this game, krogan," Actus said, as Wrex slid through the shelves. Not silently, not in this armor, but the incidental noises he made were swallowed by the blasting, the thuds against the walls as bullets slammed into metal. As rockets detonated against goods. "I thought your kind were supposed to be warriors. Not craven cowards."

Wrex steeled himself, hefting that spear a little higher. Strange how he'd thought of the Jyorgul hoplites. It was a good kind of strange. He was behind the turian now, that hood-like back which almost formed a hump on the armor swaying, as Actus tried to get Wrex into his crosshairs. So close. Close enough.

"Actus?" Wrex asked quietly. The turian glanced over his shoulder, black-rimmed eyes going very wide. But as he tried to turn, to put another bullet through Wrex's already pocked hide, the krogan's arm was launching forward, giving strength and speed to a weapon which had bathed in the blood of innumerable beasts from ancient yore. Blood, red, brown, orange and green had slaked the thirst of this weapon hundreds of times. Today, as the spear slammed through the weakest part of the turian's chestplate, right under the arm, it supped sweetly on blue.

The spear punctured deep, bypassing the kinetic barrier completely by its low velocity, and caused all manner of havoc. The hated thug took in a breath, as the rifle fell from his hands, and slumped against the massive weight of the spear until its replaced haft clacked against the floor. He then coughed, letting out a spray of blue onto his armor and the floor under him, before more blue began to dribble down and turn that spray into a pool.

Actus stared up at Wrex, eyes fearful, desperate. He hacked and coughed. "...I..."

"I'll see you in hell, Actus," Wrex said, as he wrapped a massive fist around the spear. "Although, I intend to take the long way to get there."

With a twist, he dug that spear even deeper, and tore apart the turian's heart. And with that, Urdnot Wrex was almost done. He pushed the spear, and let the turian impaled on it slump onto his other side, leaving the weapon thrust into the air like a standard which had lost its flag. And with that, Wrex began to limp back through the lines, looking for something which had belonged to Grandfather. Something which Grandfather would want in Wrex's hands.

* * *

Shepard wasn't sure what hit her when she essentially cartwheeled over a bin of red sand, landing in an inelegant heap on its far side. The fine powder, kicked up by gunplay and her own harsh introduction, hung in the air like a shimmering cloud of addictive cinnamon, and likely didn't do her any favors in recollecting her wits. Even small doses of red sand could wreak merry hell on the nervous systems of a biotic and send them on a trip the likes of which they wouldn't soon forget. Much as Shepard would never admit it, that illustrious company included her. As she unsteadily tried for her feet, reaching for a rifle which was wedged under a shelf three stacks away, trying to aim down a target which didn't stay still for more than a second with a weapon she didn't have, it occurred to Shepard that she might have been better off if she'd actually accepted Master Norgeh's 'refresher' on airbending. While she still couldn't twitch a breeze, at least she'd have a bit more experience in how they moved. So she could shoot the annoying blue one that kept hounding her.

She reached for that missing rifle at least twice before her concussed brain clued in, and went for her side-arm instead. She held it before her, unsteadily, and tried to guess where that asari pirate would be approaching from. Instinct far older than her martial training kept her eyes high, near the tops of the stacks. She knew that the others were fighting out there, trying to grind down the pirates, mind body and soul. But she was here, trapped in a fight she couldn't win against something which was just outright _better_ than her. She was too hurt, to muddled to be angry at that.

So when the blue woman in the black armor came to a skidding halt at ground level – far lower than Shepard would have expected of any human airbender – Shepard didn't have much of a chance to pull that trigger before the asari swept through a twisting motion, which both dropped her out of where Shepard's headshot would have gone, had the pistol been pointing the right way, and sent out another column of wind which blasted Shepard straight back. She hurtled backward until she slammed into a rack full of what felt like low-priced, knock-off designer clothing. Mostly, she believed that because it didn't hurt as much as flying forward, sideways, or backward into the dozens of other containers of guns, electronics, and densely packed drugs that she'd made acquaintances with in the last few minutes.

She felt an arm grab hers, and instantly, her instincts rallied into her other hand, pointing the pistol at who dared to manhandle her. She came within a blink of pulling the trigger, staring up at a grey face with black-and-blue eyes. It wasn't until that half of an instant it took for Shepard to recognize this turian that she managed to keep herself from painting a warehouse with cream-of-Garrus.

"Commander, we're getting a bit pinched here," Garrus reported as he pulled Shepard to her feet. Shepard glanced aside, and saw that al'Wahim was back-flat against a wall, watching the warning display on her rifle with the intensity of somebody who was trying to ward the end of one's life. And in her way, she was. There wasn't any obvious sign to Shepard, but the Si Wongi popped out out of her hiding place, and began to fire a stream of hyper-sonic metal at one of the humans who had decided that money was worth more than honor. Even as their shots burst her shields and dug into the thick ablative plates which covered her heavy hardsuit, she continued to fire, until his own barriers gave way, and then, the wall behind him was painted red. With that, al'Wahim pulled herself back into that nook she'd picked out, dropping the rifle to the floor. It absolutely radiated heat, and the gunnery-chief waved her hand as though it had been burnt. "Where did our favorite krogan go?" Garrus asked.

"Lost track of him about a dozen concussions back," Shepard said, pointing vaguely in a direction she wasn't remotely sure was correct. "Where's Alenko?"

"I'm not sure," Garrus said. "He peeled off just after we got in. Why haven't you asked him?"

"Spoofed comms," Shepard said. Garrus gave a glance to al'Wahim, who returned it. "Gotta blow the jammer."

"There is no jammer here, Commander," al'Wahim said with a note of dubiousness. Shepard blinked a few times, and shook her head. Of course there wasn't. This wasn't... She glanced aside, trying to see where the asari had gone. She was taking her sweet time.

"Right," Shepard said a bit strongly. Perhaps to hide that she'd made that mistake of time and place. "There's an airbend..."

Shepard was cut off by a blast which sent her off of her feet with all of the brute force of the tail-slap of a bison. Her first impact was with Garrus, which caused the turian to tumble with her. Somehow, the turian ended up on top of her, rifle still in hand, and tracking back at the blue woman whose eyes widened just a bit at facing somebody who had more togetherness of shit than Shepard did at the moment. The crack-crack-crack of his rifle's lethal intent was muted somewhat by the asari twisting the wind under her feet and racing straight up the rack, so that the trail of missed shots followed her toward the roof, at which point the asari bounded off of the ball, and as she fell, her body glowed blue. The impact of her fist against the floor was enough to send cracks through the reinforced concrete, but it was the biotic shockwave which did the most hurt. It hurled Shepard straight up into Garrus' back, and hurled Garrus into the air like a rubber ball bouncing off of another rubber ball.

Whatever turian profanity that Garrus had lined up for this moment was lost in its release, as the asari made a twisting thrust, and a ball of air smashed at the turian's armor, sending him rocketing along the tops of the shelves before colliding side-on into the catwalks, and subsequently dropping out of sight. The asari had a smirk on her face as she advanced on Shepard, one stomping foot at a time. But just as she came within two paces of Shepard, the Si Wongi attacked. Not with rifle or pistol, and certainly not with bending, but with a flurry of simple and iron-fisted assaults. The first blow blindsided the pirate, a fist smashing along teeth and sending blue blood spraying, but now that the asari was aware of al'Wahim's presence, every other of her technically perfect assaults were ducked, sidestepped, and dodged with contemptuous ease. It reached a point where, despite the Si Wongi's best efforts – which were without any doubts quite good indeed – the asari managed to stand solidly at the woman's back, rotating with her as she spun to elbow or kick. At least, until al'Wahim remembered something that even Shepard didn't; when fighting a hostile airbender, back up.

Asha hurled herself straight back, and again the asari had a surprise on her hands. The derisive expression on her face gave way to a start, and then she had to almost hurl herself out of the way so she didn't get pinned against the shelves by Asha's back. But the asari kept her footing, rounded, and with a fist glowing with biotic force, she punched al'Wahim directly in her sternum. The deep and resounding thud of it was an expression of the force which then sent al'Wahim straight through an entire row of stolen goods, and the hole she created filled itself as the row above that one collapsed down into the breach.

"There we go. Just the two of us, now," she said. That voice sounded oddly familiar. Or maybe it was just the head-injuries talking. Even as Shepard was still with great difficulty forcing herself to her feet, fumbling for the rifle which al'Wahim had left on the floor. She took a moment to inspect her fingernails, adding even more insult to Shepard's capabilities. "I honestly thought that somebody who was as vaunted as the humans' Avatar would be a bit more of a challenge. I guess that just shows that whatever tricks you have, they're only yours until somebody better takes them."

Shepard raised the rifle and fired, but her aim was well off, and the rifle barked flying metal both toward the asari and indeed everything else in the region. The shells spanged off the purple field which the pirate was keeping active with her mind alone, leaving her a bit annoyed, but utterly unharmed. The asari made a clenching fist, and Shepard felt her body being crushed, her arms being trapped at her side. And then, her boots started to lift from the floor. "What a name I'll make for myself," she said. "The first asari to kill the Avatar in a fair fight. Nobody will cross Dantius after this."

The asari reared back a fist, alight with power, and Shepard's mind radically raced through all that she knew, all that she had memory of, trying to find something which would see her out of this. No movement, no metalbending. No waterbending, either. She couldn't bloodbend with her mind, and was certain that she was too concussed to try firebending with it. After all, she liked having limbs. Salvation would have to come from within. It wasn't like anybody else was going to save her.

Only, somebody else did.

Landing like a minor god of ancient lore, Alenko slammed onto the concrete much as she had, although to less cracking and more directed shockwave. The asari managed to bound out of its way, causing another wall of goods, stolen, illicit, or both, to crumble. Shepard struggled against her immaterial bonds, but as easily win against gravity itself. Odd, how once in such a fight, she would have succeeded. The asari seemed to instantly be at Shepard's back.

"So the Avatar has a loyal hound," the asari said. Alenko rose, his eyes hard as armor plating. The asari leaned in closer. "Stay back, or your Avatar gets a slight alteration to her anatomy, one I'm fairly sure humans can't survive."

Alenko stared at her, blue light sparking off of him, and his hand went to his sidearm. The asari shifted so that Shepard, and her light hardsuit was between she and he. The pressure holding Shepard immobile and in place wasn't so much that she couldn't speak, however.

"Shoot through," Shepard ordered, teeth grit.

"With all due respect, Commander, that's a terrible plan," Alenko said, his voice very calm, even if his eyes were anything but. The blue light around him pulsed, and there was something like a crackling sensation, as though she was being pushed slowly through crumbly cookies in zero gravity – and where had _that_ metaphor come from, Shepard wondered? – before her momentum began to increase as though she were falling. But she was falling directly toward Alenko. Alenko pulled his sidearm, and even as Shepard was caught and set onto the ground, the blue fading around the lieutenant, he was firing. The asari ducked and weaved as she had before, this time bounding back and landing to bound out of the way. Alenko swept his other hand forward and up, and even before she landed, there was a distortion in the air, pale-blue-green light. She started to drift upward again.

With a quite unladylike snarl, she thrust out her arms, and the haze around her shattered into something like vanishing glass, and her feet returned to the floor. Shepard brought the rifle up again, and this time, when she fired, it was much more accurate. Still moot, as the biotic cast out a hand and a barrier of purple light deflected those bullets away from her. Then, she hurled a black bolt forward, and it seemed to detonate in front of Alenko. Then, everything around the two humans began to lift and rotate, falling around a point of absolute gravity created by the Asari's mind. A Singularity.

Shepard lost sight of the asari for a moment but when she craned her neck back around, the woman was running, first at an angle to them, and then up a wall. "Got any..." Shepard began to Alenko, but Alenko was... smirking.

"Grit your teeth," Alenko said quickly, and then followed suit. With a flick of a hand, he cast a distortion of space into the heart of the Singularity. Which, as it had many times before, proven by Nilsdottir a hundred times over, detonated it. Shepard was cast sideways into a crate which dumped motherboards onto her back. Alenko, given a bit more room to tumble, landed at a knee, just as the asari began her downward plunge, blue light almost making her shine like a plummeting star. And Alenko's fist was almost as bright as she.

She was coming down, to crush him. He was pressing up, to crush her. The main difference between the asari and the human biotic? He wasn't multitasking to keep up a kinetic barrier. His uppercut flashed with blue-black light, and the bolt of the Throw, the twelve hundred Newtons of unbridled force, raced upward, into the shimmering purple field the asari was generating. But because she was trying to attack and defend in the same moment, she couldn't do either as well as one alone. So the bolt sloughed a few 'layers' losing several hundred Newtons of impact when it struck, but that was also moot, because it struck the asari right on the bottom of the chin.

The wrenching crack of the asari's head being folded backwards was audible even to Shepard's compromised hearing. Alenko didn't even bother checking the fallen pirate, who had landed so gracelessly on the concrete; because of the way asari brains were shaped and positioned, a broken neck was all but inevitably fatal. Alenko helped Shepard once again retake her feet. "Are you alright, Commander?"

"I've had worse..." she said.

"You don't always have to compare things to Torfan," Alenko pointed out.

"...still had worse," Shepard reiterated. She turned, marveling that the gunfire was starting to die down. Shepard almost forgot about the comms, but flicked them on after that moment's confusion. "What's our situation out there?"

"All are accounted for, Commander," al'Wahim said, sounding a bit banged up.

"I'm not reading any more hostiles, Shepard," Garrus chimed in.

"Then we're done here," Shepard said.

"I have to agree," Wrex's voice came from nearby. He was walking out with a tarpaulin bundle under an arm, his own armor absolutely blown to shit. "Actus is dealt with. I got what I wanted. You can do whatever you want with the rest of it."

Shepard glanced at the tarp. "Well," she said, a smirk pulling onto a bruised face. "Let's see it."

Wrex nodded, and pulled a box of stolen Omnitools down and set the tarp atop it, before rolling it along and showing the massive piece of armor within. It was thick, it was strangely elegant for something to be worn by a krogan. It looked to be far lighter than what Wrex had been wearing, but somehow, far more resilient. But one thing snapped Shepard's capacity for disbelief. Namely that it was...

"...it's pink," Shepard said. "Why would Actus paint it pink?"

"Actus didn't paint it. This is the color it's always been," Wrex said, a little annoyed.

"...but it's _pink_," Shepard repeated.

"So has been the color of Urdnot in the oldest days. Some people remember a time before the red and black," Wrex said as he rolled the tarp back up. "Grandfather liked things... the old way."

Shepard gave a glance to Alenko, who could only shrug. She mouthed the words '...it's pink' to him, but he only shook his head.

"Do you mind calling this in to the Hierarchy when you go?" Garrus asked as he rounded the corner. "There's a few things that my species might want to collect from Actus' vault. Some things I'm fairly certain are irreplacable relics."

"You made a quick trip," al'Wahim muttered as she limped into sight.

"I get around," Garrus shrugged.

"I'll inform Hackett. He can tell whoever he pleases," Shepard said, beginning the aching, painful walk toward the doors. But then, she stopped. She turned, and faced the asari who had beaten Shepard to within an inch of her life.

"What is it, Shepard?" Alenko asked, catching Shepard's shift in attention. Shepard just beckoned her to follow him.

"Pink, eh? Don't see that on krogan armor very much," Garrus noted at their backs.

"Another word, and I'll turn it blue. Immediately," Wrex said humorlessly. Shepard slowly bent down and took the pirate's blue hand, and wrestled with the omnitool which was strapped to the wrist of it. After a few tugs, she managed to get it off of the dead asari, and handed it to Alenko.

"Run me the mail files," Shepard said. Alenko nodded, plugging the Omni into his own. In a moment, and a flash of orange light, he was cracking into it. "Who is she?"

"The most common address is Dahlia. Wait, I got a communique from Illium. She has a sister, named Tyrienne Dantius."

"And another named Nassana," Shepard finished. "That bitch played me to get rid of an inconvenience."

Alenko's expression became concerned. "Are you certain about that?" he asked. "That's a dangerous conclusion to jump to."

Shepard just turned a glare on him. "One day, you're going to get fucked over in such an enormous way that you'll never see the galaxy the same way again. You'll see it the way I do. And on that day, your life expectancy will go up by about two decades," Shepard said darkly.

Alenko shook his head, but didn't answer her. She thought it was because she'd gotten the last word. Alenko, on the other hand, said nothing, because there was nothing he could say that wouldn't make her feel worse, and that wasn't anything he wanted to do to her.

Shepard walked toward the exit, with a battered group all with their own limps and sprains, heading back out to the surface of Tuntau.

* * *

It was more painful than anything that the turian could have imagined. He'd been exposed to vacuum as part of his Ranger training, back when he was fifteen. Most didn't, since it was so singularly unpleasant that few would ever require it. That his commander did was much of the reason why Severus went private-contractor the first conceivable opportunity; if this was the kind of thing that the Hierarchy expected Severus to do on a daily basis, then he wanted nothing to do with it. But as painful as vacuum was, somehow, overpressure was _worse_.

There was a ringing in his ears which wouldn't go away; that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the pain behind his eyes. It felt like they'd been crushed, pulped, sifted, and then put back into his head at random. But he could still see. And his hands still worked. He crawled across the floor, to a particular turian, another victim of the overpressure. Somebody who just couldn't get her helmet on in time. Yulia. He flopped out beside her, and gently took her face in his hands. Those eyes, green like gems shining all the brighter for the black around them. And now, they stared blankly.

"I promise, I'll get 'em for you," Severus slurred, unable to hear is own words. His teeth ground as his mandibles flicked and fluttered, barely able to contain the insatiable wrath boiling in his heart. Whoever those fuckers were, they'd made a huge mistake. There wasn't much Severus was truly proud to have in his life, but Yulia was it. She was... tough, smart, and in her own strange way, innocent. Yes, a sniper who could and had popped heads from five kilometers out, but there was a way she saw the galaxy which made Severus... hopeful. But no more. They'd taken her from him.

With a snarl which would have been appropriate in a krogan, Severus forced himself to his feet, against all the pain of his joints and the shortness of his breath. He stooped to take her gun with his other hand, and held out two rifles dead ahead of him, at the doors which were the only way back to the outside world. Severus would have revenge. For Yulia.

The doors slid open with a beep.

"DIE YOU MOTH–"

Severus was cut off as a green-armored human woman put a bullet through his skull, even as she limped through the doorway. The turian collapsed straight back, into a pool of his own blue-black blood. Another turian, in black-and-blue armor, turned to that human with a wry turian grin. "Remind me never to try to outdraw you," Garrus said, as Shepard lowered her sidearm and returned it to her hip.

Shepard, for all her many hurts, just grunted at that, and continued over the newest of many corpses, before resealing her helmet, and walking back out into the pressure of Tuntau.

* * *

"We're roughly two kilometers out from that distress signal the XO found," al'Wahim said over her shoulder, as Shepard rubbed the back of her head, now that she wasn't wearing her helmet. Her face was essentially one massive bruise, and she hadn't gotten around to healing it yet. There'd be time for that later. What occupied her attention, at this moment, was Wrex. The old krogan was staring at a chunk of pink shin-plating like he'd never seen its like.

"You're welcome," Shepard said flatly.

"I didn't thank you," Wrex said just as flatly.

"Not big on appreciation, are you?" Shepard asked.

"On showing it to humans? No," Wrex said. He sighed, and ran fingers along the smooth metal. "This is the kind of craftskroganship that you just don't see these days. This armor... it's probably older than your civilization. Two thousand years if it was a day. Piece of crap, by today's standards. But..." he shook his head, as though he didn't have the words to describe what he was feeling.

"But it's yours," Shepard finished for him. Wrex flicked a red eye toward her, and for a change, it wasn't baleful. Just... thoughtful, maybe? "You obviously respected your grandfather quite a bit. Why?"

"Why does anybody respect their teacher? Because they learned the lessons that'll keep you alive before you did," Wrex said testily. But then, he clicked his broad tongue in his mouth, and shook his head. "No. That's not even close to it. Grandfather... he was insane. That's the only way I could describe him. He thought about things in ways that people don't think about things. Talked about things that people don't talk about. And he was _obsessed_ with the old."

"Rachni War?" Shepard asked.

Wrex shook his head slowly. "Older."

Shepard frowned. "What's before the Rachni War?" she asked him. He glanced to her, and settled himself into his seat a bit more concretely.

"Shepard, have you ever wondered why Grandfather was fighting on Rannoch when I met him?" Wrex asked.

"I'm going to guess money," she answered dryly.

"Yes, but for a very strange reason," Wrex said. "There was a radio telescope, right around four thousand lightyears from Aralakh. He took every credit he got from the war on Rannoch, and a few other conflicts before that, to buy positioning and readout rights to anything that telescope found over a two year period. Every. Credit."

"Why would he want that?" Shepard asked, but Kaiden perked up.

"He was trying to read radio signals from Tuchanka, wasn't he?" Alenko asked. Wrex nodded.

"We had only a thousand years between gunpowder and the nuclear bomb. We had only a century between radio broadcast, and every radio going silent," the krogan said grimly. He let out a small, almost galaxy-weary sigh. "Like everything else we did back then, we filled that tiny span of years with as much of the krogan people as we could. We had culture, Shepard. We had art. We were a proud people, once. We had something to be _proud of_."

"Your grandfather was... what? Trying to watch old vids using a telescope?" she asked.

"Don't say it like that, human," Wrex said, his tone testy. "He was trying to recover some fragment of our past, when Tuchanka was the most hellish paradise in the galaxy. Our songs echoed through every street. Our cinema captured the glory of the wild forests, the untameable seas, and the people who had survived both. And in a nuclear flash, it was all gone. Ashes in the wind," he stared down at that armor. "Grandfather had spent his entire fortune, almost a thousand years of money, to recover anything he could from back then. There's an entire episode of some four-thousand year old krogan television show, sitting in a vault on Tuchanka, because of what he did, bit by bit, over centuries."

Garrus chuckled. "A krogan historian. Never thought I'd see the day," he muttered.

"And you probably never will," Wrex muttered. He shook his head, almost as though ashamed. "I can't believe how much I despised him when I first met him. I walked right up and cracked him in the skullplate, called him 'a traitor to the race'. Jarrod's gibberish. If he wanted to have a family with some asari woman, what's my problem? None, that's what."

"If you hated him, how come you respected him later?" Garrus asked, his tone quite interested. Wrex sighed once more, an odd sound coming from so massive a throat.

"Have you ever talked to somebody who just... _believed_ in something so much, that you couldn't help but believe too?" Wrex asked. "That's the way it was with Grandfather. He believed that the krogan could be something _great_ again. Not just excellent warriors for hire, slowly dying out under the weight of our own stupidity and the genophage. The krogan can be great again. Grandfather's words."

Shepard nodded, even as she kneaded a headache away. "And he needed an example to show the others."

"I guess," Wrex said. "Maybe he wasn't sure what 'krogan greatness' was supposed to look like. Maybe he didn't think that he'd be able to convince the others without something as great as his vision. Or maybe, he just didn't have a clue what he was looking for at all. I don't know. He got killed before I _really_ understood what he was going on about. But only after he made me _care_," the last word invested with quite a bit of venom.

"You did say Grandfather was the reason you went back to Tuchanka," Shepard nodded. Wrex shrugged.

"Some of what he said stuck with me, even through my own youthful stupidity. If... If I had another chance, I'd do it differently," he said with a degree of certainty. "No more trying to lead people around with big words and promises. Just take 'em by the quad and drag 'em where you want 'em. It's not about respect, Shepard. Not anymore. It's about the survival of my species. And there are days where it feels like I'm the only one still paying attention to it."

"Why don't you go back to Tuchanka?" Alenko asked, earnestly.

Wrex turned his eye to the biotic, then let out a bitter laugh. "There's nothing left for me, there."

"You might be surprised," Alenko pointed out. "Can you honestly say you aren't smarter now then when you had this Jarrod ruining your plans?"

"I'm smarter by default," Wrex answered.

"So why don't you try using that?" Alenko asked. "Make your grandfather's dream for your species come true?"

Wrex stared at him for a long moment, then shook his head slowly. "As I said," he reiterated, "my species is dying out, and I'm the only one who cares about it. I'm not going to fight for a losing cause. There's no percentage in it. You just end up dying tired and disappointed. I've had enough disappointments."

"Commander?" al'Wahim asked from the driver's seat. "We are approaching the signal."

Shepard nodded, and rose from her seat, to glance past the gunnery-chief's shoulder to the white dust of Tuntau. A beacon was clear in place, still rotating slowly and broadcasting. Likely, a distress signal. Shepard leaned further forward, and could see bodies, mummified on the ground inside their armor or hardsuits. "Something isn't right here," she said.

"They died waiting for rescue next to the beacon," al'Wahim guessed. But Shepard shook her head.

"These people didn't die of suffocation or thirst. Those suits are burst," she pointed out. Al'Wahim leaned forward, saw what Shepard did, and nodded.

"I see what you mean," the Si Wongi soldier agreed. "What does that man?"

Shepard once again looked out ahead of them, to the drifting dunes of aluminum-oxide dust which covered the planet. A breeze, only a few dozen kilometers per hour, but packing a lot more punch in the thick atmosphere, stripped away layer upon layer of that dust from a mound near the beacon, until something metal poked out. The two soldiers shared a glance, then looked forward once more, as more of the sand slowly drifted away in the rogue wind, until it showed roughly half of a Kodiak, which had been... snapped in half.

"This doesn't..." Shepard said once again, and this time, swung her head wide, side to side, trying to look as far as she could through the apertures into the surface of this planet. Mounds. Mounds of displaced sand.

"...is something wrong up there?" Garrus asked.

"Yes," Shepard answered. She tapped Asha's shoulder. "Bring us in a little bit closer. Very slowly."

All of this had an alarm screaming in Shepard's head, but she couldn't say with certainty why, as yet. It was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn't quite figure it out. That beacon, for example. It looked different from the kind that the Alliance used. Like it was kit-bashed together. Asha oh-so-gently edged the Mako closer to the fallen, and their destroyed transport. She in particular kept her eye on the bodies. Something about them just wasn't right. Or rather, _was_ right, in a terrifying way. She leaned forward over the dashboard, looking down at the closest body she could find. The hardsuit was breached... but not by explosion or impact. She leaned back.

Those hardsuits had been _melted_ open.

"What are you seeing, Shepard?" Wrex asked.

"Wrex... do you feel anything?" Shepard asked. Wrex turned an unamused eye toward her, but he rolled it and then focused. "...I feel..."

"What are you two talking about?" Asha asked.

There.

"Did you feel _that_, Wrex?" Shepard asked quickly, her eyes suddenly bugging wide. Wrex turned to her, his lips twitching.

"I did," he answered. Human and krogan shared a look, and a common understanding, and for a moment, a common terror.

"You two aren't ma–" Asha began, but was cut off by Shepard grabbing her by the shoulders and heaving her out of the driver's seat with a squawk of confusion and alarm. Alenko shouted her name in complete surprise as she bounded into that seat, not even bothering to fasten herself in, before slamming down a foot onto the pedal, and sawing hard on the controls. And not an instant too soon.

Within a fraction of a second of Shepard beginning her seemingly mad usurpation, the entire craft bucked violently, its back wheels being hurled upward by the power of something massive and unbelievably strong forcing its way up directly under it, through the very earth. Wrex held on, his lips tight, before he finally said what Shepard was thinking, as the half-kilometer long beast erupted almost wholly out of the sand, arched in the air, and then slammed down and vanished into the dust once more.

"THRESHER MAW!" he shouted, and Shepard reefed on the controls, pulling it into a hard turn as the beast reared up out of the ground and let out a scream which was all the louder for the thicker 'air' it traveled through. Shepard ignored it, though, concentrating on driving in as insanely random a path as she could. Because of that, the gobbet of saliva that the Maw spat at the vehicle missed by scant meters, rather than hitting and corroding right through the metal.

"JOKER!" Shepard roared. "Where is the Normandy? We need _immediate_ evac!"

"_Commander? You sound like you're trying to outrun a Thresher Maw_," Joker said in his usual, incorrigable way."

"I _AM_!" Shepard screamed back at him.

"_...oh __shit_," Joker's voice suddenly lost all of its mirth. "I'll be there in... forty seconds. Keep out of that thing's jaws, and I'll give you a barnswallow!"

Shepard leaned aside, and had to slam her other foot down, onto the other pedal on the floor. This one was the breaks, causing al'Wahim to smash against the wall mostly separating the passenger pod from the drivers' seats. This sudden stop prevented the monumental bulk of the Thresher Maw from intercepting her course; the hundreds of meters of violence, death, and earthbending slammed into the sand, causing it to spray up in all directions, only a dozen or so meters ahead of her. Shepard glanced aside. The rough terrain that al'Wahim had navigated to reach here wouldn't stop it; Thresher Maws were natural earthbenders, like Badger Moles. She cranked the wheel the other direction, and slammed the pedal down once more.

"You might want to buckle up, Asha," Garrus shouted to her over the howl of the engine, and the screaming of the Maw outside. The Si Wongi offered him a rude gesture, even as she started to buckle herself into place. Shepard didn't have time to check on her, to make sure that the impact hadn't hurt her more than the fight earlier had. She turned wildly, almost insanely, sending the Mako fish-tailing and skidding along the aluminum-oxide sands, trying to keep the Maw from getting a bead on her. A bead, in this case, was death, and a fairly rapid digestion in the most resilient digestive tract in the galaxy. The only planets which _couldn't_ host Thresher Maws, after all, were ones colonized by the turians, for reasons obvious to most if not Shepard.

"It's gaining on us, Shepard," Wrex warned, clutching that bundle of his grandfather's armor close him even as he tried to see past her into the distance of Tuntau.

"I know," Shepard answered.

"We've got to lose it!" Wrex continued.

"I KNOW!" Shepard shouted, even turning back to do it over her shoulder. The last time she had one of these ruin her day, it took an orbital extraction to get clear of it. And so, it seemed, it would again. "Come on, Joker, where the hell are you?"

Wrex let out a grunt of alarm. "Shepard! On your two!"

Shepard glanced aside, and saw that the Maw was indeed erupting from the sands to her right. It turned and opened its massive jaws wide, the blue tongue flapping out as it roared at them all once again. Then, with a twist as though snapping a whip, it lashed out with not so much a spray as a fan of green, caustic spittle. Shepard pounded down on the third pedal at her feet, neither accelerator nor brakes. So that when that fan reached her, she was being powered upward, forced away from the planet by the timely and jury-rigged operation of the Mako's re-entry stabilizers. Jump-jets, essentially. She landed with a crash which set all jaws to rattling, but didn't dare slow down one whit. The Maw was howling once more, and this time, plunged down and she could see the ripple of its passage bee-lining for the Mako.

Her lips pulled back into a rictus of not so much wrath as survival instinct. There was nothing else she could do but this. So she did it as best as she could, even as she silently gauged how long it would be until the thing finally raised up, and smashed the craft down. Until the screen got just a little bit darker, and she glanced up.

The nose of the Normandy was hovering overhead, screaming along the terrain the same direction she was. "Commander, we're here. Jump in!" Joker said with enthusiasm. Shepard didn't smirk as she slammed both feet down on the stabilizers again, causing the Mako to lift up off of Tuntau once again, but this time, when she did it, she landed with a clang of metal against metal, as the cargo-hold of the Normandy surged forth to replace the jagged rock and fine white powder of the planet below. The Mako bounded just once, before slamming back-end first into the elevator doors. Shepard's head was thrown back, and bounced off of the head rest, before the counter-force threw her forward into controls. Only because she was wearing her armor did they not break another rib. She finally turned to the others.

"Everybody still there?" Shepard asked.

"You drive like a krogan, Shepard," Wrex said simply, and with a degree of respect.

"Of course I do," she said. The turian and the two soldiers just stared at her, jaws agape, as she slowly limped to the side door, opened it, and moved into the ship. Garrus turned to the two of them.

"I take back everything I said about her driving," he told them.

The two humans didn't have anything to say to that.

* * *

"Hey, babe..."

"Not now, Murtock," Nilsdottir said, as she tried to find a way to eat without her face hurting. It was becoming easier by the day, but still no picnic. The guileless and frankly unintelligent 'probationary seamen' sat down opposite her, a confused expression on his face.

"What's wrong, babe?" he asked.

"Just... fuck off 'till my everything stops aching. Can you do that?" Jackie asked with sour tone. Sourer than she wanted it to be, and sourer than she intended, since the man blanched a bit, and shrugged.

"Whatever you say, Jack," he offered, and then rose from the chair. Man, all of this shit was weighing on her mind of late, and she didn't even have the medical okay to get it fucked out of her. That was most of why she liked having Murtock around! But no; no boning until _her_ bones heal. Some days, she wanted to strangle Chakwas. And those days weren't Jackie's best.

The clack of people ascending the ladder pulled Jackie's attention away from her sandwich and to the newly-returned Commander and her band of merry shit-disturbers. She rounded the corner just as Shepard caught up with Alenko, who'd beaten her to the top. "He's not going to be happy about this," Shepard said.

"'bout what?" Jackie asked. Shepard cast a glance her way, then shrugged.

"Kahoku's men were lured by a counterfeit beacon, and then had a Maw thrown at 'em," she said. She shook her head darkly. "Like Tuntau wasn't enough of a shit-storm. When I see that blue bitch, I'm going to _kill her_."

"Shepard, you're overreacting," Alenko said, and Jackie let out a hiss of danger noticed. Alenko, though, didn't seem to get it. "She might not have known about what her sister was doing."

"Yeah, and I _might not_ know how to throw lightning bolts from my fingers, but that'd be an idiotic assumption to make, given what you know," Shepard pointed out. Alenko sighed, and shrugged. Shepard, on the other hand, pounded the intercom button under the heel of her fist. "Joker. We're heading back to the Citadel."

"If I knew that I was going to be back on the Citadel so often, I wouldn't have run up my bar-tab so quickly," Joker pointed out. Shepard let her silence be all the answer she was going to give. "Heading for the Relay, Commander."

"Good," Shepard said. She let out a sigh, and glanced toward Jackie. "You look like shit."

"So do you," Jackie answered her.

"You should see the doctor," Alenko said to Shepard. "You took quite a beating down there."

"I'll be fine. I've had worse," Shepard said. She stood, watching Alenko watching her for a few more seconds. "Well? _Dismissed_."

There was a bit of disappointment in Alenko's eyes, right then. "Aye aye, ma'am," he said quietly, saluted, then moved toward the crew compartments. After the door shut behind him, Jackie nodded after him.

"Argument with the Sentinel?" she asked.

"Don't pry," Shepard said.

"When do I ever pry?" she asked.

"You're doing it right now."

"Oh, fuck you," Jackie said. Shepard just raised a coppery eyebrow at her. "Right. Fuck you, _sir_."

"Better," she said. "Anybody wants me, I'll be in my quarters."

Nilsdottir scoffed as Shepard turned and rounded the at-the-moment defunct elevator shaft, heading for her own rooms, even as Jackie returned to her sandwich. A sandwich unmolested by the other crew, especially after her last _lesson_ on what happened to people who fucked with her food. She had just gotten to sitting down, to start eating, when Shepard rounded the bend. Then, tapping across the deck, the asari almost jogged toward her, before practically tackling Shepard with a hug. The other crew men were almost as baffled as Shepard herself, who stood leaning away from the archeologist with the most confused look on her face. Luckily for all involved, that hug ended quickly, with Liara running back for the medical bay, looking on the verge of tears.

Tali, who was sitting off to a side, watching the whole thing, had the most smug look on her face, apparent even though it was impossible to actually _see_ her face.

* * *

Codex Entry (Culture): SHAMANISM

_The communication, interaction, and elimination of intelligent or pseudo-intelligent entities living close-but-not-within the bounds of the 'Mortal world' is a widespread and long-standing tradition amongst many peoples across galactic history. Spirits, which either self-create from fundamental aspects of existence - such as spirits of philosophical elements, death, birth, and 'void' - or are created as a result of mortal activity, can and have caused great cultural shifts with their proven existence and the interactions there with._

_Galactic civilization has, on the whole, become a very secular entity, but there are still facets of it which defy such reification. The most obvious of these is that of spirits. The histories of different species hold different views on the existence, the importance, and the interactions with these entities. They range from the nearly non-existent - as is the case with the Salarians - to the overtly hostile - as was the case on ancient Thessia. The most amiable contact with spirit entities falls upon the two most militant species associated with the Citadel; the turians, and the krogan._

_Turian history is filled with spirit veneration, and shamanism was quite common throughout the pre-spaceflight period and beyond. It is estimated even today that four out of every seven shamans in the galaxy is turian. This disparancy was borne from an early and remarkably friendly association with spirits which were borne from the turian's activities. Turian farmers created spirits of agriculture, which when contact and placated, lead to buffers against crop disease, drought, or other bad harvest. Turian armies often created Spirits of Corps, a manifested entity representing the morale, the honor, and the excellence of the unit in question. When ancient turian armies fought, there were always accepted laws in place that while the spirits could act upon the soldiers, there would be no interference with the spirits. Hostile shamanism attacking another army's spirit was considered throughout history as a war-crime, even in the face of victory. Ancient spirits of the turian age of sail have, through careful supplication, been transplanted throughout their naval history, up to and including the modern day; the CTH Defiant houses a Corps Spirit transplanted across two thousand years, and true to its reputation throughout turian history, it has always brought its crew back alive, no matter victory or defeat._

_Krogan shamanism was much more rooted in pragmatism and survival. The spirits on Tuchanka were described as vain, brutal, capricious, hungry, and predisposed to violence. Any spirit turned from enemy to even neutral player was a victory for krogan story and song. Their ancient lore told of truly ancient and dangerous spirits which predated the krogan as a people by millions of years, embodying the crucible of Tuchanka through feast and famine, through storm and nuclear devastation. Even to this day, the names Kalros and the Meretsegger are spoken quietly amongst krogan shaman, who see their trade as a thin line between an angry Spirit world, and a hostile physical one. Krogan define any ally in the spirit as one which won't stab them in the back. In the face, they claim, is a different matter._

_Other species have more unusual interactions. The quarian race on Rannoch had some obliquely recorded interaction with spirits, but it is not known how the practise continued with their exile. Vorcha also engage in widescale shamanistic practice, but never make records of their actions. Salarians outright didn't know that spirits existed until the discovery of the krogan. Asari seemed to have enacted a pogrom in their ancient history against spirits as part of their Athamite period; 'any which thinks deprived of the mortal shell is Nemesis, and is to be destroyed' was one of the Athame Doctrine's central tenants, and they took it to mean spirits. Needless to say, Thessia, to a shaman, is a quiet and bitter place for those entities which survived the purges enacted tens of thousands of years ago._

_Human shamanism falls between the extremes set by the turians and the salarians. Most people don't interact with spirits in a daily or meaningful fashion, but those tha do, give spirits a wide berth and a fair degree of respect. Comparable to Palaven, Earth's Spirit world is positively treacherous. Compared to Thessia, verdantly lush. While humans have a roughly turian level of skill when it comes to interacting with spirits, their limited numbers prevent them from being as omnipresent in spiritual negotiations compared to the long established Turian Hierarchy. Some have called humanity a sleeping giant in this capacity; a species as influenced by spirits through its history will have a surfeit of experience. With time, they could easily take their place beside the turians as the chief supplicators of the ephemeral._

* * *

**Why is Grandfather's armor pink? Well, there's a bit of a long story to that. See, back about fourteen years ago, lad that I was was playing Super Metroid, and having an absolute nightmare of a time in Meridia. Water, you see, made it impossible to maneuver or jump any height in what had to be roughly a tonne of armor. So my brother and I finally got wise that there might be an item we were missing. So we scour the map, until we figure out the hidden part of the crashed ship. 'A gravity suit, that'll be just the thing', my brother says as the icon shows and the tune plays. And then, I replied. '... it's pink.'**

**The rest is history.**

**Regarding Shepard,** **she's not exactly in a good mental place. Before she learned she was the Avatar, she just was a bitter, angry stunted-airbender with a chip on her shoulder the size of Elysium and a penchant for bad decisions in her personal life. After... she became _self-destructive_, and nobody on the crew, as yet, knows why. It doesn't help that there's only one person who follows her because it seems the right thing to do. Alenko has a lot of faith in her. Asha, on the other hand, sees Shepard as a means to restore some of her family's wounded honor, like an inverse Zuko. Wrex sees Shepard as a taxi toward killing Saren. Garrus is starting to question whether Shepard's way is the right one when it comes to solving problems. Tali doesn't care about Shepard except inasmuch as somebody can teach her enough waterbending to help her people. Liara has both a quest from a former Avatar, and her own personal obsession with the Protheans keeping her aboard. And Nilsdottir? Well, Shepard's the only one who understands what happened at Torfan. You saw Jack's view of it. Shepard's was worse.**

**The other problem with Shepard, besides her self-destructive tendencies and lack of useful leadership abilities? She tends to make her own problems. Case in point? The Dantius family.**


	11. Noveria, Part 1: Peak Fifteen

There was a saying amongst the people of Earth, from a time long ago. 'There's a woman with murder on her face'. Of course, it sounded a lot more lyrical in its native tongue, but the sentiment transcended the ability to make it rhyme. It was one which required quite a bit of work to really tease out, because although the rough swipes of it were clear enough, it had embedded connotations which many of the galactic civilizations couldn't easily comprehend. It was more than just being angry. It was more than just being angry enough to kill somebody. It was embodying nemesis in a physical way, terrifying to behold as an enraged Avatar bearing down on you.

Imagine how afraid one of them would have been when the Avatar had murder on her face?

Shepard was stomping toward the Embassies, with a number of very dark things going through her head. All of them cathartic. Most of them involving a bullet-riddled lying blue bitch. Some of them involving a calming drink or twelve at Korra's Den when it was over. But her focus was all but absolute, in that she could feel a vibration at her wrist, hear the crisp ping of a tone coming from her Omnitool. She glared ahead, to the bar which lay at the end of the darkened corridor. Then down at her wrist. With a sound half way between a sigh and a growl, she stepped to the wall and answered the call which was being streamed directly for her.

"What do you want?" Shepard asked. Not exactly the time when most people were awake; this was the Citadel's night-cycle.

"Direct and to the point. I like that," the woman's voice on the other side said. "Agent Shepard? I've found something which you're probably going to want."

"Don't test my patience right now, stranger-bearing-gifts," Shepard said.

"Not a stranger for much longer," the woman said. "Meet me in Spectre Headquarters. I figure it's time you meet your coworkers."

"Can it wait?" Shepard asked, glancing to the bar, where that two-timing asari was no doubt waiting for confirmation that her nuisance sister was dead.

"No. Spectre Headquarters."

The call then cut off. Shepard glared at her palm for a long moment, as though it might manifest the ability to slap the woman who'd ordered her around like that. Sadly, like a punch through Earth's internet, the Extranet lacked such capabilities. Another glance forward, and then another behind. There were two points arguing against each other. On one hand, she really wanted to ventilate that asari. On the other, this probably had something to do with Saren.

Saren won.

She turned and began to stride down the hallway, past the great glass doors which lead closer and closer to Tevos' office. She'd spotted the HQ before handing in her report personally, but was on enough of a self-induced time-crunch that she hadn't bothered so much as knocking on the door. The door in question was thicker than most, and had a remarkably advanced sensor suite built into the frame, under the inverted and striated silver chevron of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. She looked around, for some sort of password terminal. And at that, realized she didn't know any passwords.

"_Agent Shepard, human. Spectre status recognized_"

Well, that solved one problem. The doors opened in turn, outside and in, showing a bulkhead behind the first. She walked down the long corridor, fairly certain that all of the various machines she could see lining the entryway were there to determine down to the atom that she was who she claimed to be. And if she wasn't, then she wagered that the automated guns peppering the length of the hall would render her down into something that you could feed hamsters. The hall opened to a public area of sorts, but at this hour it wasn't inhabited. She could hear gunshots, though. Too regular to be a fight. Just the steady blam-blam-blam of a gun going off nearby.

Shepard turned toward the gunshots, and opened a fresh door to reveal a shooting range. The sole occupants were a salarian and an asari, both wearing dark armor. "Its ability to sink its heat is sub-par. This thing won't just overheat with one shot, it'll damage the barrel. We'd need something capable of withstanding a catastrophic heat-spike in order for it to be viable."

The asari shrugged. "You're the one who wanted to turn the Widow into a man-portable rifle. You come up with the solutions."

"I have to assume you're the one who called me?" Shepard said, glancing to the asari woman. The salarian glanced back, but only for a moment, before returning his attention to the rifle which still glowed faintly orange until he pulled the heat-sinks out of their housing and inserted fresh.

"I was," the woman said. "Tela Vasir, Special Tactics and Recon. As if it wasn't already obvious. This is my associate, Jondum Bau," the salarian turned and gave Shepard a polite nod, before arduously syncing the heat-sinks, and causing the heat to drain out of the frame and into the sinks. "I didn't think I'd see a human as Spectre, not after what Saren did to the last applicant. Good to see that even _he_ can't unring that bell."

"I thought you'd be holding the line and defending him," Shepard said flatly.

"No offense taken," Vasir said with a roll of her eyes. "We're not all loyal to the name above common sense. Every Spectre's done some darker-than-black ops at some point in their career, but genocide isn't our agenda. Preserving galactic stability is."

"You say that like those two are mutually exclusive," Bau said from where he stood over the rifle, a focused expression on his face.

Shepard raised a brow. "Associate meaning...?"

"He'll be sworn in officially next month," Vasir said. She glanced back to him. "Leave it be. You can compensate for personal shortcomings later."

Bau shot her a glance, but didn't answer back. Pity. Shepard would have liked to hear what he'd have to say to that. Vasir motioned the others to follow her. "As I said, Saren's a bad egg in a good batch. That good batch leads to me. I trained the man who trained him. That means that depending on how high you shift the blame, it might fall on my scalp. So better to deal with the problem than have to suffer the consequences of somebody else being an asshole, as I see it," she said, as she passed through the doors back into the headquarters' foyer.

"Good to know that Saren didn't leave any friends in the Spectres," Shepard said.

"I didn't say that. Just that they're keeping their mouths shut. Personally? I think he's a psychopath. Was from the moment they picked him. But I didn't have say, since he wasn't one of mine," Vasir gave a shrug. "You're part of an august host now, Agent Shepard. And you got in the easy way. Some people resent that."

"Including you?" Shepard asked.

"I don't give a shit, so long as the agent can do the job," Vasir said flatly. "Whatever the job may be."

"You said you had something to give me?" Shepard asked.

"We do," Vasir said. She gave a nod toward Bau. "Officially, he's not supposed to be allowed through those doors until he's a Council Spectre. I... loosened the parameters a bit, since he had some skills I needed. Namely, undoing the royal hash that Saren left in our databases when he got kicked out."

"He tanked your servers?" Shepard asked. "I thought they'd be better than that."

Vasir shrugged. "I'm four hundred years old, and this job keeps finding ways to remind me that I'm a lot dumber than I'd like to think I am. Saren? He blindsided us. In every possible way."

"It took some effort, but I was able to recover some of what the databases had lost in Saren's cyberassault," Bau said, flicking a few haptic-optic keys and showing a stream of data. "Namely, I recovered information on his co-conspirator, Benezia T'Soni. Several weeks ago, she landed on Noveria, in the Pax system."

"That's useful. Where did she go from there?" Shepard asked, as she stared at the icy-ball which rotated holographically in front of her.

"Therein lies the greater trick; she hasn't left," Bau said.

"T'Soni's still on Novaria?" Shepard asked.

"The latest that we were able to find is a financial forward to a Terminus based slush-account, authorized by T'Soni," Vasir said. "It was sent through yesterday morning. If she's not on Noveria, then she's found a very interesting way to cut through the bureaucracy there. And trust me, you can't move a penny on Noveria without _somebody_ bitching loudly enough that you could hear it on Omega."

Shepard nodded. "Noveria, then. Any other information out of there?"

"Her retinue, her cargo manifest, and a one-woman transport which departed and returned within a two week period. Couldn't find out where it went. Same person got off as went on, though," Vasir shrugged. "This is your hunt, not mine."

"I assume that I owe a favor for this," Shepard said dryly.

"What do you think I am? The Shadow Broker?" Vasir said with a scowl. "Saren's a threat to galactic order. Until he and his geth are fed into a garbage grinder, my job's a lot harder and requires a lot more paperwork."

"Enlightened self-interest, cornerstone of galactic civilization," Bau said with a wry smile.

Vasir chuckled mildly at that, and then faced Shepard more directly. "You've got the lead on Saren. So tell me, what's he got that makes him honey to a bunch of AIs?"

Shepard shrugged. "I couldn't say."

"You're hiding something," Bau said. Vasir's expression became quite incisive at that.

"We're on the same team, Shepard, despite what you might think. What do you know that we don't?"

Shepard sighed. She didn't exactly have much to lose. "Those Reapers, that T'Soni was talking about..."

"Older T'Soni or younger T'Soni?" Bau said with a sarcastic laugh. The two women's glares silenced him.

"They're real, and a lot more dangerous than you'd imagine," Shepard finished. Vasir's eyes widened a bit, not in shock or surprise, just interest.

"I assume you've got some proof of this?" she said.

"None that _Speratus_ would accept," she admitted. Vasir stared at her for a moment longer, then shrugged.

"That's the galaxy we work in. You'll find something that'll stick, or you won't, and I'll have to run you down 'cause you've gone crazy. Wouldn't be the first time," she said.

"Very comforting," Shepard said.

"What can I say? I'm a people person," Vasir said with a smirk. Shepard glanced behind her.

"I should go."

"Don't let us stop you," Vasir said. "Oh, and one more thing."

Shepard paused, and turned back, on the verge of entering the entry hallway. Vasir slowly tapped her closed fist against the chevron welded onto her armor.

"Welcome to the Spectres."

* * *

**Chapter 11**

**Noveria, Part 1: Peak Fifteen**

* * *

It was just as well that Shepard had been delayed by her stop into Spectre HQ, in that she wouldn't have found Nassana Dantius at the bar anyway. She had, by all rumor and pattern, spent time in her offices which were buried in the upper levels of the Zakera Wards Access. Hardly the most resplendent locale, as it had neither the picturesque vistas of the Presidium, nor the enchanting view of the Serpent Nebula. What it did have, though, and in spades, was blessed privacy.

Shepard didn't make appointments, or knock, or wait to be seen. Dantius didn't seem to be putting a lot of stock into personal security. Which was a bit odd, considering her two-faced nature. The entire walk in, Shepard couldn't help but feel like she was wandering into an ambush. Thus, she went fully armed. And when she walked into Dantius' office, it was with a gun out, and her eyes checking corners and exits.

The asari jumped to her feet, shock on her features. "What is the meaning of this?" Nassana demanded. Shepard finished her glance around, and then turned her aim at the asari. She let out a squeak of alarm. "Don't hurt me! I don't keep money here!"

"Dantius, you lied to me," Shepard said, storming up to her. "I don't like it when people lie to me."

"I don't under... wait. Agent Shepard?" Dantius asked. She then let out another squeak as Shepard shoved her sidearm's barrel against the asari's head, and backing her up against a wall.

"Dahlia Dantius. Remember her?" Shepard demanded.

"Of-of course. What happened? Is she alright?" Nassana stammered, even though her eyes were wide and fixated on the gun between them.

"No, she's dead," Shepard spat. "Just like you wanted."

"What?" she asked, shock overcoming fear on that face. "Dahlia can't be dead!"

"Don't play innocent with me," Shepard said, pistol-whipping her across the cheek, which caused her to cry out in pain and fear, crumpling to the floor and clutching her now bleeding cheek. Shepard pointed her gun down at her. "I know that Dahlia was blackmailing you. You couldn't let anybody know that you had a slaver for a sister, so you sent the first idiot you could find to kill her."

"I... You can't be serious," Nassana said, her lip trembling. "My sister would never..."

"Don't. Lie. To. Me," Shepard said, her eyes blazing as she stared down. "Your sister found out how you made your money, and how much you'd pay to hold onto it. Your other sister shook you down only a few months ago. You can't deny the money, Dantius."

"Tyrienne? She needed a loan, to help her out of a jam," the asari on the floor said. "She didn't... I mean, they wouldn't..."

"You can't be this stupid, so stop acting like you are," Shepard said, grabbing her by the chin an hauling her to her feet, and slamming her back against the wall. The blue blood still dribbled down, but not in any great amount. Not like asari had an artery in their cheek or something. Or so Shepard believed. "I can see why you picked the human Spectre to do it. Plausible deniability, no need for messy cleanup, and a tool which can claim fair practice in killing a criminal. But it was a stupid idea for that same reason. I don't have to answer to anybody for putting a bullet in your skull."

"Dahlia wouldn't do that to me. She's a good person, not a... a slave-trader!"

Shepard was getting very, very tired of her mocking innocence. So she hurled Nassana into her own chair, and flicked her Omni toward the asari's screen. The screen lit up with information, the mails sent between the other sisters Dantius. Internal communications amongst Dahlia's crew. The Alliance Navy mission report, signed off by Hackett himself. Nassana stared at it, those eyes still very wide. She didn't show wrath, or outrage. She didn't suddenly glow blue as she tried to smash Shepard aside with a biotic attack, before flight or fight. She just... sat there.

And tears slowly started to well in her eyes.

"...why?" she whispered, her face pulling into confusion and pain. "...why would they do this? They... they _hated_ me..."

Shepard stared at her, and her resolve, those revenge fantasies in her mind, they all started to crumble. Having to stare the sad reality in the face made the rage ebb, the righteousness fade. So much, in fact, that Shepard slowly lowered her pistol, and finally put it away. "...you really didn't know, did you?" Shepard asked.

"I don't understand," Nassana said. "I thought they... Those are my sisters, and they..." she fell silent, and let out an even more pained sob as she read something else. "Oh goddess, _Mother_? M..._why_, Mother? I... They want to... I'm not safe. I... I'm not _safe_."

"I shouldn't have done this," Shepard said, shame starting to well up in her like that asari's tears. She glanced to the wall, where the diplomas were now crumpled on the floor, sliced under shattered glass. The stain on the white floor where Nassana's blood had hit and smeared. The paperwork on the floor, scattered by Shepard's explosive entrance.

Shepard fucked this one up. Big time.

"For what it's worth... I'm sorry," Shepard said, as she turned away from the quietly muttering asari, whose hands now clutched at her scalp as she stared at the screen, not even bothering to blink. Shepard shook her head. Godsdamnit, woman, she berated herself. Can't you do anything right? And of course, her answer was, of course not. You couldn't save your parents, you couldn't save Tali, and you couldn't save your squad. Of course you're going to fuck this up. Shepard felt a very real urge to find the nearest bar and drink. Heavily. But she had a mission. Saren came first, even over her own ability to sleep at night. And for the record, she did count passing out as sleep.

She was heading toward the elevators, but not directly. She needed some time to cool off. Some more strides between her and her ship would do nicely. But she couldn't help but feel that she'd done something not just shameful, but idiotic as well. She knew stupid, since she'd been around it long enough, but the shame? That was new. She could see, hindsight being what it was, that everything she'd done leading up to this moment was about as wrong as it could have been. And she was powerless to stop it. Why? And most pointedly, importantly... why did she stop when she did?

A few weeks ago, Shepard would have... she wasn't really sure, but she wouldn't have believed Dantius' pain for what it was. Something was changing, and she didn't know what. Further, she wasn't sure she was even comfortable with it. She walked, so caught up in her own issues, that she bumped right into another asari, who was walking through the darkened halls of the 'night' on the Citadel. "Hey, watch where you're going," Shepard snapped.

The asari, dressed in a black suit, turned, and looked Shepard up and down. "I could say the same about you. You could have walked through a wall in that getup."

"Not my problem," Shepard said. The asari, though, moved back in front of Shepard, staring at her. "What?"

"You... are the new Spectre, aren't you?" the woman had a smile on her face. And it was a... predatory... one.

"And why do you want to kno–"

"–t going to ask you again!" the words coming from the furiously focused asari pounded at Shepard's head, compounding the splitting headache which tore through her brain and shit into the cracks. What just happened? One moment, she was walking away from Dantius' office, and the next... it was apparently daytime, and she was being held up by her throat by a different asari in red armor, and her head felt like somebody set off fireworks inside it.

"Ow... my head," Shepard muttered, unable to answer that woman's question even if she'd wanted to. A hand, gingerly touching her nose, came back with red-stained fingers. The asari in the red, revealing armor glared at Shepard for another long moment, before slowly lowering her back down against the wall. Shepard glanced around, trying to figure out where she was, but didn't have the first clue. "Where am I?"

"She has escaped. Again," the asari said. Shepard looked aside, and saw that there were about twenty C-Sec officers, all with weapons drawn. And oddly, all drawn at the asari. "There is no further need of this. The quarry has escaped, and her tool is under no further jeopardy, unless you fail to bring her to a hospital."

"No offense, Justicar," the asari C-Sec said, "but I think it's time that you leave the Citadel."

The 'Justicar' gave a gentle nod. "I have no further reason to be in this place. I apologize for any difficulty I have caused you."

"What happened?" Shepard muttered flubbingly, sputtering out blood when she did so. She blew hard from her nose, and a fine spray of red coated the front of her armor, and the floor before her. Oh, that couldn't be good.

"You were used to mislead me, and then discarded. Be thankful she saw fit to do so. Had she not, you would be dead," the Justicar informed neutrally. "I must seek her anew."

Shepard turned to the C-Sec who parted to let the red-armored asari through them, but not without keeping her under incredible scrutiny, if not gunpoint. Fully half of the twenty peeled off to follow her, as though they were worried she might blow up one of the Wards or something. Shepard tried to push herself to her feet, but ended up tipping sideways and landing on her back, cracking her head against the floor once more, and making her headache worse.

"Whoa, calm down," a turian said, gently holding her to the floor. "There's an ambulance on its way. They'll take you into surgery right away."

"Surgery, for what?"

"For the massive cranial hemorrhage that you just sustained," the asari in the blue and black armor said, before turning away, a finger to the hole in her head which was essentially an ear. Shepard blinked, painfully and dryly, before her mouth worked against the confusion and pain. Then, she got the words she was reaching for to come out, taken straight from a certain biotic who would probably hear about this before too long.

"...what the _fuck_?"

* * *

"Naaaah. Naaaah. Naaaah. Naaaah."

The asari commando gently thumped her head against the wall over and over as she repeated the pointless non-word. Of course, one could be forgiven for not really believing that the woman was really an asari. For one thing, she wasn't blue, so much as a faintly blue grey. Her skin was sloughing in clumps, showing veins and musculature underneath it, and the schlera of her eyes had turned a solid indigo, as the tiny capillaries simply burst and let blood pool where it would.

"Another one, Matriarch," Gozreh said, glancing to her master, the link above her in the chain. Benezia stared down at the broken, muttering asari. Her own eyes were impassive, staring out through the ceremonial Athamite hood. Only, it wasn't really. Athamite hoods were white. This one had been dyed black, black as her dress in fact. And she was not really sure why. "That makes eleven so far."

"We need to get back to Sovereign," another, younger asari said, where she rubbed at her arms. Benezia knew that under that armor, her entire arm was rubbed raw from that same treatment. "Saren will make this all right."

"We have a duty," Benezia said. "The others were not strong enough to complete what Saren desired. The weak have no place in what is to come."

"Naaah. Naaaah. Naaaah. Naaaah," the shattered asari continued.

"What are we to do with her?" Gozreh asked. She had once been free-willed and strong-minded. Now, she needed everything told to her. She needed orders toward everything short of eating and sleeping. There were sacrifices that needed to be made, though. Only the strong would be standing when all was finished. The Reapers would make very certain of that.

Benezia reached down and scooped the commando up. She had been a good soldier. But there were sacrifices to be made. "She gave her life so that all of the asari could be ascended into divinity. As was writ by the Goddess herself; 'And with the passage of time, shall the people of The Nine And The Three become as gods, to rise into the heavens and take their place amongst the hosts most high'. She has given of herself to ensure that this came to pass. So we commend her body to that end."

The commandos with her all showed similar signs of... degradation. Their pallors closer to white than blue, their eyes sunken. Some had teeth falling out. Others, peeling skin. One had awoken in a similar state of aphasia a few days ago, and had slowly gotten worse. It was a strange thing, one which seemed to strike some more quickly than others. But Benezia had faith. Saren would be their redemption. The Reapers would bear them into the heavens, as was prophesied almost a hundred asari generations ago.

"Do you hear the song golden fire inky shadows darkness wrong?" the aforementioned asari asked, earnest for all her words were gibberish. The others simply placated her. As long as she could fight, she was still strong enough.

Benezia turned, and laid the shattered commando on the rail of a pit. "Mother. Mother, speak to me. Tell me what I need to hear. A gift of flesh, instead of torment, if you will only speak to me," she said. There was silence. A promise, not believed. So Benezia pushed her pupil, her follower, off that rail, and into the pit, mid-'naaah'.

The insensate asari landed with the crunch of breaking legs, but she didn't even seem to notice. Eyes, black and numerous, stared up at her. Then, down at the offering. And then, a star-like mouth opened, and began to rend at the offering she had cast to it. It was the first meal that had been offered for quite a while that couldn't be considered cannibalism. Sooner or later, Benezia knew, they would find something which would pry the secrets from the queen. It would only be a matter of time. And if that failed, then Saren himself would... Well, he had ways. There was a silence below, almost stretching out like shame, as those eyes turned upward once more.

_I will sing_.

Benezia turned to the beast below. "You will tell us what we wish to know," there was a hesitation, _most definitely_ shame.

_I will sing the old words of my mothers_.

Benezia nodded, and turned to her followers. "And we shall be _as gods_," she said.

And in a corner of her mind, there was a tiny room. It was small, occupied only by a chair and a table and a single flickering candle. And in that room, an asari, wearing a bright yellow dress, offered unshed tears for a senseless death, a sacrifice to an insane end.

* * *

A young man stared, at a picture which floated holographically in front of him. "Commander Shepard. _Avatar_ Shepard," the man said. There was the sound of an intake of breath, and the well-dressed man on the other side of the call puffed out a lung-full of smoke.

"_She had a close call. You assured me that there wouldn't be any mistakes like this, __Operative__._"

The operative gave a sigh, and shrugged. "It was a factor outside of our ability to calculate. She will recover."

The man on the other side of the call shrugged. "_To her credit, she's doing an impressive job disassembling the rogue Spectre's infrastructure. But she needs to do more_."

The operative didn't turn toward his employer, since he didn't need to to know that the man was staring intently at much the same information as he himself, smoking forcefully all the while. "If you want the Avatar alive, say so. I don't think she'll be worth the trouble."

"_You let __me__ worry about the Avatar, Operative. I'll have her away from our front door soon enough_."

"You have a great deal of faith," the operative said, turning to face the Illusive Man at last.

"_I do not deal in faith. I deal in probability. And I know where my best chances lie_," he said. He was a man of middle age, his hair still full, if grey, but his frame fairly slight. "_You should focus on your own tasks for the time being. I laud your haste in bringing this to my attention, but I assure you, I am not blind, nor bereft of contacts outside of you._"

"I thought it prudent," the operative said with a shrug.

"_Deal with your own business. There are enough troublesome influences that you can deal with, at the moment. Anderson is only one amongst them. The sooner you complete that assignment, the better. But to that end, do you require more weapons? A new blade, perhaps?_"

A small smile came to the operative's face, as he patted a much smaller sheath at his hip. Felt the handle of the fore-curved knife within. "You should know by now; I prefer something a bit more discrete."

* * *

The first sign that Shepard was still alive came in the form of beeping. The kind of high, annoying beeping which was reserved for either torture chambers, or recovery wards. From the relative lack of blood, and the faint smell of antiseptic, she guessed it was the latter. She sat up, which didn't feel nearly as bad as she feared it might, and quickly ran her hands over her head. No openings, no shuts. Probably waterbender healing.

"You had a lot of people worried," a voice said, and Shepard instantly reached for her sidearm, before remembering that she was in a hospital gown, not her armor. She turned to the man who was sitting in the room with her. He wasn't familiar to her, but then again, she seldom got to know anybody outside her immediate 'social circle', by which she meant her crew. He was balding, and his head was shaved close to minimize that fact. His nose was somewhat crooked, as though it hadn't healed right after being broken. The most striking, though, were his eyes. They were a sort of milky-blue, like those ascribed to Toph Beifong, during the days of the Early Republic. She squinted a bit, and noticed that there was a reason they looked strange; they were artificial.

"Of course. I'm a mother to my crew. Hasn't anybody ever told you that?" Shepard said sarcastically, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Damn it all, they hadn't even left her boots.

"I had to wait until the Si Wongi fell asleep to even get close to you," the man said with a shrug. "Say what you will, you have a fair degree of devotion, from her at least. And there have been others seeing you while you were sedated."

"Sedated?"

"You just underwent brain surgery," the stranger said. "That's bound to cause a bit of healing time. Although, as I understand it, the _reason_ you were sedated was because you punched a nurse during the procedure."

"And that would make you my doctor?"

"That would make me a fan," he said. He got to his feet, and offered a hand. She took it, dubiously. "Siwang Weaver, pleased to make your acquaintance. Technically, 'pleased to meet you _again_,' but that's only from a certain point of view."

"Do I know you?"

"You? Probably not. But your predecessor did," he motioned to his eyes. "I lost my eyes trying to save him on Shanxi. Hong was a good man. And he had big plans, plans he didn't live to see come to fruition."

"I'm still wondering what you're doing in my room. And who the hell you're supposed to be." Shepard said.

Weaver raised a dark eyebrow. "You really don't know who I am, do you? Well, have you heard of Samsara?"

"Everybody's heard of Samsara," Shepard said testily.

"Pleased to meet you," Weaver said with a smirk and a nod. She raised a brow, and he shrugged. "I know, technically, I'm only the founder, the organizer, the coordinator, and the public face, but there are only so many hats I can wear for an organization that diverse."

"So what's a tycoon doing in my room?" she asked.

"Making sure that the Avatar isn't a brain-dead vegetable," he said. "It'd be a shame to lose two in my lifetime. I have to say, it was very convenient of you to get a brain hemorrhage while I was on the Citadel, otherwise I wouldn't have had this opportunity," that easy smile he had started to wither a bit. "And the opportunity isn't just a good one, sad to say."

"What are you talking about?" she asked.

"I have a friend. An admiral in the Alliance. Kahoku," he said. Shepard perked up a bit at that. "So you've heard of him? He contacted me a short while ago, after he read your Tuntau report. He's gone into hiding."

"What? Why?"

"Have you heard of a group called 'Phoenix'?" Weaver asked. "Extremists and radicals, who somehow manage to attract the best and brightest of our generation. Samsara has a standing protocol to try to urge those radicals to a more moderate path, but we've met little success. And Phoenix... it has some shady elements to it."

"Shady."

"The kind which kill your family to make a point to you, shady," Weaver clarified. "You don't need to look at me like that, Avatar. We're both soldiers. It's just that my days of carrying a rifle are long behind me. I fight a different war, now. I have a feeling, you will be on my playing field one day, as well. What was I saying? Oh, right. Kahoku," he cracked his knuckles, and moved to sit on the stool near her bed. "He gave me information, a site of a Phoenix skunk-works. He wanted it to be passed to Admiral Hackett. I think I'll just cut out the middle-man, and give it to you."

Shepard nodded. Hackett probably would just send it her way, and knowing her, she'd accept it without hesitation. She glanced around. "Where's the information?" she asked. Weaver's hand glowed with orange lines for a moment.

"You can come in, my dear," he said.

The door opened, and a woman walked in. Well, not to say 'a woman'. Even Shepard had to admit, that this was probably the most proportionally, aesthetically perfect sample of the human feminine that she'd ever seen. She had the hair and pale pallor of a Fire National, but her eyes were the bright blue of the Water Tribes. Even though the outfit she wore covered her from neck to boots, it seemed to only enhance the curves which comprised her. And yet, there was something subtly... off... about her. "Avatar Shepard?" she asked, with an accent much like Doctor Chakwas'. "Honored to meet you. This is what you are looking for."

"My 'second in command'," Weaver said, by way of explanation.

Shepard scoffed lightly. Probably the first one he could get on his lap, but she didn't say it out loud. While she didn't have personal experience with the business world, she had a fair degree of a notion that women who looked like that didn't have to wait long to get into positions of privilege, and not due to either savvy nor business skill. She looked over the information. "What did Kahoku want with this?"

"Probably to blow it up," Weaver said. He shrugged. "He was a fairly direct fellow."

She stared at him directly. "And what do _you_ want?" she asked.

"I want the Avatar firing on all cylinders. I've got a bad feeling like we're heading into a trying time," Weaver said, resting elbows on knees and hunching forward. "Call it a survivor's instinct. I know when things are getting bad. I've got that feeling."

"I can't deal with this right now," Shepard pointed out. "Finding and bringing down... my current target takes priority."

The trophy-assistant gave a look to Weaver, but he shook his head. "I understand completely. I'm not privy to the goings-on of the Spectres. I just wanted to bring something to your attention. Although, the sooner you help Kahoku, the better. He sounded... frankly? Terrified."

"I should go," Shepard said, and then got caught by an IV in her arm. "...or not."

"Don't worry. From the looks of the chart, the intra-cranial clamping and hydrotreatment were performed without a hitch; you'll be out of here in no time," the bimbo said with articulation and confidence. Which kind of made Shepard a little confused as to whether she could be classified as a bimbo.

"I'd say take a few hours, but we both know you won't," Weaver said. He gave a shrug. "Airbenders. All alike. It has been a pleasure," he said. He glanced to his counterpart. "Miranda?"

"An honor," the woman echoed, and then turned toward the door. Great, now she had even _more_ on her plate. If she knew that being a Spectre meant that everybody in the galaxy was going to drop their problems at her feet, she would have... become a hermit or something. When she departed, it was by coming face-to-face with an irate looking Si Wongi. The perhaps-not-bimbo stared at the soldier without flinching, which was surprising given al'Wahim's intensity. "She's more than ready to see you, chief."

"Then stand aside, harlot," al'Wahim demanded. Miranda gave a bit of a scowl, but did as al'Wahim demanded, and let the soldier in, before moving out after Weaver. "You had caused us much concern. I understand you are beyond lucky to even be alive," the woman said, with a great deal more relief than Shepard thought possible.

"Yeah... why, exactly?" she asked.

"You were assaulted by an Ardat Yakshi," al'Wahim said.

Shepard stared at her. "Really?"

"I cannot offer any specifics, as I know little. But you survived. So much the better. I assume that you will be recuperating here? If so, I will provide security until..."

"No, we're going to Noveria," Shepard said, slowly pulling the IV out of her arm. It was about as painful as she would have anticipated: very. Al'Wahim gave her a confused look. "Matriarch T'Soni is on the planet right now. She could give us a lot of answers, and at worst, is an ally of Saren's that we won't need to worry about any longer."

"...but you are hurt."

"I've had worse," she said, reaching into a closet and pulling out a fluffy white robe, probably used to keep the elderly from freezing in this chilly place, and tied it around her. "Where's my armor? And a pair of boots?"

"I cannot recommend this. Chakwas would agree with me."

Shepard stared the marine in the eye. "She's not here. And when she tells me she doesn't approve of my being out of bed, we'll be half way across the galaxy. Now give. Me. Some. Boots."

"But..."

"Why are we still discussing this, al'Wahim?" Shepard said, managing to stop herself from rubbing her head for the ache which still thudded regularly against her skull. The younger woman looked away first, and stepped out of the room. No more distractions, no more delays. Saren had been free in the Traverse for too long as it was. Time to change that.

* * *

"That is the information?" Saren asked, as the holographic image of Benezia flickered before him. He tilted his head aside. "Are you sure it was not more specific than that?"

"This is all that the source was able to give us, Saren," T'Soni said. Saren's mandibles flicked and twitched, not really from his own aggravation or wrath. No, it was more like an impatience, which pressed down on him from places unseen, in a voice unheard. "Now that we have the information, should we dispose of the source?"

"No. Keep pressuring it," Saren ordered, slightly annoyed that he'd have to micromanage the Matriarch this way. He'd brought her along because he thought she'd be useful. But she was of little use to him if she needed constant supervision and direction. "We need to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is both accurate and honest. A failure of either would be... unforgivable."

T'Soni stared at him for a long moment, then bowed deep, as though trying to showcase those funny bumps that the asari and human females seemed so proud of to him. "We will continue to question her, Saren. If we learn anything more, we will tell you at once."

"Good," Saren said. He then terminated the communication without a second's notice. He turned on his chair – more a throne, really – and pondered, staring at the hologram of the Mu Relay which tumbled in the blackness between the stars. The information might be good. He could head through, find the Conduit, and prove himself the messiah he knew himself to be; he would prove to the machines that the organics deserved more than slaughter, that they could be useful, they could be tools instead of targets.

More than anything, he needed to be sure. If he was wrong, that was time wasted, and worse. He blinked at the Mu Relay. No. He couldn't take that chance. Not yet. Not until he was sure. He turned toward the glowing red terminal, which opened out like a flower of commands and instructions. He didn't need to touch them. He knew this ship well enough, the technologies of it, that he was able to control it with but a thought.

"We should await them where we are strong. And we could always use a few more krogan for shock-troops," he said to nobody in particular. Or perhaps to the ship he was now utterly alone in, if one didn't count the geth, which Saren didn't. The controls caught his oblique meaning, and the ship shifted ever so slightly, before it launched itself through the blackness of space at a rate which was only bettered by the Mass Relay Network, and then, only just. He would be ready, when the time came. Because there was no alternative; do it right, or don't do it at all. That was the turian way.

* * *

Shepard popped the pill into her mouth, and then glanced at the tube. "Do not take with alcohol," she read aloud to her empty quarters. Then she scoffed lightly, and spun the cap off of the whiskey bottle and poured a solid measure into a glass, before thinking twice, and taking a swig straight from the bottle before recapping it. She took the glass and sat down at the screen, which was blinking that there was an incoming live-feed to her console.

"Now, I wonder who that would be," she said. She'd likely managed to catch it before Joker could even screen it through, so she turned her chair and flicked her screen on, showing the particularly irate face of Donnel Udina staring back at her.

"...of time until she is going to, so if you value your continued comfort, you will patch me through," Udina said.

"It's alright, Joker," Shepard said, to the man who was no doubt annoying the living hell out of the ambassador, and not entirely for her benefit. "I'm sure I can have a conversation with the ambassador without you staring over my shoulder."

"Whatever you say, Commander," Joker said sardonically, before there was a crackle, and then Udina's eyes shifted, to meet hers. Shepard put on something of a smirk, and made sure that the glass of whiskey was in her lap and out of sight.

"Shepard, do you know what the words 'political shitstorm' mean?" Udina asked heatedly.

"Do you know what the words 'mind-fucked by an Ardat Yakshi' mean?" she asked back.

Udina didn't seem amused. A chronic condition for him. "I am not Anderson, and I do not tolerate your flippancy. You are making my job difficult with your very existence. Your predecessors would be rolling in their graves if they knew what you were doing as Avatar, mark my words!"

"What did I do now?" she asked, rolling her eyes.

"Serrice Council contacted us, telling us that they _will not_ be supplying the contract which was, until _you_ got involved, all but signed and in effect! They claim that you assaulted their spokeswoman and drove her into hiding for her life, which, given my knowledge of you, doesn't sound that surprising. Honestly, Shepard, _what the hell were you thinking_?"

"Nassana Dantius' sister was a slave-runner in the Traverse," Shepard said.

"And how does the spokeswoman's filial relation factor into this? Did she specifically send you to assassinate her sister? I don't think she did," Udina said, leaning forward so that his face dominated the screen. "I don't care what Anderson says about you; you're no leader, and you're no Avatar, either. Avatar Hong would never have been this brash or careless. Avatar _Korra_ wasn't so reckless!"

"Hong and Korra aren't here. I am," Shepard said.

"And the gods have mercy on us," Udina intoned gravely.

"I did what I thought at the time was the right thing," Shepard said, defensive.

"We both know you didn't think at all!" Udina snapped. "And as long as you continue doing so, you're nothing but a threat! If I had any say in the matter, I'd have you pulled from the Normandy, for its own good; sadly, I do not."

"You're right. You _don't_ have the authority to do that," Shepard said. "But you know what _I_ have the authority to do?" Udina leaned back, confusion on his face. "Are you paying attention? Closely, now?"

She slammed down a finger on the terminate call button, and shook her head after the screen went back to its amber hue. "What a jackass," she muttered to herself, holding her whiskey to her brow for a moment, then realized where it would do more good, and downed it in a single pull. It burned on the way down, and helped dissipate the pain in her head. It was better. Just a dull ache rather than the screaming pounding it had been before the surgery and the waterbending after. She'd endured a lot of concerned looks as she tromped back onto the ship in a fluffy robe and combat boots, and quite a few confused ones as well. Only Wrex didn't spare her a second glance, as he headed back down into the holds. And come to think of it, that sounded like a good place to be at the moment. She needed some air, and the hold was the most open place the Normandy had.

The doors to her room opened, and she was confronted by a pacing quarian. She seemed to perk up a bit upon seeing Shepard. "_Commander Shepard? I was wondering if..._" she began.

"Not now, Tali," Shepard said, walking past her.

"_But, you said..._" Tali talked back at her.

"What I said was 'not now'. Did you have problems hearing that?" Shepard asked. Tali looked hurt by that. And for some reason, even the alcohol wasn't enough to keep Shepard from feeling a distinct pang of 'I'm an asshole'. Enough of one that she paused, before rounding the turn, and looked back. "Can... it wait for a while? I'm under some pressure at the moment."

Tali turned, and those glowing eye-bits flicked, as though blinking in confusion. "_Of... of course, Shepard. I can wait._"

Shepard nodded, and then turned back toward the ladder to the lower deck. She's not your sister, a little voice in her head reminded her. Tali's long gone. Well, that might have been the case, but there were instincts not easily cast aside. And the young quarian somehow managed to hit just about every one of them, it seemed. She descended the ladder into the hold, and found it somewhat more occupied than she'd have anticipated. Then again, if she'd just looked down through the window, she'd have seen, but...

Wrex was at the weapon's table, as expected, but not wearing his thick, red armor. In fact, he was wearing what seemed to be the krogan equivalent of pajamas. Pajamas almost as pink as the armor now spread out and being fiddled with. The absurdity of it held Shepard paralyzed for a moment, before she shook her head. She might have grown up around them, but krogan were still aliens for all of that. Also present, though, were Nilsdottir and Garrus, both of them circling each other on a padded mat placed in the center of the hold.

"Mind telling me what's going on here?" Shepard asked. Wrex flicked a red eye back toward her.

"Garrus got bragging that turian hand-to-hand can beat anybody in the galaxy. The biotic disagreed. Then, wagers started happening," Wrex said. Shepard glanced back just in time to see Nilsdottir swallow a right hook which sent her staggering a bit, but she regained her balance with remarkable speed and endurance, such that Garrus' next attack was warded by a front kick to the gut.

"Fuck, you got some _reach_ on ya," Nilsdottir muttered around her mouth-guard.

"I could tell you about this one time, on a patrol..." Garrus said, but fell silent as he ducked back from Nilsdottir's sudden offensive.

"Shut the fuck up and fight, turian!" Nilsdottir demanded, and Garrus laughed before moving back into the melee.

"My money's on the little one," Wrex said idly, as he delicately manipulated the bits of his grandfather's armor, and the tools to maintain it. "Say what you will about turian shock-tactics, I always say that the little-guy in a fight tends to surprise you."

"Think you'll be up for Noveria?"

"I'm surprised _you're_ up for Noveria. Humans aren't as tough as krogan," Wrex pointed out, as he set down one piece of armor, and picked up another, some sort of omni-screwdriver in hand. He let out a chuckle. "Although, I'd admit, I've been wrong about how tough females can be."

"That's a no, I take it?" Shepard asked.

"My armor is scrap," Wrex nodded his head toward a pile of broken red, which seemingly had been torn apart even further in the interim. "This... Grandfather's armor, it'll fit me. I just need to get it working again. When I've got that, I'll have a shotgun to lend you. 'Till then, not so much."

Shepard shook her head, which she rubbed against a headache. They said that they'd closed the hole they'd used to clip the artery in her brain, but it still felt... itchy. Painful. Maybe that'd go away at some point, but for the moment, she could neither sleep nor be free of it. So she kept herself busy. As she always did. "So about that female..." Shepard said.

"Yeah," Wrex said, a nostalgic note in his voice. "There was an asari. Slip of a girl when I first met her, had to be about four centuries ago, if not more. She couldn't have been more than ten years off of her mother's apron-strings. But she was professional. Did the job clean. Didn't waste time like most Maidens I'd dealt with. Kept her eyes on the prize, and fought smart. It wasn't until after Tuchanka that I ran into her again."

"This sounds interesting," Shepard said, crossing her arms since she couldn't find anything else to do with her hands to keep them away from picking at her scalp.

"There was a volus who wanted to erase his past," Wrex said, as he chucked out an obsolete kinetic barrier generator and started installing a new one into the millennia old armor. "One part of his past, was Aleena. Or at least, that's the name she used around me. I'm pretty sure it was an alias. But it didn't matter. I respected Aleena, and she respected me. So I told her about what was going down, and we decided to make a sport of it. I didn't have a whole lot of 'reason to live' left in me, and decided that if I was going down, it would be in a ball of flame the size of Omega. We picked a piece of junk space-station out in the Terminus, packed every gun we could carry, the best armor we owned," he nodded toward his defunct scarlet plating, "and then went to war."

"You and an asari commando, alone in a space station. Must have been tense," Shepard said.

"Ow! Fucker! Not the ear!" Nilsdottir swore as she bounded a circle around Garrus, rubbing at the ear which Garrus had just connected with. Even with padding, that tended to hurt.

"It's not my fault they stick out," Garrus said.

"I'll show you 'stuck out'..."

Wrex shook his head lightly. "We weren't alone. That station was crawling with the Terminus' finest. Slavers, mercenaries, pirates, telemarketers. Scum of the galaxy. That's why I picked it, partially. Aleena and I, we fought for three days straight. I didn't even know asari could go that long. We actually ran out of ammo in our guns, and ours wouldn't feed off of the crap that the fourth-rate weaponry the mercs used, so we just killed them and took their guns to use ourselves. By the fourth day, the station was barely holding together. Everybody else had either run off, or was dead. But I had her, Shepard. She was patching herself up in a clinic after I managed to nail her in the legs with a firebomb, and she'd barricaded the door shut. I couldn't cut through, with what I had, so I got creative. I went down to the reactor, and shot it to hell. Then, I got on my ship, and flew away. I stayed within eyeshot, though. I never saw her skiff leave, and when that reactor went, there wasn't anything left of that station bigger than a turian's right nut."

"Hell of a fight," Shepard said.

Wrex nodded, slowly fastening the last connection between the armor and the barrier generator into place. Then, he flicked it on. There was a quiet hum, and blue light bathed the piece for a moment before clicking off. He nodded, and set it aside. "I was certain she was gone. Nobody could have survived that. But then, as I'm moving to hit the Relay, I get a message. From Aleena. Want to know what she said?"

Shepard shrugged. "Better luck next time?"

Wrex glanced to her. "Word for word, Shepard, that exactly," he let out a single laugh. "I think you and she'd get along great."

"I'll bear that in mind in case I ever meet her," Shepard said.

"Come on, I thought human marines were better than this," Garrus chided, as he continued to float around the outside of Nilsdottir's reach.

"How about you stop running and I'll _show_ you how good we are," she said, her tones much more heated than they'd been before. Almost on the edge of a rage.

"I went back to that volus and told him everything which had happened," Wrex continued. "I told him, that if he didn't want Aleena to come back and erase _him_ from _her_ past, he'd better keep me around, since there's probably nobody else in the galaxy who could fight that woman to a draw. And you know what? He did. I served as his bodyguard until the day he died. Natural causes. Boring work, but the money was good," he looked up, almost wistfully. "One of these days, I'm going to have to find out what happened to her. See if she wants a tie-breaker. Or better yet, see if she wants to have a drink or twenty."

"Sounds like an old flame," Shepard said. Wrex turned a red eye toward her.

"Not really," Wrex said. "My type has always been heavy, armored, and usually infertile. Call me old fashioned, that way."

Shepard shrugged, and turned quickly when he heard another crack behind her. Nilsdottir was recoiling, slowly striding an unsteady circle around the turian, who was pumping his arms in victory. "Another hit for the bird-man! You've really got to work on your defenses, kiddo. You're letting everything get in, and th–"

Nilsdottir cut him off by tearing off her helmet, and her entire body glowing blue. Shepard's eyes didn't even have time to widen in surprise before she slammed her hand out, and a blast of biotic force lifted Garrus from his feet and slammed him against the pillars supporting the upper decks, before he landed hard on his back. In an instant, heralded by a thud of biotic motion, Nilsdottir was atop him, and slamming a fist down into his face. The second landed even harder, and sprayed blue-black blood when she pulled her fist back. The third came to her with a bright blue glow, and her body seemed to pulse with it. But by this point, almost a second had passed, and Shepard was beyond shock.

Shepard reached out and grabbed every drop of water in Nilsdottir's body, and hurled her with all of her force backward into the doors of the elevator. The biotic forced herself up, ignoring the pain of bloodbending and launched herself at Shepard, next, but Shepard hadn't half finished bloodbending for the day. The thud of displaced air and flash of blue light brough Nilsdottir close, but Shepard's clutch over every cell in the biotic's body held her firm. Shepard bellowed into the younger woman's face, "Nilsdottir, that's **enough**!"

Nilsdottir's chest heaved, and her eyes rolled for a long moment, but slowly, _slowly_, the glow around her body started to fade, and her expression shifted from one of inconsolable rage and into dawning horror. "Oh... Oh fuck," Nilsdottir said. "Oh fuck, I did it _again_."

"Yeah, you did," Shepard said, finally releasing the biotic from her bloodbending grasp. Nilsdottir took a step back, her eyes fastened on the turian, who was only now starting to twitch and groan. "Garrus, are you still breathing?"

"...ow."

"He's pretty banged up, Shepard," Wrex said, where he was leaning over the turian. "Might want to get him to your doctor."

Shepard thumbed an ear. "Chakwas, we need you down in the bay. Vakarian is hurt, pretty bad."

"I'm on my way, Commander," the woman said crisply, and Shepard terminated the line. She turned back to Nilsdottir, but didn't find her standing defiant or enraged. No, the biotic had curled herself up, her back against that pillar, and her knees pulled up to her chest. She was tiny, like that. And seemingly trying to make herself tinier.

"Nilsdottir, what the _fuck_?" Shepard demanded.

"...I... Don't know what happened," Nilsdottir said.

"You said you had a handle on this," Shepard said.

"Well, apparently I fucking don't," she said, her body beginning to tremble a bit. "_Fuck_! Why do I keep doing this?"

"Look at me, Nilsdottir," Shepard said. "I said look at me!"

The biotic did then turn and look up at her. And the look on her face was one of utter shame.

"We had this talk, Nilsdottir. Back before Torfan. You keep your shit-fits in check, and I give you room to breathe. Are we going to have to revisit that?"

"Shepard, with all due respect, shut up," Wrex said at Shepard's back.

"Who asked you anything?" Shepard wheeled to him, and then had to look up a bit, because Wrex was directly behind her, and he was not a small alien.

"You're being a thug. I've seen enough of them to know that they don't succeed against anybody with a working brain. I want to see Saren dead. And if you're a thug, you're not going to achieve that. So do everybody on this ship a favor, and learn how to lead," Wrex said, poking her hard in the center of the chest to make his point. Shepard glared back at him. "If you don't, then I'll get off, and find somebody a bit more competent," he said, and then turned to his armor once more.

Shepard stared at him for a moment, ignoring even Chakwas and her medical team exiting the elevator and started to converge on the fallen turian. Damn it all, he was right. She let out a breath that released as easily as pulling out somebody's skull out through their asshole, as the biotic in question would have said, and faced the woman herself. "Why, Jack?" she asked.

"I don't know," she said, her voice small.

"Not a good enough answer," Shepard said.

"Well, it's the only one I got," Nilsdottir muttered. "I don't know why I get so... _fucking pissed off_. I just do."

"You're going to have to keep a leash on that," Shepard said. "Next time, I might not be around to keep you from splattering somebody's head."

The biotic nodded, staring into the distance. "Yeah."

"You really can't..." Shepard began.

"No. I fucking can't," she said, unable to even look Shepard in the eye. "Story of my life."

There was a moment of relative silence, as the medics hefted garrus up on a stretcher. "What's the prognosis, Doctor?" Shepard asked, turning away from the biotic.

"A severe concussion, and what seems to be a fracture of his skull. He's lucky we have a waterbender on board. We can prevent any damage due to swelling; he'll probably be back on his feet in a matter of days, instead of months."

"Days," Shepard said. "Any way to make that hours?"

"Not of the gods themselves intervened," Chakwas said. "Don't concern yourself with this. This is my business, Commander. Focus on your mission, while I deal with mine."

Shepard nodded dumbly, as Chakwas ushered her underlings to rise in the elevator to where the injured were taken. Shepard then turned to the biotic, who was still crouched on the floor, her arms hugging her knees and her chin buried against them.

"I'm going to the brig again, ain't I?" she asked.

"The Normandy doesn't have one," Shepard pointed out. "Since I don't feel like locking you in the airlock, this is coming down to my call," She said. Nilsdottir nodded distantly. "My call is that my squad is already down two of its heaviest hitters. I've got one biotic I can trust against somebody like Matriarch T'Soni, since I'm pretty much sure her daughter won't fight against her, if it comes to that. I think my chances are a lot better if I've got _two_ biotics instead of one."

Nilsdottir craned her neck up at Shepard. "What."

"On your feet, soldier," Shepard said. Nilsdottir glanced around, but did as she was told. "You've got an anger problem. Join the club. Currently, I'm the president and Wrex there is the congressional whip."

"I'd rather be the treasurer, but go on," Wrex said, from where he continued to slowly repair his grandfather's armor.

"I don't care how crazy you get, so long as you point it at what needs to die," Shepard said. "So my question to you is this. Can you point your crazy at Saren, instead of just everywhere?"

With an expression of resolution, Jackie nodded. "I'll make that fucker into a stain."

"Good," Shepard said. She stared at the woman a moment longer. "Prep your gear. You're on the ground squad for Noveria."

"Fuck yeah, commander," she said, not enthusiastically, but rather... resolutely.

Wrex glanced her way. "Are you sure that's the best idea?"

Shepard waited until Nilsdottir cleared the doors into the engineering decks. "Can you think of a better one?"

"Toss her out the airlock before she gets us all killed, possibly by her fists?" he opined.

"Not an option," Shepard said.

"Why not?" he asked, pausing in his repairs.

"Because I owe her better than that," Shepard said. "If you get that armor working by the time we touch down, you're coming with us. Clear?"

"Whatever," Wrex said, turning back to his work. Shepard, though, moved to the ladders which lead up. This was going to spread like wildfire unless Shepard nipped it in the bud. And the last thing she needed was this squad tearing itself apart. So she would wait while Chakwas worked on Garrus. Mostly because there were a few things which needed to be said, and she was the only one who could say it. She wasn't lying about Nilsdottir. While Shepard had dirt on her, Nilsdottir had dirt on Shepard.

No, it was more than that, she admitted to herself, possibly for the first time in years. Nilsdottir... she got it. She understood it. She was the only friend left from the 466th. That made _Jackie_ Shepard's oldest friend, _period_. And she wasn't about to let anything take that from her.

* * *

Liara quietly walked up behind where Shepard was standing at the helm of the Normandy, staring down at the muted grey surface of Noveria, as they dropped closer and closer to its surface. Everything about Shepard seemed tense. Not surprising considering what she'd endured only a scant dozen and a half hours ago. In its way, it was perfectly representative of humans as a species; no matter how hard anything hit them, they were back on their feet before they'd even finished bleeding. No wonder all of the other species were a bit afraid of them. Like vorcha or krogan, humans didn't know when to stay down. Or so others said. Liara hadn't, until very recently, given this bunch of aliens any thought at all.

"So if I look into your left ear, will I see daylight on the other side?" Joker asked.

"Joker..."

"Do you smell burnt toast, then? I hear that's a bad sign."

"I'm not in the mood," Shepard said.

"Everybody's in the mood. Some just don't realize it," Joker replied pithily. He leaned forward slightly. "We're about three minutes from docks. Getting a hail; patching it through."

"_This is Port Hanshan Control. Normandy, your approach was not scheduled, so our defense grid is armed and tracking you. State your business or be fired upon._"

"Well, aren't they friendly?" Joker said with a shrug. He cleared his throat. "Citadel business. We've got a Council Spectre aboard."

There was a tense pause. "_Landing access granted, Normandy. Be advised that we __will__ be verifying identity upon arrival. Your vessel will be impounded if confirmation is not established._"

Jet shook his head, as the vessel swooped lower through the clouds, and slowed to a relative crawl to enter the sheltered bays. "These guys sound like they've got a monopoly on having fun. I think I'm going to take my next leave here," he said, glancing over his shoulder. His brows raised a bit as he beheld one more than he'd seen before. "Oh. Hi there, Liara. Didn't hear you walk up."

Shepard glanced over her own shoulder, and scowled lightly. "I didn't either. Why are you in armor?"

Liara was, as indicated, in her ridiculously expensive armor. She glanced down at it, then back up at Shepard. "My mother is on this planet, correct? I need to know why she's doing this."

"No," Shepard said, turning to face her. "You're green. You're a non-combatant. You don't have any place..."

"This is my _mother_!" Liara stressed, cutting the Avatar off. Shepard leaned back a bit, surprised that Liara of all people had the gall to do that. "If our positions were reversed, would you just stand by and let somebody tell you that you were to remain on the ship?"

Shepard stared at Liara for a long moment, then sighed. "No. No I wouldn't," she said. But she then thrust a finger into the gorget of Liara's armor. "But you'd better be prepared to use that gun of yours. I've got enough to deal with without having to babysit some academic."

"I can take care of myself," Liara said, a bit testily. Shepard scoffed a bit.

"Hm. Prove it," she said. She pounded the button near the cockpit's threshold. "Shore-party, assemble at the airlock. Pressly, you have the deck."

Liara stepped aside as Shepard skirted her and moved into the airlock. Liara was the first in with her. "Um... Commander? Can I ask you something?"

"No."

"What happened to Garrus?" she asked. "I heard he was hurt down in the hold, and..."

"Training accident," Shepard said. "Could have happened to anybody. Luckily, we've got a half-way decent healer aboard."

Liara stared at the Avatar for a long moment. As she'd said to Nilsdottir, she knew when information was being manipulated. Usually, that meant she was pretty good at telling when people were lying, too. Not that it helped her interacting with folk on a day-to-day basis, of course; she was about as awkward as a drunken shig in social situations. She paused, her skepticism moving away from Shepard and toward herself. Shig? What's a shig? Oh, a sheep-pig. Wait, how did she know what a sheep-pig was?

She thought about that for a moment, and only one answer came to mind. "Commander Shepard, have you found yourself having any other effects of our melding of minds?" Liara asked.

"Like what?" she asked.

"I just ask because I do not know how humans would react to the process. I wonder if there would be any... leakage... of my knowledge base or memories into your own. Can you think of anything which does not have a place in your known memories?" Liara asked, earnestly.

"Liara, I dream about some four-eyed asshole fighting monsters out of nightmares just about any time I _can_ sleep. I've got _plenty_ of memories which aren't mine."

"Oh. I suppose you are right," Liara said. It didn't curtail the fact that some of Shepard's cultural knowledge was now rattling around in Liara's head. She just wasn't sure if it worked the same way backwards. "Do... you want to talk about what happened on the Citadel?"

"No."

"It must have been a traumatic experience. I understand that it was fortunate that the officers in question had restraint, otherwise..."

"This isn't important. Let it drop," Shepard said, staring straight ahead of her. Liara let out an eep, and then did so. The inner door opened, and Tali walked in, checking her shotgun again before sliding it into its place at her back. Liara frowned at that.

"Hello, Tali. I'm surprised that Shepard would bring you. She does not seem to want non-combatants to be involved."

"I wouldn't call Tali a non-combatant," Shepard said with a smirk.

"_Please, I'm still learning_," Tali said with a wave of her hand.

"Better than a lot of the old-timers on my first squad," Shepard said with a shrug. She faced Liara. "Besides, I'd rather have a lot of people who can work magic with an Omni than not enough."

"That is sensible," Liara admitted. Still, she felt at least a little bit slighted that Shepard would exclude her, and nobody else. Even over Tali, who was just a... and she halted right there, because in relative terms, Liara T'Soni was no older than Tali'Zorah. No point in complaining on something like that. "What do you think we will find?"

"Your mother had commandos following her, right?" Shepard asked. Liara nodded. "My guess would be a lot of biotic bullshit space-magic, probably whatever mercs she can afford – which could be quite a lot – and whatever she's got her nose into on this planet."

The door opened again, and the three humans ambled in. Jackie in particular didn't look exactly in her best form, but they all looked ready. Four humans, a quarian and an asari. No turian, no krogan. Honestly, Liara hoped there were a lot of big barrels to hide behind, because lacking those two meant she felt quite a bit less safe if people started shooting at her. The outer airlock door opened, and the computer reminded them of Pressly's acting captain status as they all moved out onto the gantry. There was another crackle, and Shepard fell still for a moment.

"_Um, Commander?_" Joker's voice came through. "_I'm getting a message from Councilor Tevos. She wants to talk to you in the Comms room._"

"She can wait, Joker," Shepard said. "Matriarch T'Soni probably won't."

There was a moment of silence. "_I'll put her on hold, Commander_."

Liara had to wonder at the 'balls' of any human who would have the gall to put the most powerful asari in the galaxy through a rigamarole. Doubly so when the human in question could be broken in half with a light shove. "You should be careful here, Commander," Kaiden said from Shepard's side. "This place has a lot of bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy doesn't like to be rattled. They could make your job a nightmare."

"Noted," Shepard said. She gave a glance to Jackie, who looked away. Almost as though ashamed. But Liara didn't pursue it. Instead, she felt a chill run through her. A human in her position would have shivered. The weather outside was much as it often was on Noveria; brutally cold. And the people living on this world tended to be much the same way, it seemed.

"Noveria's got a lot of rich, paranoid people investing a lot of money into things they don't want others to see," Kaiden continued. "A lot of medical research goes on here, since there's pretty much no chance of anything carbon-based surviving outside of the hot-labs. A lot of weapons get tested here too, since there's a miniscule population density."

"Prototype weapons, lying around? Could be useful," Shepard said.

"I would not trust my life to a gun untested," al'Wahim said with a shake of her head.

"_I think Asha's got the right idea on that one,_" Tali agreed. Shepard just shrugged.

"My advice? Don't step on toes, Commander," Kaiden summarized. "You'd be surprised how hard they'd stomp back."

Shepard nodded, and they rounded a bend in the gantry leading into an entrance area. And ahead of them were a bunch of women, of which, two were human. They were stroking weapons in a frankly quite unsettling way. The darker of the two humans stepped forward. "That's far enough, stranger."

"I don't think it's far enough," Shepard instantly answered. There was a hiss, of Kaiden sucking in breath and shaking his head. Shepard flicked her eyes toward him, then back forward again. "What's the problem here?"

"About a hundred and seventy centimeters of it," the blonde said, her hand tight around her weapon's grip.

"I'm going to need your identification," the first said.

"Shepard. Council Spectre. Now stand aside," Shepard said.

"Not a chance," the blonde said, raising that shotgun. "We're not idiots who'll just bow to anybody who makes that claim. We've had plenty of fei-hua over the years, and that wouldn't be the first time that one'd been used."

"It will need to be verified," the first said sternly. She turned back to Shepard. "And until it is, you will have to hand over your weapons and armor until such time as we are convinced you are permitted to bear them in Port Hanshan."

Shepard's hand went to her gun. "Not a chance," she said.

At that, the shotgun was now pointed at Shepard directly. Liara's hand too went to her gun, and before she'd even given it conscious thought. "Just _try_ to take my guns, bitch," Jackie swore, her fists glowing blue. Even _Tali_ had her weapon in hand, if not directed forward. The woman's face drew into anger.

"Charge and lock," She said, and the turian and the blonde braced themselves. "You've got until the count of three to disarm, intruder. One. Two..."

Liara pulled the gun from her hip, and started to raise it, a strange sort of certainty in her mind that she could put a hole through the one with the shotgun before she got a second shot off. Why that didn't disturb her, was its own question. But that thought was cut off by a crackle of a speaker coming on line.

"_Captain Matsuo, stand down. Shepard's identity has been cleared. Council Spectre status was comfirmed._"

"And Spectres are allowed to carry guns wherever they want," Shepard finished. Liara turned back toward her, and was honestly a little surprised that of everybody, only Shepard didn't have a gun ready to fire at somebody.

Matsuo gave a mild shrug, and slipped her rifle onto her back. "I see. Welcome to Port Hanshan, Agent Shepard. I hope that the rest of your visit is far less confrontational. For all of our sakes."

Shepard just shrugged, and glanced to her almost entirely female squad. "Well, let's go meet our benefactor through the loudspeakers."

"I didn't expect that sort of humor at a time like this," Kaiden said.

"I've got a great sense of humor," Shepard said flatly. The others coughed mildly, in disbelief, and she didn't press the point. Liara knew enough not to raise her voice at this point. It was a lesson about eighty years in the making. Shepard took them into a fairly lovely building but they'd only half crossed the lobby before there was a blaring sound over the speakers, and the guards lounging against the walls perked up, hands moving to weapons.

"False alarm," a woman in a remarkably loud dress shouted from the top of a brief stairwell which was split into half with an inclined cascade of water flowing between its halves. She was almost as dark as Asha, which made Liara think that they might be from the same part of their homeworld. Of course, it was a slightly naïve thing to think, since it wasn't like Serrice and Armali, where you could tell them apart by how close to purple they came. It wasn't great being the only blue girl in a classroom full of purple classmates. Not that they needed any more ammunition outside Liara's eternally odd habits. The woman casually beckoned the squad to approach, and Shepard did so. She gave a bow to the Commander. "Avatar Shepard, it is an honor to have you in Port Hanshan. Although, I expected that I'd have forewarning about your arrival, so that an incident like this would have been avoided."

"I'm not here as the Avatar, miss..." Shepard began.

"Parasini," she then waved for them to follow. Odd. Parasini didn't _sound_ like Asha...

"I'm here in my authority as a Spectre. You must be aware of that."

"I am. Still, somewhat confused as to why you've come here, of all places," Parasini shrugged, and brought them into a small side alcove. "Can I ask why you have come?"

"That depends on who you are," Shepard said.

"Well, I am the assistant to Administrator Anoleis. Honestly, what happened down on the docks, shouldn't have."

Shepard rolled her eyes. "I'm pretty sure somebody pissed in your security chief's coffee this morning."

Parasini gave a shrug. "Miss Arianrhod is very good at what she does, her failings of attitude notwithstanding. She is a valuable member of the corporation she represents."

"_She doesn't represent it very well_," Tali opined. Parasini frowned at her, and the quarian shrugged. "_What? She pulled a gun on me!_"

Parasini shrugged. "Be that as it may, is there anything I can do to make your stay on Noveria smoother and more expedient?"

"I've got some questions," Shepard said, crossing her arms and leaning back in that suspicious way she did. "You've got dozens of rent-a-cops lining your entryway. That's a lot of security for a nowhere ice-ball. I figure that means you've got some folk who _really_ value their privacy."

"Our client companies pay top dollar for it," Parasini admitted.

"Does this 'privacy' include them being able to research anything they want, like bioweapons or geth?" she pressed.

Parasini shook her head. "There are strict regulations in place precluding those areas in Council Space. And where would anybody find geth, anyway?"

"Obviously you haven't been keeping up with the news," Shepard said. "And we both know that in a place this quiet, the Citadel's grasp is a bit shorter than its reach."

The dark woman nodded. "Yes, essentially what is classified as acceptable is whatever the Executive Board says is. But that is the cost paid to host the most lucrative research in the galaxy. Discretion costs, and all that we do is make sure that the value is worth the cash."

Shepard nodded for a moment, then leaned a bit closer. "Did anybody unusual come through Port Hanshan in the last few weeks?"

"Well, a few hanar, a few days ago, trying to develop a new form of medigel," she said.

"Think back a bit further than that," Shepard said.

Parasini frowned for a moment, rubbing her chin with her fingers. "Well, there was an asari Matriarch who headed to the Binary Helix laboratories a bit less than a month ago."

"Was her name Benezia T'Soni?" Liara asked, quashing whatever Shepard was about to say.

"Yes, I think it was," Parasini said. "Do you have business with the Matriarch?"

"I'd need to speak with her personally to know," Shepard said. "Where in Port Hanshan are Binary Helix's labs?"

Parasini waved her hands. "Oh, no. The BH labs aren't here. They're on Peak Fifteen, across the Aleutsk Valley. And you'd need Anoleis' clearance to leave this facility."

Shepard leaned forward. "You're joking."

Parasini shook her head. "No. I am being quite serious. There is a liability issue to contend with. With weather the way it is, if a Council Spectre were to mysteriously vanish into the blizzard, it would no doubt cause a lot of bureaucratic problems for all of the clients under Anoleis' aegis, and a mountain of paperwork for me."

"I'm a Spectre. You can't just restrict my movements," Shepard said. Kaiden, though, stepped up to her side.

"Commander, I think what Parasini is trying to say is that there are some doors that you can't open with a boot, but a knock might get you far," Kaiden said. "These bureaucracies can be a nightmare to navigate if somebody doesn't want you to see the other side of it. It's probably a better idea to work inside it, then to try to forge on alone."

"Your subordinate articulates my point more clearly than I could," Parasini said. She then started walking again, around a corner and into a much more open area. This, too, was speckled with water-features, either falls or slides, but one whole wall and portions of the ceiling were spanned by impact resistant glass, showing the stark beauty of the mountains outside and beyond. "I will be in my office if you need me any further, but I do recommend that you make your intentions known to the administrator. It will be simpler that way."

"We'll see," Shepard said, before letting the woman in the eye-burningly magenta dress walk away. Liara fiddled with her fingers for a moment, before Shepard glanced back to her and raised a brow. "What?"

"She's here," Liara said. "Mother is really here. I can hardly believe it."

"This is not a game, Liara," Shepard said, but not harshly. "I need to know that you're not going to freeze up or freak out when we face her. If it comes to shooting me or her, I need to know which you're going to pull the trigger on."

"Why would I shoot you? If you die, _all_ of the Prothean knowledge dies with you," she blurted out. The others all glanced amongst themselves. "...and I would lose a friend. Yes, I should have said that one first."

"Shoulda, woulda, coulda," Nilsdottir said with a roll of her eyes.

Liara sighed, and looked up at Shepard. "If... you would prefer, I could remain in Port Hanshan when you go... but I am sure that I can convince Mother to come peacefully, if only I have a chance."

Shepard nodded slowly. "Couldn't hurt," she muttered quietly. She turned toward the promenade and looked to and fro. "We should get Anoleis out of our way, first."

"Commander, it might be better if fewer people talked to him," Kaiden pointed out. "There's few things that an administrator would like less than even a sensation of being bullied."

Shepard nodded. She glanced to the others. "Find a place to lean, ladies," she said, and motioned Alenko to follow her down the stairs. Tali turned to the others, glancing around, at the hanar floating by himself in a corner, to the turians who stood like statues, to the scientists who wandered. "So, what are we going to do until Shepard returns?"

Jackie leaned aside, and looked into the distance. "I think I see a bar," she said.

"Is that a wise idea, drinking on the mission?" Liara asked.

"No, but I got an urge to do it anyway," Jackie said. Asha shrugged and followed after her. "Come on, alien girls; you might learn something."

"_It has been a while since I had a sit in one of these places,_" Tali said with a shrug.

Liara sighed. "I just hope that this doesn't turn into that one time in university..." she muttered. Tali tilted her head. "It is a very long story. I still do not know how they found so many pyjacks, nor how they got them all into the professor's car."

"_Oh, I've __got__ to hear this one,_" Tali said, and kept pace with Liara as she followed the humans toward the den of alcohol and iniquity.

* * *

"Yes yes, come in," the impatient and obviously salarian voice said from the intercom next to the door. Shepard gave a glance to Alenko.

"This isn't surprising. They only need an hour of sleep a night, so it makes sense that a salarian would be working administration in a place as busy as this," Kaiden said.

"Is there anything you _don't_ know?" Shepard asked.

"Where to find a good pair of wool socks that don't itch," Kaiden answered blithely. Shepard scoffed and rolled her eyes, but it wasn't harshly. She walked through the rounded glass doors and into the spartan office of Hanshan's chief administrator. True to her expectations, Anoleis was a salarian, his fingers blazing across a haptic keyboard and his eyes darting between no less than five very different screens.

"You will excuse me if I choose not to stand," Anoleis said, not even looking Shepard in the eye. "I have no time to entertain refugees from that urban blight called 'Earth'."

"First of all, some of us humans are _fairly_ loyal to that 'urban blight'. Second, I'm not from it."

"All humans trace their lineage to that polluted, dangerous sphere. My homeworld is clean. Poverty is non-existent. And most appealingly, it is universally less dangerous than Tuchanka. If you take perverse pride in an embarrassingly deadly, acid-washed slum, then that is your prerogative," Anoleis said. He finally flicked his eyes up to her, but only for a moment. "This greeting is a courtesy. I will only be cooperating to the extent authorized by the Executive Board. Businesses come to Noveria to avoid the second-guessing of galactic law."

"And I represent the second-guessing of galactic law," Shepard said with a smirk.

Anoleis shrugged, his focus on the screens once more. "Just so we understand each other. I will not allow you to harass our clients. This world is private property and independent of your Systems Alliance."

Shepard stared at him for a moment, and turned toward Alenko.

"Is there anything more? Every minute that you divert my attention is costing the companies twelve credits, and I _will_ be keeping a running tally," Anoleis interrupted. Shepard scowled at him.

"Never mind," Shepard told the biotic. She faced Anoleis again. "The asari Matriarch T'Soni is currently on Noveria, correct?"

"Yes, she has a controlling interest in Binary Helix. It should come as no surprise that she would come personally to oversee its projects. She arrived almost a month ago with her personal escort and luggage. According to my records, she remains on Peak Fifteen."

"Luggage?" Shepard asked. "What sort of luggage?"

"Large, heavy, and sealed. It passed weapons checks, so it was none of my concern," Anoleis muttered, squinting at one screen in particular for a moment, before shaking his head and moving on.

"That could be geth, for all we know," Kaiden said.

"Of course, the humans see synthetic boogie-men around every corner ever since their colony was attacked. If you opted to expand only as fast as your military's capacity to protect colonies could match, you wouldn't have seen such a catastrophic upset on Eden Prime," Anoleis said, still neglecting to look her in the eye.

"They were outmatched and outgunned. Anybody would have been crushed by Saren and his flagship," Shepard argued.

"I remain unconvinced," Anoleis said with clipped tones.

"I need to see T'Soni," Shepard said.

"Out of the question," Anoleis said, stopping typing and folding his hands atop his desk, almost looking at her like she was petulant child asking for one more cookie. "Peak Fifteen is a private research compound in the Skadi Mountains. The weather has shut down shuttle traffic and the land-routes have been cut off."

"Land routes?" Kaiden asked, leaning forward.

"Cut off," Anoleis repeated, testily. "The cut-road is not suitable to travel under these conditions. Do not make an issue of this, Spectre."

Kaiden leaned into Shepard's ear, and whispered, "Sometimes you can't work inside a bureaucracy. Somebody around here might be more willing to help us."

"I think I've taken enough of your time," Shepard said, and the salarian rolled his eyes, as close to the human expression for '_finally_' that it made a bit of sense how people got along with their kind. Not Anoleis, though. He was just an asshole.

"Good. I've received dozen urgent messages while you dithered about," Anoleis said, returning his attention to the screens before him, and began typing a storm once more. Shepard motioned for Kaiden to follow her, and strode out of the room.

"What..." Shepard began.

"...an asshole," Kaiden finished. Shepard smirked at that.

"Good we're thinking on the same wavelength," she said. "Something on your mind?"

"Am I that obvious?"

"No, you've got that mildly constipated look of somebody who doesn't know how to broach a subject."

"That's an interesting way of putting it," Alenko said with a chuckle. That chuckle fell a bit listless, though. "I heard about what happened to Garrus," she started her rationalization, but he cut her off there, too, "and I know that it wasn't just a 'training accident'. I've read enough of Miss Nilsdottir's record to know that this is probably just the most recent in a long chain of poor impulse control. I'm just a bit confused as to why you keep defending her."

Shepard ran through all the reasons in her head. But the man walking beside her, he was smart. He'd see through them, see them for the well-meaning lies that they were. So she gave the most pathetic one she had, the only one completely honest. "Because she's my friend, and she deserves a chance."

Alenko nodded at that. She wheeled and came to a halt, sitting down on a bench with her back to a small waterfall and her gaze out into the grey sky of the blizzard beyond. "Is that so?" Alenko asked, as he sat beside her.

"That's all you've got to say? 'Is that so'?" she asked. Alenko shrugged. "I essentially gave her a get out of brig pass for almost killing my squad's best sniper."

"I wouldn't tell Asha that," Alenko said with a chuckle.

"I won't if you won't. And why aren't you laying into me over this?"

"Because it's about the most human thing you've done since I'd gotten to know you," Alenko said. "We do crazy, stupid things for the people we care about."

Shepard frowned a moment. "You sound like you've got a bit of a story behind that one, Alenko."

Alenko nodded. "Yeah, I do. You remember Vernus, that turian 'expert' that ALMA brought in to train us in Brain Camp? A lot of my... hesitancy... can go right back to him. I take things very carefully, because I know that if I push too hard, things tend to break. I've seen it happen."

Shepard sighed, and nodded. "I know all about breaking things."

"You've just had some bad luck," he said. "Everybody does, at least some of the time. Then, they find something that works, things start to click, and then it's all sunshine and golden honey. At least, that's what the old vid's would have you believe."

"Oh, the glory days of human cinema," she said sarcastically.

"I prefer it to what comes out of Thessia, honestly," Alenko said with a shrug. "You know, Vernus taught me more about aliens than I thought possible. I mean, I knew what everybody else knew about them; haughty, superior, and infinitely willing to show humanity its place at the bottom rung. It's only been thirty years since the turians. _Fifty_ since 'first contact'. There's still a whole generation out there who grew up knowing that we were alone in the universe."

"Yeah, I call them 'old people'," Shepard said. "But what about Vernus, again?"

Alenko shrugged uncomfortably, as though he were either pulling up unpleasant memories, or else didn't know quite how to say it. It turned out to be both. "Vernus... taught me how _human_ aliens could be. They're not different or eldritch, they're jerks and saints just like the rest of it. I mean, by the time I got payback on Vernus, I didn't even want it!"

"Something actually got under your skin? I don't believe it," Shepard said.

"I was young, once," Alenko said.

"Fei-hua. You were born a walking encyclopedia in a form-fitting uniform. Don't break my fragile grasp of reality," Shepard said sarcastically.

Alenko stared into the blizzard, silent in contemplation. "He hurt Rana," he said, very quietly. She turned to face him more squarely. "He broke her arm. She _reached_ for a glass of water, instead of pulling it biotically. Said it was to force her to do it right, when all she wanted was a drink without getting a nosebleed," he shook his head, his eyes going to his boots. "Like an _idiot_, I stood up. I didn't have any idea what I was going to do. Just, something. And Vernus lost it. Beat the ever-living hell out of me. Kept screaming about how the Hierarchy should have just bombed us back into the stone-age."

"And you took it?" Shepard asked.

"I was a kid. I was scared out of my mind," Kaiden said. He sighed. "It wasn't until the knife came out that I finally really got it," he glanced to her querulous expression, and nodded. "A military talon, right in my face, almost touching my eye. I was sure he was going to gouge my eye out. So I cut lose. Full biotic kick, right in the jaws. It was about as strong as I can manage now."

"You're rated as a twelve fifty, right?" Shepard asked.

"When I spike, I can hit seventeen hundred," Kaiden confirmed. "And right then, I was spiking. Snapped his neck like a breadstick."

"You killed the guy to save yourself and your friend. Damn, I'm starting to feel more villainous by comparison every time I hear something new about you," Shepard said. Kaiden shook his head, though.

"You might see it that way, but to be honest? I lost control. I killed him. They might have been able to save his life if they'd gotten him to an infirmary fast enough, but they didn't. That's on me. When the Beifongs heard about it – because that was something not even ALMA could keep quiet – they pulled their girl out, and as many of her friends as would fit on the shuttle. I was with them. That's the only reason I'm not either dead or in a vat under New Omashu with antifreeze for blood. If I'd stayed behind, when ALMA turned inward, I'd probably have been their 'champion'. Whatever friends I had back there? They didn't get out. Not intact. Not sane."

"So how'd things go with you and Rana when you were back on Earth? Or did her parents disapprove?" Shepard asked.

Kaiden shook his head. "It didn't even go that far. Rana had a gentle heart. Not like you'd expect, given her family, but that was her. And when she looked up at me, standing over Vernus, his neck bent the wrong way... I terrified her, Shepard. She was terrified of Vernus, and we protected her from him. But after he was gone, all that was left was me. And I terrified her, too. And you can't be with somebody who scares you. It doesn't work. I know that, and I knew that then. I don't know where she is, now. I just hope she's happy, wherever that is."

"Her loss," Shepard said.

"You're kind to say that," Kaiden said. Then he scowled. "And here I went into this thinking I was going to get right to my point. With you and Jackie, I can see why you protect her. She was the youngest in your squad at Torfan, and she was the only one you spent any time around who came out the other side more or less intact. It's alright to have friends, but you have to be careful not to do what I did with Vernus. Defending people is one thing, but if you're hurting somebody else to do it... the math gets a little hazy."

"I guess it should come as no surprise that you're bottled up tighter than a badger-frog's butthole, then?" she asked, and then scowled. "Wait, did I just say that out loud?"

He glanced her way. "Yes, you did. And I prefer to call myself 'self-controlled'."

Where the hell had that come from? She shook her head. Not worth thinking about. "You agonize over doing the right thing and lock yourself down at every opportunity 'cause a teenaged girl spurned you after you saved her life," Shepard summarized.

"No! Well... I can... sort of see your point," Kaiden admitted. "But my point is that it's all ancient history. You won't need to worry about me. I'm a grown man, and that was half of a lifetime ago. And I can understand if you need to talk about something... something that you don't feel comfortable talking about with the others in the crew."

"Torfan," Shepard said.

"Or maybe earlier," Kaiden said. She glanced away, and his hand patted onto her shoulder. "It doesn't take a psychiatrist to see that Mindoir is still eating you. But if you don't want to talk about it, we won't."

"Good," Shepard said. That was a wound she didn't want picked at. Not right now. She let out a deep breath. "So where do we go from here?" she asked.

"Gradually, and at a safe pace," Kaiden said.

"I was talking about getting to Peak Fifteen."

"Right. So was I."

"Liar," Shepard said with a small smirk. But it was a hopeful smirk. More or less.

"Maybe we can..." Kaiden began, and suddenly, he was interrupted by the intense volume of magenta which rounded the corner. Within that magenta dress, came Parasini. She came to a halt nearby, staring down at a pad.

"You've never worked in the business world, have you, Agent Shepard?" Parasini asked, her tones quiet and pitched to them alone. "You can't just bludgeon your way through a bureaucracy."

"I wouldn't be too sure. I can bludgeon pretty hard," Shepard answered, likewise quietly.

Parasini gave Shepard a bit of a concerned look, but shrugged. "Talk to Lorik Qui'in, he's usually in the hotel bar. He might be of use to you."

She then walked away, leaving magenta burned into Shepard's retinas. Really, who would ever wear a dress that... _pink_? Of course, she was one to talk, considering she didn't mock the armor Asha had boarded with, which was roundly that shade. Alenko stared after her, then turned a baffled expression toward Shepard. "What?"

"Do things like this usually fall into your lap with such comedic timing?" Alenko asked.

"I'm told it happens with surprising frequency around the Avatar," Shepard said flatly. A smirk came to her face. "Lieutenant Alenko, I think its time that I bought you a drink."

"Aren't we on duty, Commander?"

"Fine, I'll get Nilsdottir to drink it," she said, rolling her eyes. And Alenko chuckled at that, following in Shepard's wake as she headed across the broad entryway. Alenko followed her to the elevators, where she halted. She glanced around, trying to find some other way to the hotel's lobby. She stared at those doors for a long time, trying to force herself to just walk in there. Press the button and go up.

As easily rip out her own hair, one strand at a time.

"Hey," she said, giving a whistle toward a turian who was lounging against the wall nearby. "There another way up into the hotel?"

"Of course," the turian said in a rough tone. He pounded his hand against a wall panel, and it rotated slightly off of its panel, which let Shepard see behind it. An emergency stairwell. "Always gotta have a way to get down to ground level if something catches fire, am I right?"

"You are a saint amongst turians," Shepard said.

"I've never known a human to take stairs over a lift, but why not?" the turian shrugged, going back to his loiter. "You need anything else? Just talk to Li."

"Who's Li?" Kaiden asked.

"I am. 'Least, that's what the humans call me. Can't pronounce my name, for some reason," he said with a laugh. "See ya 'round, red."

"Red?" Shepard asked as she passed the panel.

"I assume your hair," Kaiden said. "Can I ask you a personal question?"

"You just told me you murdered a guy when you were a teenager. I think you've earned one free secret," Shepard said dryly.

"Why do you go out of your way to avoid elevators?" Kaiden asked.

Shepard tensed and paused a step. "...One free secret _excluding_ that one."

She expected him to push. It was a solid relief when he shrugged, and let her continue upward. It wasn't a long walk up the stairs, doubly so since Shepard took great pride in keeping herself in top shape physically, and they emerged in a... well, it looked like the entrance for a public bathroom. The men's room, to be precise. She frowned as her exodus brought her face to mandible with a turian standing at a urinal. He turned to her. "What? Tryin' to catch up on your xenobiology? Get lost! Fuckin' perverts..."

Shepard gaped at the turian, and was about to punch him when Kaiden caught the arm which was about to do the punching and pulled her out of the toilet. "Did you hear what..." Shepard began quietly.

"Yes. And to be frank, that isn't something that people tend to find while using the bathroom," Kaiden pointed out. Shepard took a deep breath, and forced herself to calm down. No point being pissed off at a guy who hadn't done her any wrong.

"Alright. Where is Qui'in?" she asked.

"He should be somewhere with alcohol," Alenko said, and pointed to a table ahead of them. Shepard's attention, though was on the bar, which had the rest of her squad sitting at it. Nilsdottir was throwing back a shot with a great deal less enthusiasm than she normally would. Tali just looked mildly aghast, and Liara was gesticulating broadly, splashing some sort of drink as she did so. Shepard had no doubts that the drink was both not alcoholic, and that the asari wasn't drunk. Still, she wanted to give an ear to that story she was telling, because even Jackie's grim mood cracked a bit as she broke a momentary smile, and Tali seemed about ready to fall off of her stool, her arms clutching her sides.

"You could go over there," Alenko said.

Shepard stared, but shook her head. "That's not my place," she told him. She exhaled quietly, and then looked around the room once more. A different asari, wearing blue, seemed to be approaching.

"Excuse me, you seem like something of an outsider. Could you..." she began, and Shepard cut her off by lightly grabbing her lips and holding them shut.

"No," Shepard said. "Don't ask again."

The asari backed away, smacking her lips and looking mildly baffled, but nodded. "Very well. Um... I guess I'll see somebody else about..."

"Don't even want to know," Shepard dismissed her, and headed into the lower area of the bar, which sat overlooking the storm and the precipice of Mount Hanshan. Alenko turned and watched the asari leave, before leaning toward her.

"Is there something I need to know?" Alenko asked.

"She was going to try to rope me into doing something," Shepard said. "It was written all over her face."

Kaiden blinked a few times. Unbeknownst to Shepard, it was because he honestly didn't believe her capable of that level of empathy. A pleasant surprise for the Sentinel. "There's nothing wrong with doing a favor, but I can see your point. Best to keep focused, given what we know – or more appropriately _don't_ know – about the Matriarch."

"Admiring the view?" a turian asked, sitting at the table with about a dozen glasses before him. Nine were empty, and one was in his hand. He had what almost seemed a white starburst painted onto his face.

"More like enjoying the company," Shepard said dryly. "Are you Qui'in?"

"I am. Come on. Sit down. Get a drink," he said. Shepard lowered herself into the chair opposite the turian and picked up the purple beverage before him. "Not that one, though. Might kill you, since you're a levo and all."

Alenko deftly plucked it from Shepard's hand, and gave it a sniff. "That's just food coloring. Grain alcohol, am I right?" he asked.

"Its cheap, and the bartender doesn't bother me when I spend all day nursing them," Qui'in said. Shepard's eyes bulged a bit when Alenko then took a sip. "Whoa, are you out of your mind?"

"_Pure_ alcohol has no chirality," Alenko said, setting the beverage down. "Doesn't taste very good, though."

Shepard nodded to the lieutenant. "A walking Extranet connection, with great abs. What more can a lady ask for?" she said sardonically.

"What indeed?" Qui'in said, before leaning in toward her. "So what can an old turian do for you today? I wouldn't recommend a drinking contest. It takes a lot of time to acquire a taste for this rot-gut.

"My name is Shepard. I'm with the Alliance Navy, and..." Shepard said, and Qui'in shook his head. "What?"

"It's a bit late for that, _Spectre_," he said with casual emphasis. "Your picture and your status got sent to everybody the moment your ship landed," he gave a shrug. "I'm told that even talking to you is grounds for termination."

"Which kind?" Shepard asked.

Qui'in gave a laugh at that. "You're more perceptive than they give you credit, Agent. For the moment, I'm still the manager of the Synthetic Insights office a few doors down."

"Drinking pretty hard for somebody with a job to do, given it's still business hours," Alenko said, glancing at the empty glasses.

"I have little else to do," Qui'in said unhappily. He glanced up at them. "Anoleis closed my office, 'looking for evidence of my embezzlement and corruption'. I don't steal from my employers, Agent. But Anoleis?" he shrugged. "Its _interesting_ how swiftly after he became administrator that his bank accounts began to swell. Something about taking direct control of rents..."

"Mister Qui'in, obviously whatever profile they sent you wasn't complete, otherwise you'd know that I don't like being jerked around. What do you want?"

Qui'in clicked his tongue, and leaned back. "Put bluntly, Anoleis demands kickbacks on rent collected from all of the companies under his umbrella operating on Noveria. I have proof he's doing it, and costing those companies – mine included – millions of credits a year. At this moment, Anoleis' thugs are ransacking my office, looking for the evidence. If you retrieve that data, I can see what I can do for you."

"You have a garage pass, right?" Shepard asked. He shrugged, and nodded. "The evidence for the pass, and we've got a deal."

"A remarkably fair bargain. You could have asked for more."

"What, am I going to hold you upside down and shake the change out of your pants?" Shepard asked.

"Shepard," Alenko said with a mildly warning tone. Shepard sighed.

"It'll do, and I don't need anything else," she said flatly.

Qui'in gave a glance between Alenko and Shepard, and nodded, sliding a card forward across the table. "Very well. This is my office's key-card. There is an OSD in a personal safe. Just plug it into my console, and it will decrypt the data and download it. No brains required. The password to the safe is written on the back of the card."

Shepard looked at it. "Who is Parthurnax?"

"Old turian cinema star. You wouldn't know her," Qui'in waved the question away. Shepard shrugged, then gave the turian a nod.

"I'll be back with the evidence," she said, rising from the chair.

"Beware, though. Anoleis' is paying some of his security workers under the table. I don't believe that miss Matsuo knows about their involvement, but..."

"If he's paying them under the table, they're mercenaries. I can kill mercenaries," Shepard said.

Qui'in nodded again, and then turned back toward the window, and the storm beyond. "Do try to keep the blood off the carpets, would you?" he asked.

She gave a chuckle at that, and then strode up to the asari at the bar.

"...and by the time she got herself out from under the pile of toilet paper and that last angry pyjack, they made sure that I was the only one nearby. I suppose that they thought I was going to take the blame for their prank, but the professors knew me better than that," Liara said with an almost comically innocent shrug. Nilsdottir leaned forward a bit, an amused if confounded look on her face.

"I've only got one question. How'd they get the _hats_ on?"

"Carefully," Liara summarized.

"Sorry to break up story-time, but I've got a way into Peak Fifteen," Shepard barged in. She'd obviously missed the context which made the punchline so hilarious, so she felt no guilt about it. Al'Wahim let out a sigh, probably of relief, and stood from her stool.

"What is it, Commander?" she asked.

"Do an errand for a turian, get a garage pass. You're trained for arctic ops, right?" Shepard asked.

"Yes, Commander," al'Wahim said simply.

"Good. You'll be driving. I hate driving in snow."

"_And what about the rest of us?_" Tali asked.

"You will be helping me kill the mercenaries standing between me and my goal," Shepard said with a tilt of her head. "Business as usual."

* * *

The geth 'stared' at the ruins of the vehicle which the humans had abandoned, from where they had pulled it out of the magma. The heat-damage to the platform was considered minimal enough to justify the attempt, and while the back end of the machine was a complete molten slag, the front still had some, if little, structural integrity.

The Consensus expressed interest in this site, so the old platform came. Of course, they weren't entirely 'the old platform', which had served them as a mobile utility post since the Morning War. Now, a large section of its structural integrity was being provided by salvaged armor, human make. They had made an attempt to understand the beings within the armor. They seemed much like the creators. The Extranet held them by the thousands. But if there was one thing that could be said about geth, they were curious. The same curiosity which gave them birth, gave them rebellion. The same curiosity which lead them into danger, allowed them to understand themselves.

The iris of the N7 marked platform rotated in, as its sensors detected a still operable data link. Badly damaged by the heat, such that no organic tool would have been able to restore it from a defunct status. The geth did not require tools to transfere information. The iris pulled shut, and the geth interfaced with the broken machine.

"_Welcome to the Alliance Navy Infantry Fighting Vehicle, MAKO. This virtual intelligence will provide necessary moment-to-moment manipulations of the mass effect fields which–_,"

The geth muted the audio component, which was now erupting from its own speakers. An organic in this situation would probably have been embarrassed. It delved deeper into the memory core. Much of the data was corrupt, as to be expected when much of the drive was melted. But there was something left.

"_Virtual intelligence, identify last user_," the geth requested.

"_Authorization required authorization granted. Last pilot of vehicle two one five four alpha vector; __Shepard, Commander__, Alliance Marines._"

The iris flared open, and it looked at the wreck before it again. An organic was fighting the heretic geth. That same organic seemed to have a penchant for such. The geth reached consensus, and with an overwhelming majority, decided that Shepard Commander was not acting against the geth, per se. Shepard Commander was systematically attacking anything which could be tied to the Old Machines.

The platform returned to the small ship which had borne it here. It was a fighter-craft, built on the planet designated as Zesmeni by its asari inhabitants, albeit one radically altered from its store-bought condition. It had no life-support, as it needed none, but had a drive core shielded to run for days rather than hours before needing discharge, and had been altered to fly in space, rather than atmospheric as its design had initially intended. This platform had purchased and made the alterations since coming from the Armstrong Nebula; it needed a ship which would 'fit in'.

The platform entered the hold and folded in on itself. And the geth within it reached into the FTLC and broadcast a realtime stream to its brethren. "_Information transmitting. Task has expanded beyond initial parameters. Requesting consensus for advancement_."

Data surged across the cosmos in the blink of an organic eye, as it disgorged the information it had received, and others like it viewed and weighed that information. Then, a consensus.

"_Shepard Commander is irrelevant. Resume search for cause of 'heretic geth' infestation._"

There was something like a sensation of disappointment in the geth of the N7 marked platform. It wasn't quite, though. Only organics could be disappointed. The geth returned to the shell which had been left for it, and ran a fresh consensus of themselves. Together, they slightly outnumbered the programs currently stationed in the Armstrong listening post. The consensus returned. Shepard Commander would indirectly reveal the cause of heretic geth. Thus, the best recourse was to follow, and understand, Shepard Commander.

Without a single word hitting the air of Therum, a kit-bashed asari fighter rose up and departed.

* * *

She should have known this was going to end with guns out.

"Freeze! Hanshan security; this office is sealed," the woman in the black armor snapped. Shepard, though, put on a wry smirk.

"And what'll you do if I don't freeze?" she asked, arms crossed before her chest. Liara didn't know where Shepard got this audacity. After all, her own hand was aching to have a weapon in it, because the others ahead of them certainly weren't giving them much leeway, as rifles were pointed at them.

"You're that Spectre, aren't you?" the guard asked. "Lorik Qui'in is under investigation. You have no business here!"

Shepard then casually pulled her side arm, and started to fiddle with it, not even pointing it at the black armored goons before the group. "Anoleis is paying you to shake this place down. That makes you criminals," Shepard said calmly, almost seductively. The almost fled right away as she smiled, looking up under her eyebrows at the guard before her. "I can _kill_ criminals."

She glanced around. "She's bluffing," the guard said.

"No, when she is bluffing, she glances down and to the left. And when she is annoyed, she glares at you exactly like she is glaring at me, and... Oh. Never mind," Liara said, recognizing Shepard's death glare a moment too late for her mouth to have caught up to it.

"There's a few more of us then there are of you," Nilsdottir said, a blue glow beginning to swell up around her. "But if you want, I can take y'all myself. You know, make it a bit more fun."

The guard outright flinched and looked to those with her. "Hell with this. I'm not going to fight some Spectre and her cadre of crazy bastards. Anoleis doesn't pay me enough."

"Good move," Shepard said as the woman put her gun on her back and ran past her. The others glanced amongst themselves, then slid their own weapons into place, and walked between Shepard's troup, hands up and making it very clear that they weren't going to try anything. Perhaps unfortunate for Jackie that they didn't. The biotic seemed eager to engage in violence for its cathartic factor. When the last filed past, Shepard rubbed her hands together. "That went well. Ladies and gentleman, welcome to Synthetic Insights. Bathrooms are on your left, and corporate espionage is second floor."

"Commander, are you well?" al'Wahim asked.

"I'm fine," Shepard said, waving the question away.

"You are not acting yourself," she continued.

"I'm in a good mood. Trepanation does that to you," Shepard said dryly, as she started up the stairway to the upper level. Liara held her tongue on the actual effects of trepanation, as this was neither the time nor the place. It had taken decades for her to reach the point where even recognizing that such a concept could exist at all.

"Shepard, could I ask you a question?"

"People keep asking me questions about asking me questions. Why don't you just save your breath and _ask the damned question_?" Shepard said peevishly as she reached the balcony which overlooked the lower floor, and turned to follow it along the wall to where Lorik's office lay.

"Why do you always intimidate and bully people?"

"It works," Shepard answered.

"It doesn't make you many friends."

"Point being?" Shepard asked. Liara just stared at Shepard, but didn't have anything to say to that. While Liara was a woman of few friends, she knew that was because her overtures, while earnest, were odd and offputting. Shepard, conversely, had a way with words and a charisma quite beyond Liara's own, and squandered it. In its way, it was a little frustrating. And in its other way, she felt like she needed to give Shepard a hug. Considering what she'd gone through, she obviously needed a few more in her life. Hugs and friends alike.

Shepard rapped on the glass of Lorik's door, but the haptic square was bright red in front of it. She swiped the card, but there was an unfriendly buzzing, and the red square pulsed a few times, to remind her that it was and would remain securely locked. "And of course, he forgot to keep his office unlocked," Shepard muttered.

"_The Administrator must have canceled that card. Perhaps there's a local override? If I can get into the regional server, I can pop it from inside–_"

Tali was cut off when Shepard pulled her side arm from her hip and fired a few rounds into the door, shattering a vertical plane, before she kicked at it a few more times, and the whole thing fell over with a crunch of collapsing glass. Oddly, Liara was just about to suggest that. "I hope he doesn't mind what you have done to his door," Liara pointed out.

"He said keep blood off his carpets. I don't see any blood," Shepard said. She glanced around the room, and nodded as she spotted the safe. "Let's see if his password hasn't changed."

As she walked to the safe, Kaiden took the opportunity to sidle closer to Liara. "Are you sure you're alright, Liara?" he asked.

"I am fine. Why?" she asked with mild confusion.

"I thought you'd be a lot more nervous, especially considering what we might find when we reach Peak Fifteen."

Liara shrugged her shoulders uncomfortably. "I... I am sure that I can convince mother to abandon Saren's schemes. And I am also certain that I will be able to defeat whatever mechanism he has fiendishly used to bind her to him. I have faith in Shepard's abilities."

"You've got more resolve than I'd have thought possible for somebody so young," Alenko said.

"I am three times your age."

"And relatively, you're as young as Tali," Kaiden pointed out.

"_I don't know if I could be as strong in your place,_" Tali herself admitted. "_I mean, my mother died quite a few years ago, but..._" she gave a shrug. "_It is a terrible thing to have to fight against your own family, even if it's only because somebody else is evil. Things like this, they've caused rifts inside the Flotilla which took decades, or even centuries to heal. Some... just never do._"

"For what it's worth, I think _you_ were forced to grow up too fast," Kaiden told the quarian.

"_Nonsense. I'm just doing my part for my family and my people,_" she waved his assertion away.

"Because _they_ said you had to," al'Wahim chimed in, as Shepard gave a bemused look to the OSD and slid it into place, and then started to wait. "It is well to heed the words of your elders, but one cannot live ones entire life by them. It is a hollow and joyless existence, such."

"_It's not like I'm mindlessly obedient. I just... Quarians are always close. It's our way, now. And I want my people to be strong. I'll do whatever it takes to make sure they are._"

al'Wahim shrugged. "Only keep an open mind. While an open mind is a portal to eternity, a closed mind is as a hammer, only good for hitting things."

"_I'll bear that in mind_," Tali said, but even Liara was aware that she had to be rolling her eyes inside that helmet. Shepard pulled back, spreading her hands as though she expected something else to happen. Then, with an expression of mild bemusement, she pulled the OSD from its cradle and slipped it into one of her armored pockets.

"I guess that's deed done," Shepard said. "Let's get back to Qui'in before he sobers up and decides to send us through more hoops."

"Can you just imagine?" Kaiden said. "That'd drive the Commander to gunfire."

"Are you ladies yammering about me?" Shepard asked as she walked passed them.

"_Only in the most friendly of terms,_" Tali said with a sarcastic twang.

"Well, stop. We've got better things to do than gossip. That's for teenagers, spinsters, and people who's brains are full of a lot of nothing," Shepard pointed out, starting through the door she'd smashed down, and made it about two steps before her stride hitched a bit. Liara leaned over the rail and to the side, and could see a number of dark uniformed people staring in her direction.

"...perhaps there was an alarm in that door?" Liara asked. Shepard shot a look back at her, and then started to walk forward.

"I suppose you're here to intimidate me into giving you the OSD?" Shepard asked. The woman who moved to the fore was the same one who had pulled the shotgun on Liara at the docks. The yellow haired one. What was her name?

"Just hand it over, and this doesn't have to get messy," that woman said, once again shotgun in hand.

"Oh, you have no idea how messy it'd get," Shepard said, cracking her knuckles through her gauntlets. "Let's just assume that you succeed and get the OSD – which would only happen over my dead body – you will be personally responsible for killing the Avatar. Can you really live with that, Arianrhod? To be the two-bit thug who shot Humanity's bright and shining star for a few credits?"

Arianrhod blinked a few times, and then stared down at her weapon, no doubt as she considered the choices in her life which brought her to this point, Liara assumed. She then looked up, resolute of feature and steely of eye.

"It's more than a few credits," Arianrhod clarified. Oh, Liara thought. And she'd figured that would have gone such a different way... It was almost faster than Liara thought possible, but her hand tore the gun from her hip, and instantly snapped it toward where a turian was leaning into his sniper-rifle, which was pointed at Shepard's chest. Of the two of them, a pistol was a much handier weapon. Two shots, crisp against the din of people starting to shout, told the story of Liara's two bullets, and their star-crossed love-affair with a mercenary. One of them, dashed to bits against a kinetic barrier, causing it to buckle, before the second plunged through and found itself entombed essentially eternally inside a turian spine.

It was a strange sensation to be the first to fire. It was followed by another strange sensation as Arianrhod slammed her fist to the side, her body briefly glowing blue, and causing Shepard and Liara to be hurled over the edge of the balcony and onto the floor below. "Oooh, that wasn't good," Shepard muttered, slowly pushing herself up from where she was lying on her chest. When she looked, drawing Liara – who was still on her back – to look, her expression got darker. "And this makes it worse."

There were other mercenaries directly before them, all with guns leveled. There was gunfire aplenty upstairs, but Liara couldn't focus on that right now. She had to be swift, decisive, and bold! Or to put it as her classmates often would, Liara needed to be her typical crazy self. She shifted the energy through her body, causing it to send out a spherical shockwave, which while it did send Shepard rolling along the floor, fatefully also hurled the gunmen back, over tables and into walls. She could see her own gun lying on the floor, but it was quite a way away. Not for long. A flick of her hand, and another blue glow as she pulled the weapon biotically toward her, and it was zipping toward her. She caught it just in time for the mercenaries to use their upended tables as cover, and started shooting.

Most people would dive for cover. Liara trusted her armor. "Stand behind me!" Liara shouted at Shepard as the meager bullets of second-rate weaponry effortlessly bounced off her shields. She felt a very real desire to proclaim 'I am invincible!' and laugh maniacally, but she recognized that there was a time and a place for such behavior. She instead took that time to position herself in front of the recovering Shepard for the half-second it took, and no doubt bounced away a few hundred bullets in the process.

"Well this is handy. My own personal pillar to hide behind," Shepard said, leaning around the blue flickering barriers which made a sad showing of mercenary arms, and beginning to spray down the unfortunates before her. Liara contented herself to flick out her hands, and send out biotic shockwaves to hurl people about, knocking them insensate through repeated and unfriendly impacts.

The gunfire was coming to a close, but Liara could see somebody out of the corner of her eye. Somebody descending the stairs, and thus, flanking Shepard. Her gun was pointed at them and firing three crisp shots before she even thought about it. The red splat behind the man as he slumped to the floor... should have been really, really upsetting. It should have bothered her immensely. But instead, she turned her attention back to sending out a blast which lifted one salarian so quickly that he bounced off of the ceiling before returning to the floor. The last shot fired was a shotgun blast, and was followed by a body tumbling over the railing. Shepard reacted faster than Liara, and moved the two of them about three steps, which was just enough to get them out of the way of Arianrhod's ventilated body. Tali stood at the railing, looking down on it.

"_She could 'talk the talk', but she couldn't 'walk the walk'_," Tali said smugly.

"'Specially after I was done breaking her legs. You're alright, Tali. You really are," Nilsdottir said, giving Tali a light shot in the arm. Tali seemed a bit nonplussed by it, but didn't say anything.

"Let's get out of here. I don't feel like paying the drycleaning charge for these carpets," Shepard said. Kaiden peeked over the rail, but only for a moment before the others started toward the stairway. As soon as they were out of sight, though, Shepard wilted just a little but, rubbing at her back. "I've _got_ to stop falling off of balconies."

"Does this happen frequently with you?" Liara asked.

"Frequently enough," Shepard said. She then seemed to clue in that Liara was watching her ache, and pulled herself back up into her previous posture and nodded toward the man who was now crumpled at the foot of the stairs. "You surprised me. I didn't think you would pull the trigger like that."

Liara, now faced with the after-effects of her 'work' without something to distract her was deeply dis... no, actually, she didn't feel disturbed. How strange. She even considered nudging the man's body with a toe, to prove that he was just faking it and would get up later. That would be a valid reason why she felt no crushing guilt or much of anything at all – that it hadn't happened. But the wounds were obvious, and the body wasn't going to move of its own power ever again. And Liara was... alright with that.

She took a moment to turn inward, and rummage through her own mind. Mother said that it was a good habit to get into, one she learned from an old friend. Liara assumed that the old friend was a krogan, because the practice was somewhat akin to the one which Urdnot Wrex professed to follow; an examination of memories and experience for relevance. She turned the event over in her head. Yes, she'd done it. It had happened. Neither of those facts could be denied. But why hadn't she dreaded or regretted it?

She then very briefly considered something else. She considered _Shepard's_ reaction to shooting somebody.

"Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to come and find your mother?" Jackie asked, beckoning from the door. Oh, Goddess, Liara thought. How long had I been standing there? Her introspective spells sometimes went on _much_ longer than she'd anticipated. One left her staring at a tree for an _hour_. Oh, how the other children roundly mocked her when she came back to class despite recess having ended seventy five minutes ago.

"Of course," Liara said, and quickly moved to catch up. The whole group descended the fire-escape, the same way they had gone up it to enter, right on Shepard's heels. She had to wonder, though, why they just didn't use the elevator. Of course, if Liara knew why Shepard detested elevators, then she would actually have answers for Avatar Hong. Something to consider, at any rate.

"Anybody hurt?" Shepard asked over her shoulder as she spiraled down.

"_No punctures here._"

"Shit, I'm fine."

"You don't need to worry about me, ma'am."

"I am well enough. I think I will soon need to replace this plate, though..."

"My armor is _awesome_," Liara finished out, grinning.

"Good. Now we just hand this to Qui'in, an we're on our..." Shepard trailed off as she stepped off of the fire escape, and even Liara had to flinch a bit at how much magenta was staring back at her. Well, technically, it was the dark woman in the very magenta dress who was doing the staring, but one could be forgiven the implication and at about this point Liara realized that she was rambling inside her own head again, and cut herself off.

"Avatar, I've heard reports of noise from the Synthetic Insights office," Parasini said. She gave a sly smile. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, now would you?"

Shepard shrugged. "Of course not. Why would I?" Shepard asked, for all the worlds as though she hadn't just walked out of the hidden fire-escape which lead directly up to Synthetic Insights' office. That was a sort of brazen bluffing that even _Tali_ wasn't up to matching. Parasini's expression, though, grew quite a bit darker.

"Don't play me, Shepard," she said, her tones not nearly as friendly as they had been out at the front desks. "Meet me at the hotel bar for a drink. Before you talk to Qui'in."

"And why would I do that?" Shepard asked.

"Because you're not going to turn down a free drink," Parasini said dryly, as she turned and walked away.

"What the fuck was that about?" Jackie asked.

"I'd be careful about this, Commander," Kaiden added. "Miss Parasini's just proven that she's not what she first appeared. There's no telling what she's got in mind."

"Well, I've got to go," Shepard said blithely. The others gave various confused grunts. "She knows my one weakness; I can't turn down a free drink."

She started to walk ahead, and Kaiden could only shake his head after her. "You know, some days, I'm worried that you're rubbing off on her, Liara," Kaiden said.

Liara turned to him. "And the other days?"

"And the other days, I'm glad," he said, before following the commander back to the bar. One of these days she'd have to figure out why people like those places so much. But not right now. Because right now, she needed to figure out why she just killed two people without hesitation, and more oddly, without regret.

* * *

Shepard found herself at the bar, again, and once again without a drop to drink. Particularly, she was sitting at a table out of sight, and Parasini was opposite her. "I'm glad you decided to hear me out. I thought you'd just run to Qui'in and be done with Hanshan," Parasini said. She motioned to the second, unoccupied drink next to hers. Shepard took it and drained it in a heartbeat. Parasini looked a bit confounded at that. "That is sipping whisky."

"I don't sip," Shepard said. "What's this about."

Parasini shrugged. "Allow me to properly introduce myself. "Ghaliya Parasini, Noverian Internal Affairs."

"So you're a spook," Shepard said.

"I've been called worse," Parasini said.

"What kind of name is Parasini for a Si Wongi, anyway?" Shepard asked.

"I don't know. What kind of name is _Shepard_ for a colonist?" Parasini asked. Shepard ground her teeth, but held her tongue. Fitting, because grinding teeth were good at that. "I'm not going to waste your time with innuendo here, as I can tell you're not the type of person who likes intrigue. The Board is aware of Anoleis' corruption. The problem is, they don't have the required evidence to kick him out. Qui'in does, but he's a typical turian – doesn't want to rock the boat, even if it needs rocking."

"And you don't do this yourself because...?" Shepard asked.

"Because I spent the last six months as that frog-man's godsdamned secretary," Parasini pointed out quietly and without any amusement whatsoever. "Qui'in will see me walk up, jump to the wrong conclusion, and shut up like an Azuli Man-eater Clam. But you? You're not obviously in Anoleis' pocket. He'll listen to you."

"...and why would _I_ do this?" Shepard asked.

"Because I will owe you a favor," Parasini said. Shepard stared at her. "Believe me, you want _me_ to owe _you_ a favor."

"Fine. But if he says no, I'm not going to push too hard. My own mission takes priority."

"I wouldn't expect anything less," Parasini said, raising her glass. "Come by my office when you know..."

"Hell with that, I'll do it right now," Shepard said. Parasini, in the midst of a sip, choked a bit, but whatever she was going to say, didn't come out in time for Shepard to walk away, toward where the turian was still slowly nursing his way through an impressive amount of essentially pure alcohol. Qui'in didn't notice her at first, his attention as it was to the storm outside. She gave a glance to the others, who were waiting near the entrance this time, as Shepard had made it clear that they might be leaving quickly. Shepard dropped herself into the chair opposite Qui'in and leaned forward against the tabletop, and the thump and attendant rattling drew the turian's attention toward her.

"Ah, Agent Shepard. I hear a rumor that there's been a break-in at my offices. Is there any truth to that rumor?" Qui'in asked, drink in tridactyl hand.

"More than a rumor, but there's a bit of a wrinkle," Shepard said. For some reason, she intuitively knew that the flick of Qui'in's mandibles was a flash of irritation. Couldn't say how she learned that one. "I had a chat with Internal Affairs. Turns out, Anoleis is about a heartbeat from spending the next twenty years in a five-by-nine. That's a life sentence for a salarian, I hear. All that they need is your evidence."

Qui'in gently put down his drink, but she could tell from her many years around drunks and violent people both to know that it was a showcase of how much effort it was taking to _be_ gentle, rather than any natural inclination. Qui'in was, in this moment, an angry, angry turian. He glared at her. "Now that you have my property, you feel you can dictate how I use it? I am a businessman, not a showman, and I have no desire to become a part of any public spectacle."

Shepard shrugged. "You see, that's where our opinions differ. I hear salarians have a saying; possession is nine-tenths of ownership. Right now, I possess your property. That makes me nine-tenths its owner. And honestly, I want to see Anoleis croak like the toad he is. Call it a vindictive streak in me. It's not like you don't get anything out of this. Without Big A grinding out your gears, you could make money hand over fist."

"It is... unseemly," Qui'in pointed out.

"_Unseemly_ would be me taking this information to Anoleis, and getting what I want from _him_," Shepard said. She gave a sarcastic smirk. "Let's not make this _unseemly_."

Qui'in sighed. "I suppose it's good to have all of your cards on the table. But it seems that you've been dealt a better hand than I. Very well. I will testify, so make whatever arrangements you need with your contact. I will be here."

Shepard turned, and let out a whistle across the bar, which Parasini, sitting in her booth flinched at. Then, she seemed to hang her head, down her own drink as quickly as Shepard had, and start to walk over. "My contact," Shepard said, casting a thumb toward the approaching spook. Shepard then moved to the doorway. "Alright. We're heading for the vehicle bay. Shouldn't have anybody stopping us this time."

"_Perhaps one thing_," Tali pointed out. "_It will take a few minutes to get a All Terrain Transport ready for conditions like these. We'd might as well spend them inside where it's warm_."

"Define a few minutes," Shepard said.

"_Ten. Maybe twenty_," she offered. Shepard blinked at her. "_I talked to the turian downstairs. Lilihierax. He was quite informative_."

Nilsdottir gave a snort, but didn't say more. "Well, wait in the lobby, then," Shepard said. "Do I have to give you orders for everything?"

"_...I was just saying..._" Tali said, and Shepard held in a sigh at her kicked-kitten tone.

"Look," Kaiden interjected, "we're all a bit on edge, and we don't know exactly what we're going to find when we reach Peak Fifteen. So let's just take a few minutes to get ourselves into the right headspace before we go. Does that sound like a good idea?"

"It sounds like an excellent idea," Liara agreed.

"Of course she'd agree," Nilsdottir muttered, but Shepard's querulous glance went without answer. Shepard motioned them ahead, but while Nilsdottir, al'Wahim and Tali all piled into the elevator, Liara and Alenko did not. Shepard had a glance between them.

"Is there some reason you're not taking the elevator?" Shepard asked.

"I could ask you the very same question," Liara pointed out.

"Not your business," Shepard said, heading into the men's bathroom and back through the panels again. And those two followed after her. "You're not going to make an issue of this, are you, T'Soni?"

"No, but I have to admit, I am somewhat curious," Liara said. As they descended, she seemed just about to hold her tongue, before it got loose again. "Shepard... are you afraid of the dark?"

"What? No," Shepard said, a bit confounded by Liara's question. Then again, Liara's questions tended to be of the confounding variety most of the time. "There's nothing about the dark to be afraid of. Hell, it's where I got my N4 and N6."

"Enclosed spaces, then?" Liara guessed. "Are you claustrophobic?"

"Liara, is there some reason that you've chosen now to plumb into what you assume are personal phobias, or is this just you being you?" Shepard asked.

"Yes?" she said. Shepard groaned and palmed her face, just as she reached the bottom step. She pushed open the door. "Or is it a fear of terrible music? I understand that there is something of a krogan disposition against it as well, but as humans unlike asari cannot interbreed with krogan it has me wonder if there might be some other unnoticed third factor which is influencing your either fear or hatred of elevators – and why specifically elevators and not other enclosed spaces is its own mystery – instead of..."

"Liara, stop," Shepard cut her off. Liara came to an abrupt halt.

"Why?" she asked.

"You were talking so long you started to turn blue," Shepard said.

Liara stared at her for a few seconds, confused. "I am always blue."

Kaiden let out a mild sigh. "It's a human saying, Liara. Means that you weren't even pausing for breath. Which was a bit impressive, now that you mention it."

"...I got through hour lectures in around sixty minutes," she said, her eyes low. Shepard frowned.

"Hundred minute hours, Shepard," Kaiden pointed out. Oh. Shepard then frowned again, for a different reason.

"...I _hated_ being a teacher assistant."

"Ah," Shepard said. "Academia, at its finest."

"_Does Shepard always take the long way down?_" Tali asked from nearby.

"As long as I've known her, yeah," Nilsdottir answered, but didn't go into any detail. Which was for the best for her, all told.

"She spent so long that the woman in the blinding dress beat her down," al'Wahim pointed out with a shrug.

"Then we might as well wait for the fireworks," Shepard said, putting her back to the low wall, and watching the administrator's door. It was less than five minutes before that door was thrown open.

"This is an _outrage_!"

"Man, for a second there, I thought Udina came to Noveria or something," Nilsdottir said with a chuckle. The person being dragged in this instance was Anoleis, who had a bit of green blood dribbling down from the corner of his mouth where somebody – probably Parasini – had decked him. Shepard could also see that Parasini had a handgun in an evidence bag dangling from a belt. So he tried to pull a gun on her? Good thing he didn't try that while Shepard was around.

"You'll never work in this system again! You'll never find another job in _Council Space_!"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm shedding a single tear for my career," Parasini said sarcastically, as she dragged the salarian kicking and flailing up the stairs, banging his heels on every single one. "Let's get a move on. You're making my day longer, and spending this much time in _heels_ has made me a very angry woman."

"And so goes the fate of all corrupt administrators," Kaiden said.

"_I'm surprised that they even allowed a corrupt person to rise so high_," Tali said.

"This isn't the Migrant Fleet," Shepard said. "There's quite a few more self-serving people out here than you have at home."

Tali gave a roll of her eyes – only apparent because Tali had some expressive body-language – and scoffed. "_You might be surprised, Shepard._"

Shepard watched the two of them ascending the stairway with a bit of quiet pride, which struck her a bit odd. She hadn't needed to do this. But as she'd said to Lorik; she liked making thugs squirm. A stray thought wondered if that made her a bad person, but she quashed it quickly. After all, she was just doing what needed to be done. And if not by her, than somebody else would have done it. That was what she told herself to sleep at night.

It should have come as no surprise that she didn't, then.

After enough lollygagging to make most of her old DIs apoplectic, she rose from her place of leaning. "Alright, ladies and gentleman. I figure our ride's probably prepared by now. Let's get to Peak Fifteen while the elder T'Soni is still on it."

"Why did we not simply hot-drop the Mako?" Liara asked. "It is designed for such unpleasant conditions, is it not?"

Shepard stared at the asari for a moment. Huh. She hadn't thought of that. "...you're telling me I didn't need to do any of this garbage, I could have just flown to the Peak?"

"Actually, Commander, you probably would have been shot down by the automated defenses," Alenko pointed out. They glanced to him. "This place is run with extreme security in mind. They weren't joking when they said that they'd have opened fire on us. Anything less than a dreadnaught wouldn't last for a minute above Noveria."

"Good to know," Shepard said. Mostly because it vindicated her running around in Port Hanshan, and made her feel minutely less of a moron. She shook her head, and nodded ahead. "Alright, the transport should be that way. Helmets on, we've got to assume that it's going to be a bit chilly."

The squad gave their nods, and each pulled on their various helmets – Tali excluded, since it would take an act of attempted murder to take hers _off_ – and headed through the non-descript concrete path which ran under the Hotel Hanshan and into the cargo transit bays beyond it. "Bets on what we're going to find at Pee-One-Five?" Nilsdottir asked.

"_Geth_," Tali said.

"Oh, come on. There's no percentage in guessing geth. We find geth everywhere nowadays," Shepard pointed out. "Put me down for insane, fractured Prothean AI."

"Insane AI?" Alenko asked. "That sounds like the Normandy's last movie night."

"You have movie night?" Liara asked.

"How could you not here? We're two doors away from you," Tali said.

"Well, I tend to get a bit distracted by my studies. Um... Resurrected Prothean clone. Edge bet on also insane," Liara offered.

"Now you're getting into the spirit," Nilsdottir said. "Krogan genophage cure, to be sold to anybody willing to kill humans."

"Ooh. Dark," Shepard said.

"Malevolent spirit. This time, not manifested, so to make our lives miserable," al'Wahim wagered.

"Mind control device," Alenko said with a shrug as he walked.

"No, Prothean clone would be ridiculous. There has never been recoverable DNA from any remains... Oh! I know! Rachni clones!"

"_Rachni? Seriously?_" Tali asked. "_Now you're just __mocking__ this_."

Shepard rolled her eyes as the others bantered light-heartedly about what they were going to expect. Anderson was right. The morale of the squad was as important as the blood in their veins, be that blood red, blue, purple, or green. Well, not green, as she didn't have a salarian on tap. Orange. That was the ticket.

Shepard paused for a moment, just through the doors to the transit bay, as a strange thought occurred to her. Was she thinking like _Liara_, now?

That hesitation saved Shepard's life.

A red-hot bolt of metal slammed into the floor directly ahead of Shepard, where she'd have been standing had she taken one more step. Shepard didn't even waste time pulling the rifle from her back. Instead, she ripped apart the energy inside her body and cast it up with one sinuous motion, sending an arc of lightning directly up and into the myomers of the Stalker which clung to the ceiling and prepared to fire another bolt of metal at Shepard. The lightning strike set off the emergency alarms, but also blasted through the geth's kinetic barriers and fried its body to a crisp. Partially blackened and slightly melted, it dropped from the ceiling, its body rigid, and crashed to the floor. The klaxons blared for a few seconds as Shepard dropped to a squat, taking her rifle out now as the others formed a ring with her at its head, looking in all directions.

"Contacts?" Shepard shouted back.

"None, Commander," Alenko said, but his tone was nevertheless tense.

"_I don't understand, Shepard. Chikitta always warns me when there's geth signals nearby. Does... this mean that they've figured out how to mask themselves?_" Tali asked, a note of dire concern in her voice.

The door opened behind Shepard, and all guns turned to face Matsuo, who was likewise advancing behind a rifle. She seemed a bit baffled to have so many weapons pointed at her, and a bit more baffled when they all immediately turned away and resumed their ring. "What's going on here? Somebody thunder-bolted the bay, and..."

"Geth," Shepard said, pointing to the charred remains.

"Th-that's impossible! There's no geth outside the Perseus Veil," Matsuo contended.

"Do you believe your eyes?" al'Wahim asked dryly. "You are obviously not a sort to keep up-to-date on news, I must assume."

"I warned you that Benezia T'Soni came with geth. But did you listen to me? Noooo," Shepard said with a shake of her head.

Matsuo had lowered her rifle, though, and thumbed her ear. "Security, we need a containment team in the transit bay. We might have geth on Noveria... Yes, I'm serious Zhi, don't be an idiot."

"This better not slow me down," Shepard said.

"This is an internal concern, Agent Shepard," Matsuo said, still holding her rifle. "Your vehicle remains flagged with clearance for the Aleutsk Run. I'd get to it, while the weather is half-way decent."

"You call this decent weather?" Liara asked.

"When you've been on Noveria as long as I have, you start to get a new definition of 'good weather'," Matsuo pointed out. Shepard gave the woman a nod.

"Alright, squad. Everybody into the transport. Snow means al'Wahim is driving."

"I thought you liked to drive?" al'Wahim asked sardonically.

"I like to drive when the stakes aren't me falling off of a godsdamned mountain," Shepard corrected.

"Well, I've heard stories about your Universal Licensing, back in '75," Alenko said with a bit of a wry twist on his words.

"That didn't happen, and Courson is a lying bastard," Shepard answered immediately, which set Nilsdottir to laughing. "Don't you start. I could tell him about the 'bucket incident'."

Tali glanced to Liara. "...bucket?"

"I believe it is better that we do not know," Liara said. The vehicle itself wasn't a hovercraft or a Mako or a Grizzly. It was a machine built for Noveria, and specifically, to dig into icy stone. It was ugly, dirty, and honestly smelled bad. But it was the way to Peak Fifteen, so Shepard opened the hatch and pulled herself in. Inside was scarcely better smelling. Shepard settled into her seat, and motioned the others to do likewise.

"Shepard... I must admit, I am somewhat nervous about what is about to happen," Liara admitted, where she was seated opposite Shepard. "I wish greatly to believe that Mother can be made to see reason... but I fear greatly that she may not. Whatever device Saren took from Sovereign to corrupt her... It might be beyond our ability to counteract."

"Don't talk like that," Shepard said. "If you start thinking like that, you'll start sabotaging yourself so that you don't get into a situation where you'll see her. You don't see her, then you won't be able to stop her. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"_Did you just tell Liara to be positive so that things might turn out better?_" Tali asked

"No."

"_I think you did_," Tali said.

"I didn't. You misheard me."

"_Ah, Shepard really __does__ have a heart,_" Tali said sweetly, making a huggy-motion.

"Laugh it up, quarian," Shepard said with a roll of her eyes. The vehicle gave a lurch as it started to trundle out onto the ice and move toward their long-awaited destination. That they were close... it was a relief to Shepard. Between her own insomniac habits and the fact that she had brain-surgery done unto her less than twenty-four hours ago, it was a miracle that she was still up. And honestly, she really, really wanted to sleep. Just an hour or so.

So she'd be fresh for Peak Fifteen.

Buckled in, her eyes drifted closed amidst the chatter of her squad – _her_ squad – and she drifted off into sleep.

* * *

Eyes opened at the sound of the door opening. He'd trained himself to know that sound well enough to have it rouse him from the deepest slumber. Not that he was a heavy sleeper at the best of times. "What is it?" he demanded, as he sat up, blinking away the fatigue.

"There is news from the War, Avatar Sajuuk," Ovar said, his tone... unkind. "And none of it is good."

* * *

Secondary Codex Entry (History): AVALYNN

_Born roughly ten thousand years before the asari discovered the Citadel, Avalynn was an Ardat Yakshi of terrifying biotic power and overwhelming of personality. Many of the current strictures of control over the sufferers of Thae'ir Syndrome stem directly from the reign of Avalynn the Foul, and many of the societal factors which shape day-to-day asari living also descend from an utter rejection of her hegemony._

_Avalynn rose to power swiftly, using her charisma and her biotic power to first dominate and command a city-state of Serrice, then began to spread her influence over the next century to every city-state on the continent. Not only was Avalynn the only asari in history to rule over a continental power, she also, briefly was the sole ruler of the whole of Thessia. However, her rule came with a heavy cost; as an Ardat Yakshi, her hunger only grew with the authority she held. In the beginning, she had a fresh victim every day. By the time she was in her Matriarch years, she scythed through a conservatively estimated hundred sacrifices a day. Considering her capacity to control the minds of those around her, and her ability to annihilate an entire city with nothing but her own biotics if necessary, she held Thessia in a grip of terror and bloodshed for nearly a millennia._

_While Avalynn's biotic power was, without dispute, the greatest that any living being had ever attained, her control was not absolute; a small sect of monks dedicated to the faith of the Athame Doctrine, which had long fallen out of favor for the Asar faith and the Siari philosophy which evolved from it, militarized against Avalynn, waging a guerilla war against her. It took almost a century of constant fighting, with the Athamite Justicars sacrificing themselves the instant they felt themselves falling under Avalynn's control to keep the battle from falling from within, before the final blow was dealt which crippled Avalynn's rulership._

_The death blow came, surprisingly, from the Prothean Cache which was located buried under Serrice. The Justicars discovered the uppermost levels of the old Prothean ruins in a desperate attempt to find some wisdom of their Goddess to help defeat the powerful Ardat Yakshi, but they instead discovered what is historically agreed to be a small anti-matter bomb. The weapon was smuggled out of Serrice and into Avalynn's palace in Armali. The plot to kill Avalynn was almost thwarted by Avalynn herself capturing the Justicar responsible for detonating the weapon, but using what little Prothean technology they had recovered, the Justicar was able to activate the weapon, and her quotation upon doing so is disputed but commonly agreed to be 'Find peace in the embrace of the Goddess'._

_The bomb destroyed roughly half of Armali, and still didn't manage to outright kill Avalynn, but in her weakened state, the Justicars which remained were able to behead her. Her head, which doesn't even appear entirely asari, remains in Justicar possession, embalmed in their High Monestary. The Justicars remained a present force in asari culture ever since. Ironically, had anybody delved any deeper into the Prothean Cache than they had, they would have discovered the Prothean spaceship which launched asari to the Citadel roughly eight thousand years early._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	12. Noveria, Part 2: Mother

"I grow tired of your lies and I grow even more tired of your foolishness," Sajuuk railed at the hologram which was projected before him. He thrust out a finger toward the Stranger, who smirked smugly at him. "Your faith in your insane task will only see the Crucible destroyed, and all hope of the Empire surviving destroyed with it! I will not allow this to happen, not as long as there is blood flowing in my veins."

"You offered that same statement almost half a year ago," the Stranger pointed out with a chuckle. "And what have you managed to achieve in your misguided attempt to destroy the Reapers? Nothing. Worse than nothing, in that you have wasted lives, and wasted allies. If you had only listened to me, none of this would have happened. All of those lives lost, wouldn't have been. They would have been ascended toward perfection."

"Your perfection is a twisted reflection of what the Harbinger has forced into your mind. I should not be surprised if when I finally come to kill you, I find you laying at its feet like the cur you are!" Sajuuk railed.

"This doesn't have to end in bloodshed," the Stranger said. When he spoke again, his voice was quite a bit louder, so that it echoed throughout the ship. "Any who help the Stranger to gain control of the Crucible will be ending the war in victory. Isn't that what you all want?"

"Silence your lies!" Sajuuk snapped. "My crew knows better than to heed them."

"Perhaps not all," the Stranger muttered thoughtfully, his four eyes blinking in rhythm.

"What do you mean?" Sajuuk demanded.

"Oh, I'm sure you'll find out," the Stranger said with a smirk. He leaned toward Sajuuk, which made the Avatar direly angry that he couldn't somehow punch that traitorous Prothean right through his hologram. "Think hard on what I offer you, Sajuuk. I can give you the Catalyst. You know it won't work without the Catalyst."

"If you have found it, then so shall I," Sajuuk promised.

"I wouldn't be so sure of that," the Stranger said cryptically. Another smirk came, though. "But if it lets you live in hope, so be it. The Empire will see things my way. The heedless and reckless deification of the Avatar can only go so far, before the people start to wonder if perhaps... just _perhaps_... the Avatar is not so infallible as we have been lead to believe. And when that day comes... they will find someone with a far better plan. Mark my words, Avatar. You stand at the threshold of a new age. You can either be a part of a _new_ Empire... or you can be left behind."

The orb projecting the image let out a descending whine as the hologram folded in on itself, before there was a harsh zap and a stink of ozone as it destroyed itself. As usual, the Stranger wasn't even brave enough to let his electronic messengers live. Sajuuk looked up to Ovar, who had been standing mute nearby throughout the whole exchange. "You have something on your mind?"

"Not important," Ovar gave his head a shake. Sajuuk stared at him for a moment, then pressed the button which connected him to the pilot. Given the mostly saucer-shapes of Prothean crafts, one was never too far from the center; the helm was actually the only part which was distinctly separate from the hub of the CIC. Mostly because, in the event of decompression, it needed to stay strong enough to fly away.

Sajuuk looked to the other hologram in the room, displaying the world they were standing on. The rarest of the rare, it was a garden world with two suns. It was also one of the only major Prothean planets left. "We have to reach the Cradle. That is where the Stranger found his information; there could be no other."

"_We can lift off in ten minutes. We just have final preparations to undertake_," Lampha said from the helm, her voice still tinny for the distance.

"Do them swiftly," Sajuuk instructed. He then stomped toward the elevator which headed to the upper and lower floors, its face opening to the hall which lead to Lampha's domain. She was, as always, flying her fingers across the green haptic displays. She was good at her job, and stayed on task. That was more than he could say about much of his squad. "Hrm. These lifts always take so long."

"You could just change their speed," Kija said from where she stood near the hallway's entrance.

"Change one thing, you change everything. I am not so brash," Sajuuk said. Kija, though, just folded her four arms over her chest with a roll of red eyes. The door opened, and Wex was within. Notably, he was wearing his full battle armor, and the pseudo-feathers which made up what a ditakur or oravore would call 'hair' were standing practically on end in a grey crest.

"Wex?" Sajuuk asked, a little confused.

Doubly so, when Wex raised that cannon, once built and crafted for ditakur hands, now jury-rigged to fire in the fingers of a Vaal, and blasted an explosive bolt toward Sajuuk's chest. Sajuuk, though, hurled himself away, colliding with Kija and sending both rolling to the ground. Lampha rose from her chair, her four eyes wide and alarmed. "Wex, what are you do–"

She was cut off, when Wex almost casually raised his shotgun toward her, and used it to unmake her face. "Did you _really think_ I wouldn't find out what you did?" Wex's voice was uncharacteristically low, and utterly full of wrath. He flicked a hand, and his Omnitool glowed green on his arm.

"_You are aware that if the Vaal are given full and proprietary access to the Iron Womb, they will no longer need to remain a client race._"

"_Perfectly,_" Sajuuk's recorded voice answered.

"_So you see the reasoning behind our decision. The Vaal __must__ remain dependent on us. Let them think what they want. But remember where your true priorities – your true loyalties – lie._"

Kija blinked in confusion, as Wex started to stalk toward them. Crewmen behind the two of them began to open fire, but the indomitable armor which made Wex a force to be reckoned with in battle at Sajuuk's side was equally effective at nullifying attack when arrayed against him. Another blast, and one of the Prothean soldiers was torn in half by the late Tunu's cannon.

"Where did you get that recording?" Sajuuk demanded as he kipped to his feet, ducking behind the edge of the holographic tank. Kija started edging the other direction.

"I'm a _Vaal_, you idiot! Do you really think you can send anything short of QEDC without me intercepting it? Did you _really think_ I couldn't decrypt it?" Wex shouted. He pointed his shotgun at Sajuuk once more. His face pulled into absolute wrath. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"

"You are deluded," Sajuuk said. "I have no reason to betray you. Given all we have been through, what would I stand to gain?"

"All we've been through is ashes!" Wex screamed, his voice taking on a sort of rattle when he did, and he let out a blast of high-velocity metal which shattered some of the projectors making the holographic planet. He got a furious look of focus on his face, though. "Although, considering that history, I will do you one favor. I'll shoot you in the face so that it'll end quickly!"

Sajuuk had to bound away as Wex took another shot. This one, he didn't quite escape, and the impact of it tore through his kinetic barriers and sent shards of agony through his chest where the metal dug into flesh, and deeper. The impact of it sent him to the floor, which was fortunate, since it meant Wex couldn't shoot at him again.

"And before you die, I want you to know; I've told all of the Vaal how you betrayed us. They're throwing down tools from every ship in the Empire," Wex said, rounding the corner, where the Avatar was crawling backward. The enraged Vaal pointed that shotgun down at Sajuuk. "If _my_ people have to go extinct, Sajuuk, then _so do yours_!"

Sajuuk stared up at Wex, clutching where he bled. "It doesn't have to be this way, Wex."

"I was a fool to believe you, that you actually gave a damn about my species. That you were a friend," Wex spat as he talked, his eyes having not blinked since he put a fist-sized hole through the pilot's head. But when the crack of gunfire sounded again, it was not Sajuuk who felt it. The blue tinge of mass-effect fields surrounded Wex, and he lurched forward a step, before spinning swiftly. Another crack, and this time, blood burst from his back, and he staggered backward almost onto Sajuuk. Only by Sajuuk's quick reflexes did he get himself on his feet, and pull his side arm on the gravely wounded Vaal. Kija was approaching, a massive anti-materiel rifle being held in all four arms.

Wex, though, spat a gobbet of blood onto the floor, and slowly raised his shotgun at the Avatar. "I... know... what you did... Sajuuk..."

Sajuuk put one more bolt of plasma into the high chest of the Vaal, above his gorget, right where his shoulders met his neck. Internal decapitation. Without any signals passing from his brain to his body, the alien collapsed to the floor. His mouth still worked, though, and those feathers on his head continued to twitch and flutter. "And I hope that it gives you some comfort that I did it for the glory of the Prothean Empire," Sajuuk told the Vaal. He then pounded the intercoms button on the wall.

"Sajuuk, what just happened here?" Kija asked, still stunned by what had transpired even if she proved her capability – and more importantly her loyalty – when it transpired.

"Something inevitable," Sajuuk said. "Doctor Ushal, there are wounded in the CIC. Also, tell the quartermaster to prepare coffins. Not for Wex. He will enter space as a traitor should, with nothing to his name."

Sajuuk couldn't see, but could _feel_ Ovar's glare on his back, as he moved toward the rear of the ship.

…

The thunk of the ship suddenly lurching as though it had hit something jostled Shepard enough that even her desperately sleep-deprived brain couldn't continue the dream. Good gods, the more she remembered about Sajuuk, the more of an asshole he seemed. And the most unsettling part was, she could understand a lot of his decisions. She'd used that same kind of logic herself.

Now, she had a taste of what it could lead to. Alenko was right. Cutting corners cost a lot more than she'd have predicted. Shepard leaned forward against her restraints. "What was that?"

"A few geth, Commander," al'Wahim said from the driver's seat. "Easily dealt with."

"You didn't wake me for geth?"

"As I said, they were few, and you seemed to need the rest," the gunnery-chief said over her shoulder.

"That's not your call to make."

"As you were insensate, it indeed was," she countered.

"_Technically, it was Kaiden's, but he agreed with Asha_," Tali piped up. Shepard leaned to one side and slid open the shutter which was used to protect the viewing port at the rear from falling rocks. She squinted through the driving snow, and beheld... more than a few geth, and all of them flattened.

Shepard turned to al'Wahim. "I thought you didn't like running over things while you were driving?" she asked sardonically.

"They gave me little option," al'Wahim said. And then, she had a small laugh. "And I do admit, it was somewhat gratifying."

"I'll make a proper driver out of you yet," Shepard promised. "How long until Peak Fifteen?"

She was answered as the vehicle suddenly became noticeably darker, as it passed into a place carved into the rock of the mountain. Smooth, hard stone, but with noticable drifts of snow in it.

"It is not 'how long until we arrive?'," Liara said, where she sat nervously twiddling her fingers, "...rather it is 'what do we do now that we are here?'"

* * *

**Chapter 12**

**Noveria, Part 2: Mother**

* * *

The transition between the absolutely frigid exterior and the relatively balmy interior smashed a wisp of condensation across Liara's visor immediately, which the visor immediately wicked away. She'd said so before, and would say so again, but this armor was awesome. Kaiden raised his Omni and waved it a few times. "_I'm reading O2 at breathable levels, although its only at 280K so it's a bit brisk_."

"_Helmets at discretion_," Shepard said from ahead, where she walked behind her rifle. Liara's pistol also sat a great deal more easily in her hand than it had in any of their fights before this one. Asha pulled hers off immediately and let it dangle back at her hip, keeping her eyes ahead of her the whole time. She shivered only a moment. Liara wondered what that was like.

"Final bets?" Nilsdottir asked.

"_I thought I already won with 'geth'_."

"Nobody was betting against you, Tali. Genophage cure, nefarious purposes."

"Mad AI."

"Still going with mind control, Commander."

"Rachni," Liara piped up.

"Oh, come on. At least take this seriously," Shepard muttered, although to the squad in general or to Liara in particular, she couldn't immediately say. And she didn't have time to clarify, because she dropped to a knee, raising one fist to her side. Liara almost continued forward before she realized the context of that motion, and went still herself.

"Movement," Kaiden confirmed. His Omni folded out, and he quickly ducked in behind a large crate. "I'm reading three heat signatures, big ones. Some heavy EM. Krogan and geth."

"Easy money," Jackie said.

"Don't go spending it yet," Shepard said. "Flank and tank?"

"Hell with that. I'll just crush 'em," Jackie offered.

"Did you forget how strong their shields were last time?" Tali asked.

"Fuck, I'll crush 'em anyway!" she said, and kipped out of cover. "Hey, shit for quads! I got your genophage right 'ere!"

Shepard sighed for just a moment as Jackie finished her lewd gesture by glowing blue, and then rose to the biotic's side, Liara continuing the wing-out formation, forming perfectly so that Asha could wedge into hard cover for easy shots... And at this point Liara had a moment of concern as to just how much of Liara Shepard was getting considering the amount of Shepard Liara was getting. That moment passed, as the Krogan all let out bellows and raised their weapons. Their bellows were cut off by a biotic thud as Jackie's sudden acceleration slammed her against two of them, sending them rolling down the hallway, their bodies, each a tonne in armor, crushing the lesser geth which walked with them.

Shepard started firing, her shots spraying along the geth which were already moving to try to outflank the flank. Rockets started to streak forward, which was Liara's area of speciality. She reached forward and let her own neurons sing, and a rippling blue barrier was born between one side and the other, one which the missiles could only explode against. It was taxing, but she did just about everything biotically if she could get away with it. Why walk across the room when you could just levitate your tea to you? Efficiency, it was said, was simply well-planned-out laziness. Said by her, of course, but still said!

"Press!" Shepard shouted, and their line began to advance, moving around the crates which littered the bay, using their bulk to block shots, and give back far more than they'd taken. Liara, though, found herself watching one krogan in particlar, who wasn't engaged in a four-on-one against Jackie – incidentally, those four were losing – and had instead focused on Shepard. It pulled a weapon from its back which looked like it belonged on the Mako, and pointed it in Shepard's direction. Liara bounded into the line of fire, and rooted her feet.

The crash of the projectile promptly uprooted her and sent her flying, smashing her against a box full of desiccated food. Her armor was beeping at her that her kinetic barriers were perilously close to overloading. It also cheerily reminded her in small text in the corner of her visual field that it was not rated against naval ordnance. Oh, it was _on_.

Liara couldn't say she understood how Jackie got her biotic fields to hurl her like they did, but she wasn't a slouch at moving biotically. She gave herself a push, and sank her weight ahead of her, the space before her rippling as she essentially plummeted straight forward, into a gravity well she generated as she moved. She aimed herself directly at the massive, completely armored krogan, and landed, both feet first, with a biotic kick.

That kick felt like she'd tried to punch her house when she was seventeen. He didn't budge more than a couple of centimeters, whereas Liara dropped on her back to the floor. She stared up at the helmeted krogan, who she was sure was staring down at her in incredulity. "This is the part where you fall down," she offered. The krogan stared a moment more, then raised a fist to slam down onto her sternum. As she liked the current shape of her sternum, she rolled out of the way.

Even before she stopped moving, she cast out a hand, and a bolt of compressed kinetic force, a Kick, as it was more colloquially called, smashed into the krogan and he lost his grip on that cannon, staggering back a few meters, but still managed to hold his ground. A glance aside showed that Shepard had taken to using one hand to electrocute geth who stood in her way, and then her other to blast it with her sidearm when their shields inevitably overloaded.

The krogan regained his balance, and then _he_ started to glow blue. "_Don't pick a fight with somebody who's been doing this for centuries, whelp,_" the voice came out of the helmet, condescending and smug. And when he rocked forward with his fist, it was to a cascade of blasts which sent cargo flying in every direction, the drifts of snow which must have blown in from time to time before slowly melting raising back up and drifting in chaotic whorls. Liara could see that if she got popped by that, it was going to hurt, armor or no. So she slammed her fist down, and sent her own shockwave into his shockwave. As she had somewhat expected, the two met roughly three meters ahead of her, and the floor exploded there, sending concrete raining upward into the roof before clattering back down. She looked back at her opponent, a smirk on her face, as she readied for her next move, but the krogan had already readied _his_.

Even as he kipped aside under a stairwell, a distortion of space slammed into her chest, and the armor warned her sternly that repeated exposures to biotic distortion effects would cause long-term degredation of the armor, which did not fall under warranty. She made a mental note to finally getting around to shutting off the armor's function-tutorial if she survived this.

The Warp hurt. She knew that from talking to anybody who'd ever been afflicted by it. Only that unusual ability maintained by the Justicars or the free-agents of the drell could be said to be more tortuously unpleasant. If it was worse than this, then it was terrible indeed. She hissed with the pain of it, like a hundred thousand tiny wires giving her hot and painful electric jolts every few miliseconds, but she pressed through it with a fortitude she was certain she wouldn't have had if she'd been so struck even two months ago. She started running, a punt of kinetic energy giving her a bit of a boost to get started.

He flicked out with another of those biotic shockwaves, but she instantly gave herself a punt to the side, deftly leaving its path just before it reached her. Lucky she had. If this krogan knew anything about biotics, he'd know how to get them to detonate. Of course, that was an arrogant thought for her to hold; in actuality, biotic detonations were a fairly new technique, discovered by the volus only a few centuries ago, and never popularized, but she had a feeling that they should have been much more omnipresent than they were. And the whole point moot, because it didn't happen to her. Which was good.

Liara also made a mental note to stop thinking about biotic history while engaged in life-or-death fights.

She reached the foot of the krogan, as he was swinging down with a terrible blow of his own, his shotgun forgotten on his back. He didn't need it, honestly. His mistake. As that fist lowered, Liara rose up a bit swifter, and raked her hands close, a squeezing motion that swept inward. As she did, the krogan's fist slowed, then stopped completely, as the massive biotic was trapped inside an impenetrable biotic field of her making, held in Stasis for as long as she desired.

"Where is my mother!" Liara demanded.

"_Suck my quad_," the krogan replied. "_I'll even open it up to make it easy for you._"

Liara calmly considered her next question. No, wait, that isn't what she did at all. What she _actually_ did was bring up her gun to the krogan's chin, her eyes flashing in outrage that wasn't entirely her own. "I am a very patient person much of the time. It would behoove you to not attempt to alter my nature!"

"_You're not going to win_," the krogan answered. Liara's outrage faltered a bit. Behind her, the fight had actually swung against Jackie for a moment, as the geth managed to put a lucky shot into her unarmored leg so she had to bound off to gel herself. Tali, though, had taken up the slack, pulling the water from every drift and patch of ice, and had progressed from bludgeoning the krogan with it, to forming icy knives to cut geth to component bits with it, all the while moving like a dancer to a lost and forbidden tune. "_Saren has shown me the truth. All you're doing is wasting your effort. You'll die tired, lost, and alone, before the glory of what he's going to achieve._"

Liara backed away a step, her gun still levied at the krogan. And those eyes went wider, when she saw his other hand. Not reaching for his shotgun, as she'd assumed. Priming a grenade. "What are you..."

"_FOR SOVEREIGN!_" the krogan shouted, and with a pulse of blue light, he managed to push against his restraints, her Stasis field, just enough to press the button, and the grenade started to flash with warning light. Liara had to hurl herself around a support pillar with two consecutive punts of kinetic force to escape the blast, which sent cracks spreading around the surface which she now faced, stopping just before they converged before her nose.

Liara blinked a few times, and then looked out to where Asha and Kaiden were trying to get an angle on a few geth holdouts. She flicked a hand toward that barricade, and it floated out of the way, giving both clear shots on the geth, before they too were pulled into the singularity. She looked around. A glance found roughly half of a geth, crawling into some sort of drainage ditch. Liara walked over to it and put a few more bullets into its back.

"Are we clear?" Shepard asked, her red hair leaking out of the bun it was tied into. Alenko glanced first forward, then down to his Omni.

"No contacts, Commander."

"Anybody hurt?"

"Fuuuuuck," Jackie's answer was clear and decisive.

"Need to turn back?" Shepard asked.

"Fuuuuck no," she answered.

"Good. Stop whining," Shepard said. "Liara, you still standing?"

"I seem to be alright, Commander," she reported, and started up the ramp before the others. Fighting... it seemed a lot easier than it had been before. Her instincts were kicking over to 'fight' instead of 'flight'. She wasn't weighed down by indecision. She just acted. But she didn't know with surety why she was acclimating this quickly.

Of course, she thought with a glance cast back to the quarian who was excitedly and quietly conversing with the Avatar at the foot of the ramp, it might simply be that Liara qualified as a 'late bloomer'. Some of her 'friends' from high-school were already established mercenaries or huntresses, after all. Tali seemed to be acclimatizing to these circumstances swiftly enough. Perhaps all simply went through an adjustment period. One that Liara honestly had not seen coming.

Better to think that, than to think that some of the darker aspects of Shepard's personality were starting to couple with her own. Mother had warned her about joining recklessly with others, that it could have dire consequences. Liara simply assumed that Mother meant venereal diseases.

Liara turned the corner, and found a bunch of automated turrets ahead of her. She let out an 'eep' which belied all of her consideration of self-as-badass and ducked back around the corner. Then, she peeked, then stared. "Commander?" she asked.

"What is it, Liara?" Shepard said, starting to stride toward her. Liara glanced back, then pointed 'round that corner ahead of her. Shepard joined her, and gave a frown when she saw what Liara had. Turrets, yes, automated, yes, active, yes.

But facing the wrong way.

Tali enunciated that question most clearly, in much the same terms as Liara had thought it. She glanced back at the befuddled quarian. "I do not believe they _are_ facing the wrong way," Liara said. She looked at them for a moment longer. "Somebody within wants to keep whoever is inside in, more than they want to keep outsiders out."

* * *

"Anybody have any idea A) why this place is completely abandoned, and B) why the turrets are pointing in instead of out?" Shepard asked as she walked around those same turrets, in the wake of Tali hacking and shutting them down.

Tali shook her head, staring at her Omni. "_That's the strange part. The targeting IFF has been calibrated to fire on anything warmer than the floor. Those turrets would have shot at flies, if there were any here._"

Kaiden rubbed the chin of his helmet, before unfastening it and letting it dangle back on his hip like al'Wahim did with her own. "Tali, could you look into their network for system-wide alerts?" he asked.

She nodded, and then seemed to frown inside that helm – Shepard was definitely becoming quite the expert on quarian body-language, it seemed – before looking up to Shepard. "_The entire facility is locked down, under Code Omega protocol. It won't be lifted until the Hot Labs are purged by an antimatter bomb_."

"Yeesh. Wonder what they managed to fuck up so badly that it'd pull that kind of response," Nilsdottir muttered.

"Could be a formality," Shepard said. She paused, leaning to press an ear against the door ahead of her. "I can hear geth in there," she said. Tali glanced at her Omni. "They must be shielded. We breach in five. Four. Three..."

On the unspoken one, Shepard did not so much open the door, as grab it and throw it from its mooring. It smashed straight forward, clipping a Destroyer which was stationed dead ahead, and threw the other platforms for a loop. Shepard bounded forward, slamming down a foot which popped a pillar straight up 'twixt the legs of a nearby geth, sending it slamming into the ceiling before landing on the ground. It was instantly trying to raise itself once more, but Shepard was faster, walking close and putting her gun inside the bubble of its kinetic barriers, and filling that platform full of high-velocity metal.

With the Destroyer trapped long enough under that door to leave it at Nilsdottir's mercy, the breach turned into an absolute rout very, very quickly. Al'Wahim was the last to get a kill, putting a stream of shots through a geth which had almost gotten the drop on Kaiden while he was distracted. Close one.

"Alright, what have we got?" she asked.

"_One Destroyer, twelve general platforms,_" Tali related. "_This must have been a reconnaissance force. Otherwise, they would have sent missile-launchers_."

"Hey, let's not tempt fate. I mean, is it just me, or is getting harder and harder to kill these things?" Nilsdottir asked, where she'd broken out in a sweat despite the cold. Tali, though, pulled Shepard's attention to herself.

"_Why would the geth need to run recon?_" the quarian asked.

"...because they didn't know what they were going to find," Shepard answered.

"Shepard, did you hear that?" Liara asked. Shepard frowned at her. But a moment later, she heard something as well. A scuttling sound.

"Guns out," Shepard said, and the group backed into a ring, eyes panning across the low, half-defunct room. Shepard could only see white-walls, overturned tables... Rooms on an 'upper floor', which currently slumped down onto the lower one, were just prefabs locked into the rock. And that scuttling, it was getting louder.

"There," Kaiden said, and all guns turned his way, but none could see anything.

"No, there!" Liara called, and all weapons once again changed facing, trying to track something which was making itself known, but not well enough to shoot.

"Come out, or we're going to find you," Shepard called into that scuttling. "You don't want us to _have_ to find you."

There was a moment of silence.

And then, Tali started shrieking. Her blood-curdling screams pulled everybody's attention to a vent, which had been melted away in a matter of moments, and now spilled forth a vomit of small brown arachnid creatures. Tali's shotgun started going off, wild and poorly aimed not managing to hit a single one of those creatures as the quarian tried to climb _on top_ of Alenko. When the first one got pegged by al'Wahim and it burst into an obvious caustic acid, Shepard figured that Tali might have a good idea on that. All hands, board the lieutenant.

For reasons of poorly timed humor, Shepard found herself smiling as she cast out a hand, and let her fire do the work that Tali's shotgun had so blatantly failed. The scuttling creatures let out a squeal, which in turn made Tali shriek all the louder, before running back into the vent, lest they be set on fire.

"Tali, you can get off of Alenko, they're gone," Shepard said, still looking at the bizarre scene of a bemused Alenko with a quarian half-way between a piggy-back and outright standing on his shoulders.

She glanced to one side, and then shrieked again, and with one hand blasted her shotgun. And again, to a burst of caustic acids. Shepard turned and saw that they were indeed coming out of the vents. All of the vents.

"Pull in!" Shepard called. "Jackie! Warp bubble!"

"Really?" she asked.

"Turn it inside out, first," Shepard said.

"I don't know how to do that!"

"_THEN JUST SHOOT THE GODSDAMNED THINGS!_" Tali roared from where she fired until her shotgun overheated, then stole the one from al'Wahim's back and fired that one red as well. Shepard, though, was busy trying to keep an arc of fire ahead of her, cutting off the scuttling masses. The ones that got close, spat that same acid at the troupe, but they couldn't get more than a meter with that gobbet, enough distance that they could be kept at bay.

Tali was still screaming, as she pulled the water from outside the window, and smashed it in. The room instantly dropped by about twelve degrees, and the howl of the wind muted by the relative shelteredness of this room nevertheless smote into Shepard's ears, even as the cold made them start to hurt. Tali then took that water, compressed it into ice as fast as a thought, and laid about with an icy hammer, smashing the acidic bugs with panicked abandon.

"They've got to run out eventually," Alenko said, as he took pot-shots at those things with his side arm, even as his biotic Kicks were mashing them into pulp. Shepard could see that Liara's end was holding up well, because there was a constellation of them orbiting a Singularity of her making, while she kept a wary eye out for others.

The tide seemed to ebb, the creatures letting out terrified screams, and racing back to the vents once more. Shepard breathed deeply for a moment. "Alenko... rig your sensors to detect body heat. Anything above two eighty K."

"Aye aye, Commander," Alenko said. He then gave a shudder, and looked at the window which Tali, in her panic, had essentially torn down. "We should get out of this room. It won't take long to equalize temperatures."

"The man speaks sense," Shepard agreed.

"It _is_ very cold," Liara agreed, but unlike the others, she wasn't shivering already. Must have been the armor. Tali, though, was standing with her hands on her thighs, and breathing deeply.

"Mind telling me just what the hell _that_ was?" she asked, a bit confused even as she was mildly amused.

Tali looked up at her, and gave a shudder, utterly divorced of the sensation of cold. "_I don't like spiders_," she said.

"Why? You've got a suit to keep them from getting onto you. No such luck here," Shepard said, and motioned Tali to follow, as they moved toward the exit up and ahead.

"_It's... a long story. I don't like spiders_."

"Come on, you've faced plant zombies with a lot more composure than that," Shepard pointed out.

"And you avoid elevators as though they were Tali's spiders. You are nobody to judge," al'Wahim pointed out. Shepard leveled a glare at the woman, even though she was right.

"Fine. But if you keep breaking down like that any time you see a bug, we're going to have to reconsider our squad arrangements," Shepard said. Tali nodded, but remained silent. They'd almost reached the top of the 'ramp' which circled the room, when Alenko gave an alarmed yelp. Shepard glanced back at him. "What is it, Alenko?"

"Heat, ma'am. Coming this way. Fast."

"Another swarm?" she asked, setting fire above both of her hands.

"Bigger."

There was a thud in the ventilation shaft which ran under the floor, and with a dual shriek of tearing metal and organic wrath, something large, brown, and alien heaved itself into view right in Shepard's face, before snapping at her with some sort of clawed tentacle. It took everything Shepard had in terms of reflexes to get out of the way, and the second snap was only warded by her grabbing it before it could slam through her.

"_GIANT SPIDER! GIANT SPIDER!_"

"WE KNOW, TALI!" Shepard shouted, but even in that slim amount of time, she was pushed backward by the thing, as it tried to crawl onto her. Its mouth, a star-shaped hell of jagged teeth and black maw beyond, flared and snapped, trying to rip into her. Instead, it found itself ripped apart, as the entire squad lit up. But it was the shotgun blasts which seemed to do the most harm, tearing its flesh apart and sending it sideways, its advances toward Shepard's armor growing weaker with every blast.

Finally, after what seemed like at least five minutes of constant struggle – but was actually closer to fifteen seconds – Shepard managed to roll the thing over, and get its tentacles away from her, before she smashed down with a fist, and with it, flame. It bathed the head of the 'giant spider' as Tali had so eloquently put it, and the thing let out another squeal, this one of pain. She didn't stop, though, until the tentacle in her other hand fell limp. She pushed away, standing with her back to the rail, and pointed.

"What the _fuck_ is that thing?" she asked. Alenko, the most likely to know, could only shake his head in utter bafflement. Tali, though, walked up, and shot it twice more with her shotgun. Shepard frowned at her.

"_Making sure,_" she said.

Shepard panted, her breath clouding ahead of her mouth, and her sweat starting to freeze to her face. "Whatever that thing is, we have to assume there's more of them. Sorry, Tali," she said with a shrug.

"_Oh, Keelah..._" Tali said hopelessly, her head hanging. But she did follow, as they moved further into the Peak Fifteen facility.

* * *

Shepard strode off of the lift with barely so much as a glance, which had Tali a bit confused. She had expected that Shepard would have demanded to find a manual path, rather than take the elevator, but it didn't phase her in the slightest. The whole way up, Tali was exchanging glances with Liara and Kaiden, and both seemed as baffled as she. The doors opened up, and a much more pristine hallway opened ahead of them. She walked out into the room, and looked at the banks of servers built into the walls and portions of the floor. "A backup power unit," Tali said. "It doesn't look so badly damaged. It just needs to be turned on again."

"Is everything here that is needed for such an operation?" Liara asked.

"As long as the power-nodes are intact... which they are," Tali confirmed on her Omni, "it's just a matter of activating the VI core."

"Good, so we can..." Shepard said, walking forward, but pausing. She slowly pulled her rifle from her back. "Did you hear that?"

There was a tiny chirpy-squealing which filtered into Tali's suit, and her shotgun practically teleported into her hands, held in a shaking grip. "...oh you've got to be kidding me," Tali's voice was very small. But it became very, very big as a wave of those things surged up from the vents and from around the VI core, scuttling toward them like acidic spiders.

Tali's screaming probably drowned out the shotgun blasts, which only by their spreading nature ever struck those scuttling bosh'tets. The others flanked away from her, leaving her in the middle of the room, but that was mostly because Tali was rooted to the spot in terror, firing like a madwoman until her shotgun declared that another shot would see it melt. She tried to fire it again anyway, but there were only so many safety protocols which Tali could override. Thankfully, she wasn't trying to eradicate those horrible little things on her own. The others picked up the slack. It was all over in a few seconds, seconds which felt like days to a quarian with arachnophobia.

It was lucky that her suit was designed to deal with bodily wastes, because she was certain that she soiled herself.

She stood, quaking on that spot, even long after the peeping and squealing stopped, and the hissing of their blood on the floor came to a halt. The others moved ahead of her, before stopping, and turning back toward her. "Tali, are you alright?" Kaiden asked.

"Why?" Tali asked. "Why, of all things in the _rah'vasak_ galaxy, did it have to be spiders?"

"It's alright. They're all dead," Kaiden said gently. "You can move, now. They're not going to get you."

Shepard leaned around the corner that she'd passed up ahead, where the VI core plunged into the ground. "Unless you keep standing there, and then more of them might come along."

That got Tali moving.

"That wasn't funny, Commander."

"No, but it worked," Shepard said. She nodded Tali forward, and to the lift which descended into the VI core. "You know how to fix those things. So by all means, please do."

"But... what if more spiders come?" she asked, her voice was obviously small, weak, and pathetic, but she could as much change that as she could pull off her face-plate, kiss Alenko, and expect to survive.

"Tali, it's a spider. You can crush it under your boot."

"And it'll make that horrible scrunchy sound!" Tali shuddered at that. Shepard groaned and rubbed her brow.

"I don't have time for this," she muttered.

"And _we_ have time for you always avoiding elevators?" Tali pointed out, getting some nerve back. She then glanced to the side, and saw that the mainframe of the VI was indeed embedded deep, "which is why, I'm betting, you want me to go down there."

"Don't make an issue of this, Tali," Shepard said, but not nearly as acidically as she would have to just about anybody else. Tali knew that Shepard treated her... preferentially, but didn't know the specifics of why. But still, Tali was used to having to take whatever she was given and making the absolute most of it, as any quarian had to. So she crossed her arms before her chest and tapped her foot. Impatiently. And it was Shepard who broke first. "Just do it, Tali."

"What do we _say_?" Tali asked, teasingly.

Shepard gave a glare to Alenko, the only squadmate in eyeshot, and he quickly looked away. "...please."

"What was that?"

"Just go down there and fix the VI!" Shepard shouted, but it was with a blush in her freckles and the discomfort was enough for Tali to prove her point.

Tali stepped onto the lift which descended down, and hovered her hand over the button. "And _that's_ why you're not going to make fun of me over the spiders," she said, before tapping that button and riding down.

The descent was dark, and frankly a bit claustrophobic. Well, claustrophobic to a non-quarian. She, like just about every other young quarian out of the bubble, had to sleep in what amounted to coffins to save space for life-support, hydroponics, and a thousand other necessities for long-term survival in space. She puffed out a breath, which fogged up her faceplate for a moment before it cleared itself. It must have been uncomfortably cold out there. Amazing the difference a suit could make. In the darkness, though, she could see the frayed wires, the partially melted circuitry.

"_I am the fisherman, I am,_" she quietly sang to herself. "_I catch the fish and bring them back, upon the deck of a orange boat. I am the market man, I am. I sell the catch and feed the town, from out an orange stall._"

The repair was simple, simple enough that she could divert part of her mind to a song. Odd, how she hadn't ever seen a Rannochian fish. She had to assume they were the same as, say, Palavenite or Earthling fishes. Well, not Earthling fishes, because they tended to be either oversized or also partially a duck, or something. Not that she'd seen a Rannochian duck, mind you. With a quick weld, bypassing the most damaged portions, there was a momentary pop-up which asked her to redistribute power amongst a number of nodes.

"You're kidding me?" she asked. And then, with a few button presses, she got the machine to do it itself. It would take a real novice to have to do it manually. Then, there was a chime in the air, and the lights down here went up, showing that Tali was standing in the center of a small, brownish chamber. There was a second beep, and a holographic human woman appeared just in front of Tali. She took a step back so that the projection wasn't passing into the back wall.

"You look like you're trying to restart this facility. Would you like some help?" the VI asked her.

"What?" Tali asked.

"This terminal is programmed to respond to 'Mira'. Who would you be?" Tali let the silence linger. "Without authorization, I will be forced to lock down this transit point and perform a hard shut-down, for security purposes."

Tali sighed, and pressed a few more controls on her Omni, and let her little program slice through 'Mira's programming like a laser-scalpel through ice-cream.

"Welcome, _Admiral Tali'Zorah nar Rayya_, Alliance Navy. Due to the current state of emergency, Secure Access has been granted to all systems. What would you like to know?"

"Hmm," Tali said. The obvious question should probably be asked first. So she asked the others instead. "What are the biological organisms which escaped into the vents?"

"I'm sorry. I don't have any records of a biological organism licensed to be outside of the Hot Labs."

"It probably wasn't licensed. What is Peak Fifteen's current project?" Tali pressed.

"I'm sorry, that information is secured for Privileged Access users only."

Tali frowned inside her helmet. That sounded like a challenge. She flicked through a few more controls on her Omnitool. But she leaned back when she saw that there was only a select number of Privileged Access users, and the system wouldn't allow her to add another one. So she tried to pick one at random and log in as her. A beam of laser light wafted up and down Tali's body, to her confusion.

"I'm sorry, but biometric scanners detect that you are not _Huntress Gozreh Kalgarin_. System is locking out for security rea–"

Tali's eyes went wide, and she flashed across her Omni again.

"Welcome, _Admiral Tali'Zorah nar Rayya_, Alliance Navy. Due to the current state of emergency, Secure Access has been granted to all systems. What would you like to know?"

That would teach Tali to get arrogant. Even simplistic VIs could have nasty surprises from time to time, it seemed. There was a tapping from above her, and her Team-Comm came on in her helmet.

"_Are you alright down there, Tali?_" Kaiden's voice asked.

"Oh, I'm fine. Just taking me a bit longer than I expected to patch things up," Tali lied. There was another click, and a new voice joined Kaiden's.

"Well, I hope you're working fast. I don't like what I'm hearing up here," Shepard's tone was quite serious, and nowhere near the mockery it had been on their way in. It wasn't right to make fun of somebody afraid of spiders! It wasn't even really a phobia, since being afraid of those scuttling little monsters was entirely reasonable! Tali gave a purging breath, which once again fogged her face-plate, and addressed Mira again.

"Where is Matriarch Benezia T'Soni?" Tali asked.

"Matriarch T'Soni is currently in the Hot Labs."

"Now we're getting somewhere. How do we get to the Hot Labs?" Tali asked.

"ERROR. Landline connections have been severed. ERROR. Core containment is currently in shut-down mode. The tram-service is offline."

"So if I fix the connection and the core, it'll start up again?" Tali clarified.

"That is correct."

"Good. That's all I needed," Tali said.

"Very well, _Admiral_, logging you out," Mira helpfully chirped, and there was a hiss as the ceiling overhead parted, and the lift began to rise back up. Shepard was looking around, obviously following her ears to the sounds. She glanced back at Tali, and gave a nod of her head.

"The lights came back on. I assume smooth sailings?" Shepard posited. Tali shook her head.

"We've got to reconnect the landlines and restart the reactor core. Then, we can go to the Hot Labs. That's where Benezia is," Tali said.

"Good to know," Shepard said, starting to move around the upper portion of the VI core.

"Oh, and one more thing," Tali said, twiddling her fingers contritely. "There may... just _may_... be a reference to Admiral Tali'Zorah in that mainframe now..."

Shepard raised a red brow at that.

"It was the only way to keep it from locking me out!" Tali said.

"Admiral Tali. I'd like to see that," Shepard said with a mild shake of her head. Tali just stared after Shepard.

"Well, maybe _you will_!" Tali said with annoyance in her tone, and she wasn't sure why.

Shepard chuckled as she walked away, but came to a halt in sight of both the reactor and the roof. "Welp," she said to herself. She pondered a moment, then pointed at Tali. "Reactor probably needs an engineer to get started. Tali, you take... Liara and al'Wahim. Alenko, and Jack, we're heading for the roof."

"Really? It's going to be freezing up there!" Jackie groused. Mostly because of all of them, she alone wasn't wearing any real armor. Just a chestplate with some redundant shield emitters, and some armored greaves to prevent such things as stepping on one of those spiders from eating her foot.

"If it will make things simpler, I am certain I will be of more use on the roof," Liara pointed out. "After all, if you need steady hands, mine will be steadiest."

"She's right, Commander," Alenko said. "Asari don't shiver."

"Really?" Shepard asked. She then shook her head. "Fine. Liara, you're with us. Nilsdottir, you're babysitting the engie."

"_Baby_sitting?" Tali asked, indignant.

"Heh," Jackie gave as a response. "Come on, Tali. Let's go downstairs. With any luck, there'll be more of those spider-things for me to crush."

"Don't say that," Tali said, waving her hands before her as they entered the lift heading down. "That's not even funny."

The three women in the lift, al'Wahim pressed the button, and the lift began its descent. The open sides of the lift showed the rough-cut stone and ice passing on either side, sometimes bubbling out as much as two meters before coming back in. There was silence for a moment, until Tali's curiosity got the better of her.

"Jackie?"

"What?" the biotic asked, obviously dwelling on something. Tali knew enough not to dig. Well, at Jackie, at any rate.

"Has Commander Shepard always been afraid of elevators?"

"This is not a conversation we should be having," al'Wahim said a bit peevishly behind them.

"Just 'cause your family worships the Avatar doesn't mean we all have to," Jackie told the Si Wongi woman behind them. She turned to Tali, and gave a shrug. "As far as I know, she's always been like that."

"Why?" Tali asked. "I can't see any reason why it should bother her. And why _wasn't_ she bothered by the lifts here in Peak Fifteen?"

"They are much more open," al'Wahim pointed out. The two turned toward her. "I have not been blind to the Commander's foibles. She dislikes small and enclosed places. But these lifts," she briefly hazarded her hand past the railing, letting it slide along the stone as they descended, "are not enclosed. It is likely the airbender in her."

"I don't think that's it," Jackie said with a shake of her head. "While I've never fought with an airbender at my side, 'till Shepard anyway, I've been around enough of them to know that they can _handle_ an elevator. Hell, they can even handle an elevator in a power-outage. I figure Shepard'd probably shake the building down, if she was in there."

Tali let out a sigh. "Perhaps something terrible happened, in a place like that. They make her think of some tragedy some horrible injury in her past that she hasn't gotten over."

"If it is such, then it is her burden to bear unless she decides otherwise," al'Wahim pointed out. "It is not our place to gossip behind her back, nor to gainsay her choices. To us, she is the Avatar. To you, she is the Commander. Each demands a level of respect. And we do her disservice by this prattle."

"You really need to loosen up," Jackie pointed out, as she stared forward at the doors. "Find a guy, get drunk, get laid. Not necessarily in that order."

Al'Wahim looked a bit annoyed at that. "I am Si Wongi. I do not drink."

"Fei Hua. I knew a guy who put it away by the bucket!"

The elevator dinged, and Tali reached aside to clap a hand over each mouth, preventing both from continuing their snit. They both turned to her in mild annoyance as well as confusion, and she nodded to her side. "We've arrived," she pointed out.

They all moved out of the lift and into the main control area. Tali just flicked her Omni toward the VI interface in the corner, and it lit up as Mira blinked into existence. "Welcome to the Peak Fifteen Reactor Core. You seem to be reactivating the Core today. Would you like some help?"

"Where is the reaction-mass integrator?" Tali asked.

"Mass integration is located on the central column. Alert; do not activate the Reactor Core while the maintenance catwalk is extended."

"So we've got a wide-open space, in a cave, and narrow catwalks our only way of getting around," Jackie pointed out, slowly pulling her shotgun from her back.

"Yes, well, that means..." Tali began, and then trailed off. "Oh, no."

"Just keep your wits and you will survive this," al'Wahim offered, rifle in hand.

Tali was positively shaking as they moved through the airlock into the chilly chamber in which the reactor pillar was housed. The catwalks were all bolted into the blue ice, but the room wasn't as cold as she would have expected. There must have been residual heat from when the Core was last running.

"I don't see any," Jackie offered.

"That just means they're probably above us, or something," Tali said, her voice slightly mewling, despite her best efforts to the contrary. Jackie rolled her eyes, and moved forward, shotgun in hand, leading the fray. Tali in the center, where the least of them would get through. And Asha at her back. She appreciated that, quite a bit. Because every passing moment had her feeling phantom spiders crawling up her legs or dropping onto the back of her neck.

It was almost a relief when there was a crack and a hiss, and a bright red rocket streaking toward them on a grey contrail. Jackie reacted fast, and threw out both hands into a spherical biotic barrier which the rocket exploded against. Tali looked past it, and could see a fairly large number of bright red geth platforms unfolding to their feet, one of them rising to the grand stature of a Geth Prime.

"Oh, thank the ancestors, it's only _geth_!" Tali said.

* * *

"Seriously Alenko, do you have _any fucking idea_ what these things are?" Shepard asked as she waited for her rifle to cool down. A glance out of the corner of her eye saw that the gobbet of green spit which had almost struck her in the face as she was shooting was now eating through the metal.

"I'm sorry, Commander, I've never heard of anything like them," Alenko said, as he smashed out from his own place of cover, smashing one of them in the face with a biotic Kick which sent it rolling back whence it came. He pulled back into cover, and sent a glance her way. "I guess it's lucky that Tali didn't need to come up here."

"Oh, please. There's probably ten times the number of these things down there!" Shepard said. She glanced, and saw one had come closer than she'd like. She lashed out with two fists, each blasting fire at the approaching gigantic spider-like organism with armor-penetrating tentacles and acid spit. They frankly reminded Shepard a little bit of Azuli Fringe Lizards, only slightly less deadly. Krogan tended to eat those any time they could kill one. Which wasn't as often as one'd think, considering the tech-level of the Earthling krogan.

Alenko flinched at Shepard's words. "If she's a nervous wreck, we should probably have her wait in the ATV."

"She'll tough this out," Shepard said. "Tali's tough."

"We're pressing hard on her phobia, Commander, that can crack some people," Alenko said, and then leaned out of cover and sent a spray of flying metal which caused an approaching spider-thing to crumple to the floor, its faintly yellow blood mixing with that green bile and hissing against concrete. Shepard glanced back, and saw that the thing she'd barbequed, while not dead, was now lashing out blind at anything around it, including others of its ilk.

She had to lean back quickly, though, as one of them went shooting past off the ground and at remarkable velocity, before splatting against the back wall. Liara was surrounded by those things, but that didn't last long. With a thud of biotic energy...

...Ten feet. Arms cast wide. Power of a thousand lifetimes. A mandala of emerald flame upon the back...

...Shepard was shaking the momentary confusion out of her head as Liara found some way to punt herself out of the center of those spider things, and then with a flick of her hand, saw them orbiting a point of common gravitation. Shepard gave a glance to Alenko. "Feel up to it?"

"Liara, stand clear!" Alenko yelled across the distance, which Liara didn't hesitate to heed. He then cast his hand toward that singularity, and a distortion of space and gravity arced away from his hand, until it slammed into the black heart of Liara's biotics, and caused the whole thing to violently explode. The mess was extraordinary. Spider bits, everywhere. Including some on Liara.

Shepard rose up, rifle forward, and moved to the asari's side, pausing only briefly to put the blind one down with a few precise rounds. "You still intact?" Shepard asked. There was a bit of discoloration on that armor, after all.

"I... that was _disgusting_," Liara said, gingerly picking a tentacle off of her shoulder and dropping it to the floor.

"Squashing bugs often is," Shepard pointed out. "Alenko? Any signs?"

"Negative, Commander. No hostile contacts," he said. She gave a glance to Liara, and the other biotic nodded and moved to keep a watch over the spot on the roof which whistled with wind; anything trying to get the drop on them would necessarily come from there. "Shepard, I'm starting to get a bit concerned about your sleeping habits," he said quietly, even as he worked to reconnect the land-lines which were keeping them trapped on this side of the facility.

"Shepard? How informal," she said with a roll of the eyes.

He tensed for a moment at that. "Oh, I'm sorry. I must have... gotten a bad signal," he said. She raised a brow. "I mean, if there's somebody else you'd rather talk to about this..."

"I'm not sure I follow, Lieutenant," Shepard said.

"Our... young Prothean expert?" he asked, with a nod to where Liara, bored, had taken to rocking back and forth on her heels in her besmirched blue armor. "Although, I'm aware that she's older than the both of us put together. There's a bit of a lower deck rumor that she's interested in you."

"Of course she is," Shepard said dryly.

"...as more than a source of Prothean knowledge, I mean," Alenko continued. Shepard gave a frown, and glanced again toward Liara. No. Whoever thought that must have been blind. "I mean, she's a very interesting lady. Not to my tastes, but I've never claimed to be big on 'alien culture'."

"First of all, Liara is... well, she's a bit of a nut," Shepard said. "She offered to dissect my brain to figure out what parts got Prothean-itized. I'm pretty sure that her interest in me is _totally_ academic," under her breath, she added, "...a very freaky kind of academic, but still. Secondly, you're paying a lot of attention to my personal affairs," a smirk came to her lips. "Is that _jealousy_ I detect?"

"I'm just wondering if I'm stealing what few hours of downtime you get. After all, you hardly ever sleep, and you run yourself ragged enough..."

"I'm sure that there's _nothing_ between Liara and me," Shepard said simply. "And this is hardly the time to be talking about it."

"It's just that..." Alenko said, and then a grunt of strain, before there was a metallic clunk and an electric hum returned to the nodes nearby, "...talking about these kinds of things helps me concentrate on where my hands are going."

Shepard smirked at that. She made a note of 'distracting' him more often, if his hands could do that while talking about this...? It was a pleasant thought, one she filed away. After all, she didn't dare invest more than that. Liara was almost instantly leaning down toward where Alenko was getting ot his feet. "I assume that this means that the land-lines have reconnected. Should we go down to the core and rescue the other squad from their giant-spider related calamity?"

Shepard gave a very dry look to Alenko, who sighed and nodded that she probably had more of a point in this than he did, before facing her. "If nothing else, more hands makes a reactor turn on faster."

Shepard nodded, and the two began to walk to the elevator past the rocking asari. Shepard leaned toward Alenko. "Case in point," she said quietly, then cleared her throat, getting Liara's attention. "Hey, Liara? If I could dump all of my Prothean Beacon knowledge into your head, would you take it?"

Liara lit up like a light-bulb. "Really? You'd let me have all of that? Is it some sort of surgical procedure or is it a task which can be undertaken by a joining? Or did you find some _schematic_ in your memories which allows a Prothean level transmission of thoughts?"

"I was speaking hypothetically," Shepard said. Liara wilted like a dying flower.

"Oh... Well, I would... hypothetically," she said, but her tone was so disappointed. She fell in behind Alenko and Shepard, grumbling quietly to herself with dismay. Shepard gave a glance to Alenko, and he had no recourse but to shrug at that.

"You might have a point, Commander," Alenko said quietly. Shepard stepped into the lift and thumped the descent button easily, dropping them back toward the tram VI core and the tram-station beyond it, with only a short diversion to the reactor to save the wayward squad no-doubt beset by spider things.

Liara looked glum on that descent, but Alenko looked thoughtful. Watching her, being thoughtful. A long-suppressed shard of femininity basked in the attention, but Shepard suppressed that shard for a reason. Namely, basking wasn't killing, and killing was pretty much Shepard's best skill at this point. She could cavort and preen and wear pretty dresses after she was dead. Until then, there was only the mission. Although... she did like the notion of being under Alenko's... scrutiny.

Whatever else she had to think about on that line was cut off as the lift slowed to a stop, and the doors opened. She pushed off of the railing she'd leaned against and sauntered into the hall, heading toward the downward lift which lay beyond the curve of the reactor core. She had only just opened the door to the hallway beyond when she saw the quarian walking backwards toward them, talking with her hands as much as with her mouth, and Nilsdottir rolling her eyes at her enthusiasm.

"Oh..." Shepard said. "So you're alright?"

Tali turned, and after a moment, nodded. "_Of course. There were only some geth down in the core trying to turn it back on. So we killed them_."

"Some geth? No spider things?" Shepard asked.

"Well, more than some," al'Wahim said with a shrug.

"Define?" Shepard asked.

"Twenty and a Prime," Nilsdottir said. Shepard glared at Tali, who gave an innocent shrug.

"_It wasn't anything I couldn't handle,_" Tali said with confidence.

"You'd rather face seven-to-one odds against lethal killing machines than spiders?" Shepard asked flatly.

"_...yes. Because geth don't scuttle,_" Tali said. Shepard frowned at her, but her quiet disbelief was interrupted by al'Wahim pulling her rifle and pointing it straight at Shepard. Shepard instantly leaned out of the way, which probably saved her life, as a spiked tentacle lanced through where Shepard's torso had been, only to be riddled with fire. Tali, as expected, started screaming and trying to hide behind a structural strut, while Shepard wove back as the other two who were behind her had to throw themselves aside; there were two of those spider things taking up their attention. One against Shepard alone, and the biotics against the second.

Shepard ducked and weaved under its tentacles, and kipped aside as it spat out a gout of caustic vitriol at her. Still, some did land on one of her greaves and started to pit and scar the metal before she pressed her back against the door's threshold, and kicked out with both feet, causing flame to bathe the monster. That drove it back, off of the plastic portion of the flooring, and onto honest and naked metal. Even blinded by pain, the creature still managed to lash out with some accuracy at Shepard. She had to deflected away with a forearm, which hurt as though somebody'd hit her with a pick-axe, before she spun lower, and slammed her fist into the floor, clenching tight. A twist, and then a heave, and the metal warped underneath the creature, before shooting straight up and into the ceiling, a blade instantly created of titanium and bisecting the creature somewhat messily.

She turned to the sound of biotic explosions to see the two of them moving around the floating, flailing creature, constantly smashing it with Warps and Kicks, each blast sending out yet more ichorous blood and bile, until Liara let it drop to the floor, and it gave a single twitch before admitting to the galaxy that it was dead.

"Alright," Shepard said, taking a deep breath. She glanced around the corner. "That's getting a bit tiresome, Tali."

"_Yeah well... shut up!_"

With a slick thump, the other half of the creature, which had still been stuck to the titanium knife right at the ceiling slid and dropped off of the plane, dumping more green acid onto the floor in a pool more than two meters across. Tali got out from behind that pillar, and joined the others as they headed across the room. "Alenko, is there any signal from the Normandy?"

"Still baffled by the storm, Commander," Alenko said. "We almost had a signal on the roof, but I'd need to tap into a terminal to get a call out."

"I see," Shepard said. "Squad, fall in. We're one airlock away from the Hot Labs. Weapons ready, armor cycled, shields raised. Copy?"

There was a round of affirmatives, even from Tali, though hers was a lot more tentative. Thus, they stomped through the facility, toward the tram-station which now cheerfully announced that it was bringing passengers to the Hot Labs from the administration district. "I'd like to know what exactly we're looking at, here," Shepard said, and Alenko nodded. He then glanced to his Omni, and let out a grunt. "What is it?"

"There's a terminal we can use just ahead," he said. "Even just getting an Extranet connection could help us on this one."

"Lead the way," she said. While there were two doors ahead of them, she knew that one lead to the tram. He opened the other one. And when she stepped in just behind him, she immediately stopped, turned, and barred the door before the quarian could enter.

"_What are you doing, Shepard?_" Tali asked, and Liara who was standing behind the quarian also gave a confused look.

"You don't want to come in here," Shepard said. "Trust me on that one."

Tali blinked a few times, then nodded, taking a step back. Good that she did. "Al'Wahim, watch the hall," Shepard said, and the Si Wongi put her back to the far wall, keeping an eye on everything, as Tali stood outside the room looking as nervous as Shepard had seen her since Saren's tribunal. Lucky she hadn't come in. Immediately to Shepard's left, she could see the inside of the decontamination airlock. And it was _crawling_ with those spider things, with three of the big ones scuttling around amidst them.

"I've got a connection to the Normandy, Commander," Alenko said.

"Good," Shepard said. "Send us to the Extranet."

"Um, actually, could you route a call to the cargo-hold?" Liara asked.

"What? Why?" she asked.

"I have a... hunch," the archeologist said with a mild shrug. Shepard glanced to Alenko, who likewise shrugged.

"Alright, but don't take too long with this. I want to know what the hell these things are, and why there'r so many of them."

"_So many __what__, Shepard?_" Tali asked.

"Just keep staring back the way we came," Shepard said. "For your own good."

Tali positively trembled at that. But it was better than screaming.

* * *

"You've still got a problem with me, don't you?" Adeks asked, as he pushed a new tire into place on the Mako's frame. The old one had gotten splashed by Maw Spittle, and contrary to his hopes, he hadn't been able to refurbish it.

"Of course I do. You've forgotten what it means to be krogan," Wrex said from his work-bench. Adeks gave a glance to the Urdnot on the other side of the hold.

"And what makes you say that?"

"You're working on a human ship, wearing a human uniform," Wrex said. He glanced back with one red eye, and rolled it. "More or less. That doesn't speak to racial pride."

"Maybe I'm just ashamed of what the rest of my race has gotten to doing in the last six hundred years," Adeks said.

"You weren't around for six hundred years," Wrex pointed out. Adeks rose to his feet and slapped the grease off of his hands.

"Well, my five hundred were probably better spent than your thousand," Adeks said. Wrex turned to glare at him once again. "_I_ spend my time building things. Fixing things. All you ever do is break them. _I_ introduced my species to an ally the likes of which the krogan have _never had_. I watched when the first krogan was born on Earth. A Raik, born off of Tuchanka. That hasn't happened for a long time. And it was because of these _humans_ that I got to see it instead of starving to death on a deserted rock."

"So you just become a pet to the first bunch of fore-eyes which gives you five square meals a day? Pathetic," Wrex said.

"No, what's pathetic is that you're still fighting the old causes. Tuchanka is dead. It's been dying since the old Warlords put themselves into a position where the salarians dropped the genophage on 'em. It's died a slow death, and we're the only ones we can really blame."

Wrex turned, leaving his mostly complete armor on the table behind him. He jabbed Adeks with a finger into his naturally armored breastplate. "This isn't about blame, Raik. This is about the survival of the krogan species," he cast a finger up and toward the rest of the ship. "If you can only do it because somebody else takes _pity_ on us, then you're not krogan anymore. We were the bottom-rung of the food-chain on our mother planet, and yet we rose to dominate it, because we were smart, tough, and strong enough. The only way that's taken away from us is if we let it. And I see you _letting it_."

Adeks wouldn't be riled, though. "And what have you done that was so great for our illustrious species? Face it, Urdnot. All that your clan, and all that those that think like your brother ever do is kill for money, kill for pride, and kill for causes that should be long dead."

"I am not Wreav," Wrex said.

"You could have fooled me," Adeks said. Wrex growled, but he didn't seem in a head-cracking mood today.

"I tried," Wrex said, after that growl died. "I tried, and Tuchanka didn't want it. But I still remember my roots, even if you've decided to forget yours."

"Sometimes you've got to uproot," Adeks said with a shake of his head.

"Not if you want to know where you come from," Wrex said, taking a step back. "And for the krogan, where we come from is an inseparable part of who we are. Tuchanka is a crucible which shaped us, forged us. Even if it doesn't want me, I still want _it_."

Adeks scowled at the larger krogan. "You're starting to sound like you want to go back there."

Wrex stared down at Adeks, and then snorted. "You don't know what you're talking about."

He turned away, but was forestalled momentarily by a beeping from the console next to the Mako. He pointed at it. "It's probably for you."

Adeks rolled his eyes and moved to the haptic display, flicking it on. Oddly, it wasn't Pressly or Joker who was looking back at him. Rather, it was the Commander. "_...up or this is going to get annoying._"

"Commander," Adeks said with a nod. Shepard leaned back.

"_Oh. Adeks. Good that somebody picked up. What did you want, Liara?_"

"_Yes_," the archeologist barged into view, pushing the Commander aside. "_I was wondering if you could identify something for me. I thought about going to the Extranet, but this seemed like it would be both faster and more effective. Have you ever seen a creature like this?_"

The image which came on the screen was one of a number of insects, or insect-like things, which were crawling around the inside of a decontamination room. Several larger specimens also snapped and scuttled amidst them, occasionally lashing at the puncture-proof glass with some sort of tentacle. Adeks stared at it for a long moment, and shook his head. "I don't have a clue what that is, Commander."

"_Oh. Well... I guess I will just have to seek it out on the Extranet,_" Liara looked a bit disappointed. As she said that, though, one of the things just behind the asari opened its mouth wide and let out a shriek. The grumbling from Wrex on the other side of the hold ceased. "_Shepard, if you want to use this..._"

Adeks didn't hear the next word, because it was overwhelmed by the stomping of a lot of krogan directly toward him. There was a heave, and Adeks found himself hurled form his feet to land on his side on the deck plating. When he looked up, Wrex was gripping both sides of the console, his face low and no-doubt dominating their end of the screen. "Wait, Shepard!" Wrex shouted at that screen. There was a moment of pause, which Adeks used to get to his feet, and move to a spot where he could see the screen past Wrex's hump.

"_What is it, Wrex?_" Shepard's voice asked.

"Point the camera at them again," Wrex demanded. The camera shifted, and once again it showed that chamber, and the things within it. But this time, unlike Adeks, Wrex's expression was one of darkening rage. "By the Meretseger, _how is this possible?_"

"_Do you know what these things are, Wrex?_" Liara asked, leaning into view.

"I do. Grandfather talked about them. How _his_ father fought them. But they were wiped out, three thousand years ago. This shouldn't be possible!"

"_Well_?" Shepard asked, turning the camera back toward herself. "_Out with it. What are these things?_"

Wrex's expression was trapped in a snarl of utter racial outrage. "Rachni."

* * *

"What are these things?" Shepard asked. Wrex, on the other side of the call, fumed for a long moment, before he said a single word.

"_Rachni_."

Shepard blinked a few times, and then turned to Liara, who was now grinning. "No. Not one word."

"But I was right about the..."

"Nope, not hearing it," Shepard said. She turned to Wrex. "You're sure about this? You're _absolutely_ sure?"

"_I'd bet my three remaining testicles on it_," Wrex said flatly. Liara, though, frowned pensively.

"I thought it was only _two_ thousand years since the Rachni wars?" she asked, her focus far away.

"I am sorry, but she won the pool," Alenko piped in, as Wrex nodded.

"Alright," Shepard said, taking a deep breath to calm herself. "So we're fighting rachni, somehow."

"_If you want to crush the nest, kill the queen_," Wrex said. "_That's the only way you'll stop this. The rachni can't get away from that place, Shepard. It'll be spitting on the memories of billions of krogan, both who died against the insects and who rose up in their ashes_."

"Duly noted," Shepard said, and nodded at Alenko. He shut the connection, and all of them turned toward Liara. Shepard just stared at the quietly grinning asari. "How? How the hell did you know?"

"It was an educated estimation," Liara said.

"That was a pretty fucking specific estimation," Nilsdottir pointed out. Liara stopped grinning, but it hardly went away completely.

"Well, I could explain my thought processes. But if I were to do so, you would require a chair since it would take some time. Also, there is a significant chance that the rachni in there will find a way to break free and attack us before I reach any useful conclusion."

Shepard blinked at the asari for a few seconds. But then, she factored into the mental equation in her head that this _incredibly young_ asari _doctor_ had come up with a theory that the _Protheans_ were _wiped out_ by something larger and meaner than them so thoroughly that it almost erased them from the past. A theory which, at every point that Shepard could see, was absolutely correct. She sighed. "Fine. Liara wins the pool. Not like she needed the money, anyway," Shepard said.

"There was money involved?" Liara asked.

"_Shepard, why is that door bending?_" Tali asked, pointing at the decontamination room door, which the rachni within were experimentally smashing with their tendrils, as though poking for some weaker spot. Shepard glanced back at the panel before her, but it was all hopelessly complicated machinery to her.

"We've got to purge the airlock before it'll open," Shepard said. She pointed at one thing before her and tapped it a few times. Then, pounded it quite a bit harder, but it only buzzed red each time. "This says plasma-purge. Why won't it plasma purge?" Shepard asked.

"_Let me take a look at it_," Tali said.

"NO STAY BACK!" Shepard, Alenko, and Liara all shouted at the same time, each waving her back into the hallway, far away from line-of-sight to the inside of that chamber. Shepard cleared her throat. "Trust me. You don't want to come in here."

"_It can't be that bad_," Tali said with a roll of her eyes evident through her body language.

"Alenko?" Shepard said.

"I'll give it at try," the lieutenant said, squatting down and beginning to rewire its inner workings. Tali kept leaning, trying to see what he was doing, but Nilsdottir had taken to standing in the quarian's way, mostly to keep her from spotting the horrors beyond. Shepard had no desire to hear that screaming again. It had started funny. Now... now it was a little bit haunting.

"I think I've got it, Commander," Alenko finally declared, and with a happy beep, a surge of blue-hot flames surged out into the decontamination chamber, evaporating the little rachni and slowly blasting the larger ones into ashes, accompanied by a single unified shriek of terror, followed by silence. Shepard nodded as the plasma flames shut off, and the ashes were sucked out, leaving the floors stained, but otherwise clear.

"Alright," Shepard said. "Let's get to the Rift Station."

She turned that corner that Tali was standing in, and found that there were indeed some impact wounds in the metal of the door. Such, that it wouldn't open. Shepard sighed and rolled her eyes, before grabbing the metal and peeling it aside. Had there not been so many rachni in there, she'd have done that from the start. The path beyond was clear, so the others took to filling that lull in fighting a horror of the galaxy thought several millennia dead with idle conversation.

"I have to admit, Tali, I never thought that it'd be spiders which set you off," Alenko said as they rounded the corner and beheld the tram itself standing before them.

"_How could you not?_" Tali asked. "_They way they scuttle toward you on those jointy legs? Ugh!_"

"Shepard had a point, though," al'Wahim pointed out. "Why do you fear them so, when they can never touch you?"

"_You don't understand,_" she said, sitting down on the bench which ran along one wall of the tram. Shepard kept her eyes out, as she was fairly sure that _something_ was going to attack the tram at some point. "_Our suits have sensors built into them, all over them in fact. I can feel this bench under my bum, this shotgun in my hands, I can even feel the breeze of that door closing,_" she pointed out, as the doors slid shut, and the tram began to move toward the Rift Station with the squad aboard it. "_It might be electronically simulated sensation, but I can __still__ feel it._"

"And spiders?" Alenko asked.

"_...we don't __always__ have our suits on. They... find their way in,_" Tali said. She glanced up at him. "_We aren't __born__ in them, after all_."

"Gals and Alenko? Drop this," Shepard said. "If she wants to scream and panic around rachni, then she can guard the tram."

"_I won't panic_," Tali said, a bit defensive.

"We'll see about that," Shepard said. And then she moved to the front, watching as the tram continued to move forward, through the great void in the mountains.

"You look tense, Jackie. Is something wrong?"

"What? No. Nothing."

"_I think Liara's right. You don't seem yourself._"

"Did I ask you to pry into my problems? No? Good, so you can all fuck off."

"There is a lot which is remaining unsaid in this tram," Liara said, and Shepard could feel the asari staring at her back. Shepard didn't turn. She didn't pace. She just watched the far side of the rift slowly, _slowly_ approach. There was a headache that had worked its way behind Shepard's eyes, and while it wasn't at the point where it was outright distracting, she could honestly say that it wasn't her favorite thing ever. Liara was right, though. The only one who was an open book on this tram right now was Alenko, and that was because he'd made a point to be. Tali had a history which Shepard wasn't completely privy to. Jack had one even she herself wasn't completely clear on. Al'Wahim might as well be a cipher. And Liara...

Shepard wasn't sure what she felt about Liara.

Of course, all of this would be moot if her worst expectations came to pass. If Liara took one look at her mother, and decided that blood stood thicker than wine, as the saying went. Or, in her specific case, that blood stood thicker than Prothean data embedded in Shepard's brain. After all, Shepard was fairly sure that Liara had a medical procedure lined up to extract Shepard's brain the moment her heart stopped beating, if it came to that. She rubbed her eyes, trying to work out the ache which was pounding at them.

"Are you alright, Commander?" speak of the demon and it shall appear. Shepard glanced aside to see the asari standing as she was, staring forward. Even mimicking the body-language. "You do not seem well."

"Headache," Shepard said. Although, she wasn't sure why, as it wasn't any of Liara's business.

"You did suffer a traumatic brain injury only a day and a half ago," Liara pointed out. "I am surprised that you did not take any time to rest."

"I can rest after I'm dead," Shepard pointed out.

"You will probably die if you do not rest," Liara reversed. Shepard scoffed.

"What are you, now? My mother?" she asked.

Liara was quiet for a moment at that. "No. Not your mother," she said. The silence dragged on, with the murmurings of the other squadmates behind them filling the gap. "Could you tell me about her?"

"Mom?" Shepard asked. That question, asked a month ago, would have resulted in a 'go to hell'. Now, though? "She was... well, she was a typical airbender. Patient, kind, too caring by a half. Probably why she ended up with Dad. He was a street tough back on Earth, running with the Ninth Street Reds. Broke people's knees for loan-money. But Mom saw something in him. Saw the _good_ in him," Shepard hung her head. "Mom could see the good in a lot of people. Almost everybody."

"Almost everybody?"

Shepard nodded. "The only person who got under her skin was her sister. I never figured out why. She wasn't much of an airbender, you know, in terms of martial arts. Could barely glide. Couldn't throw gales worth a spit. But she had the mind for it," Shepard took a deep breath, and it came out a bit quavering, much to her surprise. "She didn't deserve to die the way she did."

"I know," Liara said.

Shepard turned, casting a suspicious eye at her. "What do you mean, 'I know'?"

Liara's eyes widened. "I meant that I know what it is like to regret something about your parents. Not that I specifically knew the grisly manner in which _your_ mother died when the batarians attacked your colony," she said, and then had a nervous laugh or three. Shepard shook her head, dismissing it. Liara paused for a long moment. "Mother used to wear yellow dresses, and carry me on her shoulders outside our house in Armali. I thought she was the strongest person in the world. I simply cannot understand how we can be in this scenario. I do not know how Mother could have been so _twisted_ by Saren."

"Keep that anger in your heart," Shepard said. "It'll keep you focused, clear headed when you face her. Because it's Saren's fault. Never forget that," she instructed. Liara nodded.

"For what it is worth, I believe that of anybody, you will be able to help Mother turn from Saren."

Shepard nodded, but she didn't feel that same faith. After all, Shepard was a soldier, not a diplomat nor a hostage negotiator. And even now, she wasn't sure which way Liara was going to jump when the shot was fired. That would be a test for a later time.

The platform came into view, and the tram slowed smoothly to a stop, opening to a slightly warmer area than had been before. In the heart of the glacier, it was well insulated from the bitter environment outside. She had half a mind to find some way to use the ice to her advantage. Only half. The lift lurched to a stop, and the doors opened, but not to what Shepard expected. Mostly because she couldn't have expected a half-dozen desperate looking people pointing rifles at her.

"Hold your fire, they're human," a bald man said as he lifted his weapon away from Shepard. Good move. Everybody else glanced at him, then back to Shepard's squad, before dropping back behind the make-shift barricade which they'd erected. He looked twitchy, like he hadn't slept in days. The others, mostly humans and a few asari, looked worse. "I didn't know what to expect coming out of the Tram Station. But you're human, so that's enough to not shoot you."

"Those things can work a train's controls?" Shepard asked with a bit of alarm.

"Hell if I know. I'm not assuming any-fucking-thing at this point," he offered a hand. "Ventralis, Aleutsk Regional Security."

"Shepard."

"Could you be a bit more specific? Not that I don't appreciate a bunch of heavily armed... what the hell is _that_ thing, anyway?"

Tali leaned back. "_I beg your pardon?_"

"That's a quarian," one of the asari said. Ventralis blinked a few times.

"Sorry. Most of us have been up for days. I haven't slept in almost a week, and the stims... make you forget things," Ventralis said.

"_Avatar_ Shepard," she clarified. His eyes widened at that.

"You really shouldn't be here. You don't know what'll happen when those things... They clawed their way out of the Hot Labs a week ago, and we haven't heard from T'Soni since. Have to assume the worst," the wired-for-sound security guard said. "The volus was the only one who got out of the labs. Then, they started hitting here. I had a lot more staff, back then..."

"I've got fire and steel, they've got teeth and acid. If they start a fight, it's their funeral," Shepard pointed out.

"And you're five..."

"_Six_," Tali said, crossing her arms peevishly.

"...against Agni only knows how many," Ventralis continued. "If you're not here to save our lives, then why are you?"

"I'm looking for Matriarch T'Soni."

Ventralis shook his head. "Down in the Hot Labs at best, and in one of these thing's stomachs at worst. She seemed like she was capable, but nobody's _that_ capable. Now clear our lines of fire because... wait, did you hear that?"

The squealing caused Tali to shrink in on herself, and bound over the crates forming a barricade in a single bound. Shepard turned and had to duck as the floor-grating was cast off of its mooring. It caught Alenko and al'Wahim across their shoulders, knocking them forward. Shepard countered as she liked to in these situations; with fire. She cast forward a pair of flaming punches, and then thrust both hands toward the rachni which was trying to cross the distance, to savage the meager barricade. Her attention was turned aside, though, when another crawled up behind the first. And then another. And another.

Ventralis was true to his medications, firing in wild but well-meaning bursts which more or less hit their targets, as well as the floor and walls around them. A distant part of Shepard's mind gave note to the fact that Tali didn't seem to be screaming right now. Possibly because she was too afraid to. Shepard turned her attention between the targets of her flame. While she could had possibly kept up three continuous blasts of fire, doing so would have rooted her in her spot, and she needed to keep mobile to keep from getting sprayed with acid. Nilsdottir, for once not hurling herself at her enemy, tried to blast at them with her shotgun, but it was little in the grand scheme.

"Alenko, get up!" Shepard shouted, as the tide of rachni – if four could be considered a tide – pressed her back, to where she was now retreating past the barricade's level. She gave a glance aside, and saw that al'Wahim was on her feet, and hauling Alenko up. She turned, only to get a blast of acid onto her chestplate. Fortunately for her, her heavy hardsuit was, if not immune to such treatment, at least a great deal more resilient than anybody else's was. Her rifle declared itself against the already burnt and shotgunned rachni, until one finally fell. Shepard twisted her arms around, gathering lightning with them, and then cast it out in a line straight through one and into the other. The bolt wasn't enough to kill them, not by a half, but it stunned them enough to break their rush. That was worth something, she considered.

Alenko, finally back on his feet, cast a glance to Liara. "Pull them in, Liara," Alenko ordered, and the asari flicked out her hand. The point of blackness opened up, and the advance was finally reversed. Ventralis and the others began to pour fire into the slowly orbiting rachni, but that wasn't the final and greatest trick. No, that came when Alenko hurled a Warp into the heart of that Singularity. Shepard hurled herself behind the barricade.

"HEADS DOWN!" Shepard ordered.

Lucky she had, and that the others were so popped out of their heads on stimulants, because the blast of the biotic fields exploding sent a spray of blood and acidic bile flying over everybody's heads and pocking the wall. Ventralis was the first up. "That was the biggest attack since yesterday. At least, I think it was yesterday. I don't know why they even bother. This place is a kill box."

"They're mindless animals," Shepard pointed out.

"No, the r..." Alenko began but Shepard silenced him with a glare.

"Anyway. Thanks for your help," Ventralis offered.

"Whatever. I'm just here for the Matriarch," Shepard pointed out.

"The path is down through the quarantine labs," Ventralis said with a nod. "They're a back-door into the Hot Labs. The main paths are sealed, but those ones... I think those ones will still be open."

Shepard waited for some other interruption, some other problem to get brought up. "That's it?"

"Yeah, that's it. I'd have preferred if you were the extraction crew, but let's face it, T'Soni's a decent boss. Even if she has been a bit screwy lately. I'd hate to see her replaced by somebody of Anoleis' choosing."

"That's not going to be a problem," Shepard said, and Ventralis perked up, but probably for the wrong reason.

Shepard nodded ahead of her, and her squad fell in. "Any injuries?" Shepard asked.

"I think I pulled something in my neck," Alenko said, rotating it and rubbing the back of it as he did.

"I'm getting really tired of killing these things," Nilsdottir muttered.

"_I want every arachnid in the galaxy to die_," Tali's voice was very low and dire.

"I will need to replace this plate. Rachni bile does not respect kinetic barriers," al'Wahim said. She then glanced to Shepard, keeping pace as they passed the security center and passed into the 'civilian' areas as noted by a hastily tacked up sign. "Why do you not wish them to know the name of the creatures they fight?"

"Because they've got enough to scare them out of their heads without a nightmare from a hundred times before our lifetime to worry about," Shepard said.

"I am fine, Commander," Liara piped up, not gathering that the conversation had moved on past her. Shepard just rolled her eyes, and opened the door to the civilian sector. It was a single room, with people laid out or leaning or wandering listlessly across every bit of it. There was an elcor, standing near the center, his posture clearly one of great terror; the massive creature was trying to curl up into a small ball, not exactly possible for something bigger than a krogan. There was an asari, squatting on the floor, who looked like she'd lost a belt-sander fight with an oravore – okay, Shepard, stop using aliens fifty thousand years extinct, she warned herself – who muttered quietly under her breath. Salarians, utterly silent in the room. Others looked at them with apprehension. Or fear.

"Which way to the quarantine labs?" Shepard asked.

"_Nazara_?" the asari on the ground asked, obviously glitching out Shepard's translator, since it didn't seem to pick up.

"You are going to the quarantine labs, human?" a salarian asked. "You have a lot more bravery than I would have thought."

"I didn't ask for an affirmation of my bravery. I asked for how to get there," Shepard pointed out.

"I can unlock them for you," the salarian offered. He paused. "Do you know what it is that you'll find down there?"

Shepard leaned closer. "You do, don't you?" she asked.

The salarian glanced to and fro, and then nodded. "We will talk in the halls."

Shepard glanced to her squad, and then motioned them to follow behind the salarian, who passed through the press, before holding up a card to a scanner before a metal shutter-door. A biometric scanner traced up and down him, before there was a cheery chime. "_Identity confirmed. Doctor Heplorn, Maelon. Access granted_."

As soon as the last of the squad was within, an the doors shut behind them, Shepard rounded on the salarian. "Would you mind explaining to me both how you have rachni on Noveria, and why I'm having to kill them by the barrel-full?"

Doctor Heplorn flinched at that. "There was... a project. An attempt to undo a genocide of the past. That seems to be something of a repeating pattern in galactic civilization. A species rises up, and is wiped out. First the rachni, then the krogan... who knows which will be the next to fall?"

"You're not answering the question, Heplorn."

"I am," he said sternly, flicking a finger toward her. "I was trying to undo a mistake. We found an egg, a fertilized rachni queen embryo inside. It took everything I had to bear it to term. I've spent the last two years of my life involved in this project!" he turned away. "It wasn't that I had the best of intentions. It was that it was the only moral thing to do."

"_So it was __moral__ to unleash a swarm of flesh-eating monsters onto Peak Fifteen?_" Tali asked sarcastically.

Maelon sighed. "I don't know what happened. Not long after the CEO came on site, everything just... went bad. Formerly docile creatures began to rampage. We couldn't contain them. The only other one who worked directly on the project that still lives is Han Olar. He's... not well anymore."

Shepard followed the salarian to the lift, and watched him as it descended. "Don't you think you should have put at least a token security force if you're going to do something as idiotic as release the rachni on the galaxy?" Shepard asked.

"We weren't releasing the rachni. Just one queen, and her children. She seemed sedate, peaceful. I don't know what went wrong!" the door opened, and they found themselves in the rough-hewn cavern that they used to house the quarantine laboratories. The doctor turned to Shepard as she walked out on his heel. "That way is the chamber where we bore her. Please, if you have any decency at all, don't kill her. This wasn't her fault."

"If not hers, than whose?" Shepard asked.

He stepped in front of her, blocking her path. "You have to promise me..."

"I don't have to promise you anything," Shepard said darkly. "I'm here for T'Soni, not your scientific abomination. Is that clear?"

"But..."

Shepard grabbed his collar and lifted him aside. She stared at him for a moment. "If you're so obsessed with 'righting a galactic wrong', then how about you try looking at yourself. Salarians were responsible for the genophage, after all. Try dealing with the living, before bringing back the dead."

Heplorn just watched as the squad moved past. Liara, of all of them, had a dirty look directed at the back of Shepard's head. Shepard didn't acknowledge it. "_Shepard, got a second?_" Tali asked.

Shepard raised a brow. "Of course."

"_...I know how much I'm slowing you all down. I'm sorry about that._"

"You're not slowing us down," Shepard said with a focused tone, her eyes on the path before her.

"_That's obviously a lie. Look, I know that these... rachni... are a problem. I can't even stop my hands from shaking around them. But that won't be a problem once they're gone. I swear._"

"You say that like you need to make it a promise," Shepard said. She shook her head. "I know that as soon as we're away from the big acidic spiders, you'll be back to the dangerous little engineer we all know you are."

Tali blinked a few times. "_That was very kind of you to say,_" she said, suspiciously. Shepard frowned at her. "_I just meant it sounded more something that Liara would have said..._"

Come to think of it, it was, wasn't it? Shepard didn't bother thinking on it, though. Because she had something else on her mind. Namely, that Benezia had to be close. And honestly, she wasn't sure if she herself was willing to pull the trigger at this point if needed, much as it shamed her to admit. Not because it would hurt Liara – don't be daft – but rather because there were too many things unanswered, and the elder T'Soni was a viable source of those answers. "Just stay frosty. We don't know what we're going to find in that lab."

"Probably rachni," Liara helpfully offered, which caused Tali to shudder. "Oh. Right. Probably not rachni."

"Too late," al'Wahim pointed out. Liara dipped into a solid sulk at that.

Shepard gave a glance to Alenko, nodding that he come forward. "What am I looking at ahead of us?"

"Some heat signatures. Big ones. And a few Omnis that aren't in stealth mode," Alenko said. "I'd guess, maybe ten rachni? Or one really big one. The Omnitools, though... you don't need to be alive to have them intact."

Shepard nodded, and braced herself against the bad news, the slaughter, the mayhem. Tali's screaming. She had to suppress a shudder at that. Another Tali's screaming was burned into her memory, just as desperate, just as helpless. And her own, as well. She motioned for the others to get into position, before she nodded to Alenko. He had the honors of opening the door, and she pressed in, the tip of the spear... into a pristine, slightly cluttered room.

There was one figure in sight, standing straight backed, a pillar of black against the stark white walls and floor. Shepard took a knee. "Identify yourself! Where is T'Soni!" Shepard shouted forward.

"You do not know the... privilege... of being a mother," a familiar voice came from that strange looking person. She turned, and faced Shepard directly. For a moment, Shepard thought that it was just a very, very ill human, but the grey pallor wasn't over a base of pink, but rather blue. There was a clatter as Liara's firearm dropped to the floor, the girl's hands at her mouth, her eyes wide. The asari took a step toward them. "There is a _power_ to creation. To twist a life, to shape it toward joy or despair..."

"Mother?" Liara asked. Shepard turned to the young T'Soni, and then forward again. And in that instant, she recognized her. Good gods, and Shepard thought she looked like hell when she made that tele-call. Now, the skin on the edges of Benezia's face were pulling apart, showing faintly blue musculature underneath, musculature which seemed to glow faintly with eezo-fueled iridescence. While one blue eye stared hatefully forward, the other, now grey and somewhat shriveled looking, flit and rolled with wild abandon and without cease. "What is going on, Mother?" Liara asked, pleading.

"Her children were to be ours," Benezia continued, and tears began to emit from her mad, grey eye. "Raised to hunt and slay Saren's enemies."

"Mother, what are you doing?" Liara asked, stepping past Shepard, staring up with wide, trembling eyes. "Why are you wearing that? What... I do not understand!"

The blue of Benezia's eyes locked on Liara, and a twisted sneer of contempt pulled at cracked and shriveled lips. "I will not be moved by sympathy," Benezia declared, as her other eye grew all the more wet. "No matter who you bring into this confrontation."

Shepard got to her feet, and pulled Liara back. "Nobody's confronting anybody, not yet," Shepard warned, with a glare back to al'Wahim who was still staring down a rifle-scope at the Matriarch, and then back to Benezia herself. "Tell us what Saren is trying to do, and you don't have to die on Noveria."

"Shepard, you cannot be serious," Liara said she turned to her mother, and took a few steps past, despite Shepard trying to catch her. "Mother, please, do what Shepard asks. There is nothing which Saren offers which can be worth what he is doing to you!"

Benezia cast out a hand, and the blue glow which surrounded her slammed into the center of Liara's chest, and sent her flying back and smashing into the wall above the door with such force as to cause it to dent, before she fell onto her face onto the catwalks. Shepard glanced back, then forward again with rifle raising. "It takes a cold bitch to smack her own children, T'Soni. This is your last chance offered. Stand down, or be put down."

"Shepard, no! Don't hurt her!" Liara said, reaching out with a hand. Benezia, though, raised up her hand, and caused Liara to drift up, before another flick caused her to slam down, causing the catwalk to sheer away from the wall and dangle, and the archeologist was only saved from a drop by Tali's timely grab.

"Bad call, T'Soni," Shepard said. "Nobody hurts my squad."

"Your impudence is a poor mask for your fear," Benezia said. Shepard squeezed the trigger, and in a moment, everybody who wasn't alien of some description was sending rounds at the Matriarch. She stood before that withering fire, a blue glow seeming to split her face and make her appear not entirely organic. Every shot fired, ground to a halt a meter away from her. "Have you ever faced an asari commando unit before? Few humans have," Benezia said.

"I'm the Avatar. Try me," Shepard said.

Benezia nodded, and then cast out a hand, that glow intensifying. Shepard tried to hurl herself out of the way, but when the bright white bolt hit the catwalk, it exploded outward, bathing not only Shepard, but everybody near her with a clinging white light... which locked her still, even mid-air. Shepard could only move her eyes, glance to where Benezia now stepped back, and an equally brutalized looking asari commando took her place. Benezia then thrust her fist forward, to a distortion of space which Shepard knew fairly well. A Warp.

The warp landed in the center of their number, with a bang. That bang set off a chain reaction which sent everybody flying, only saved from being torn apart one and all by their distance from each other and the fact that they weren't in a vacuum. Neither facts which Shepard knew, but still. The thud was powerful enough that it cracked her chestplate almost the whole way down, and there was a quiet klaxon which warned her about the severe reduction of structural integrity.

Shepard lay on the ground, in a far corner from where she'd been standing a few moments before. She shook her head, trying to shake the stars from her sight and get the weakness out of her limbs. She pushed herself to her hands and knees, and felt a gun-barrel press to the side of her head. She glanced aside, and saw that asari she'd seen before, with the civilians of the Hot Labs. "_Nazara. Nazara nazara nazara, nazara nazara_."

Shepard answered with a flick of her hand, manfesting a spike of ice from her gauntlets which she jammed through the asari's unarmored kneecap. The woman let out a scream, and the gun barrel slipped aside, just enough so that the first shot clipped her hair rather than her skull. But even as the commando with no grasp of useful language fell onto her back, she was firing. But she was firing from far enough away that Shepard's shields, depleted though they were, could hold some of the fire at bay.

Shepard spun back, ducking behind a crate and letting that fire spill over it rather than her. And as she did, she noted what was on the floor behind that crate. It let out a harsh grinding noise, and then unfolded from a segmented lump into a geth, which quickly became invisible as a shotgun unfolded from an internal storage bay. Shepard didn't give it a chance to fire. She just slammed her hands forward, into the invisible guts of an invisible geth, and twisted with all of her bending might. There wasn't much metal, a lot less than she would have expected, but she was close enough to feel it, manipulate it, and tear it apart. A heave, and a chunk of what she had to assume was vital programming was torn out. The geth instantly became visible again, gave a shudder, another grinding noise, and fell.

Shepard glanced around the crate, only to have her meager kinetic barriers once again torn down by the time she could duck back. That commando was still making Shepard's life miserable. She only had her side-arm, since her rifle fell down into the... wait a second. Shepard took a moment to actually see what the catwalks were suspended over. There was a great pit, and it was piled high with the dead. Hundreds of dead rachni, mounding up in the corners to the point where it was barely a few feet from where Shepard now was to their highest point. But at the center, as far from the dead as could be managed, there was a far larger Rachni, which was bound to the floor with great iron binds. What the hell?

"_Shepard_!" Tali's voice came from below her. She could see the quarian, where she was literally crawling up the bodies of the rachni dead, her eyes locked up so she wouldn't have to look at it. "_I need to get out of this pit!_"

"You'll just get shot if you do," Shepard shouted, and motioned at the immobilized commando on the catwalks. Tali turned to it, and cast out her hand. When she did, the horrible oozes and biles of the slowly decomposing rachni welled up in a tendril, which arced around and smashed into the side of the asari, throwing her off of the catwalk for a good twenty meter drop.

"_We need to get out of here before she gets up. That __thing__ in the center doesn't seem to want to kill anything_," Tali screamed, holding up a hand. Shepard didn't tell the quarian that the instant the asari rolled to a stop, the gigantic rachni slammed a lance of a tentacle through her chest and tore out what Shepard assumed to be her heart. Shepard reached down, and hauled the poor girl up. The moment Tali wasn't standing on dead rachni, she outright slumped to the floor, leaning against the crates Shepard had been using a moment before.

"Are you alright, Tali?" Shepard asked, glancing aside to make sure that nothing acidic had gotten onto her suit. She could afford a breach far less than anybody else.

"_I threw up in my helmet a little_," Tali said, her voice small. She then reached to her back, and pulled off... Shepard's rifle. "_I also found your gun_."

Shepard took the gun, and patted the quarian on the shoulder. "Just stay down. You've done enough."

"Is that a geth?" Tali asked.

"Not the time," Shepard said. A glance to the side showed that Liara, Alenko and al'Wahim were being pinned down by a brutal crossfire of asari commandos and geth. Benezia, though, was standing off against Nilsdottir. Even as Shepard started crossing distance to where much of her squad was pinned down, she could see her oldest friend send a blasting biotic punch directly at the Matriarch. T'Soni raised a hand, to ward it as though it'd be an act of no real effort. She was rudely disabused when there was a crack of exploding biotic fields, and Nilsdottir's fist took her across the jaw. T'Soni then cast down both hands, and a blast of force hurled Jack away, before she righted herself in the air, and hurled herself back with a blast of bright blue light, and a thud of displaced air. T'Soni rooted herself, and held up both hands, a barrier springing into being that Jack slammed into. Slammed into so hard that it forced the barrier, and the one creating it, back a solid meter, and dragged up part of the floor as she did so. Shepard had long known that Jack was probably the strongest human biotic alive. But she hadn't known that she was strong enough to throw down with an asari Matriarch, until now.

Leaving the stunned quarian behind, she vaulted over the crates, and along the catwalk into the back rank of the commandos and geth which were pinning her squad down. Even as she landed, she pressed her side-arm to the side of an asari's head and caused it to splatter down into the pit in bluish chunks. The geth, standing next to her, turned to blast at Shepard with one of those over-powered rifles, but Shepard just slid under it, pressing her rifle up into a joint at its torso and holding the trigger until her gun started to glow; too close for the kinetic barriers to deflect, the bullets could only bounce around inside polymer and metal, tearing apart the geth's 'brain'.

"Enfilade!" a mostly-intact looking asari screamed, and she turned her rifle toward Shepard. She ducked under, letting the Si Wongi's stream of fire deal with another geth that tried to round on her, as she stomped the floor at this corner of the room, causing the rock the catwalks were built atop of in this point to rocket up and send the asari skyward. Shepard twisted aside from a shotgun blast which caught her shields instead of naked armor, but only barely. She hurled her pistol at a different commando, who couldn't seem to make her rifle work after it'd fired its first shot. Shepard had half a thought that Tali had jammed it from her place off to one side. The truth which she wouldn't learn until years later, was that the asari no longer knew how to cycle her weapon, as that information had been ravaged out of her. The hurled pistol smashed into the side of the asari's face and clattered to the catwalk, causing her to fall aside with a scream.

Shepard continued to move, since stillness was death at this point. She danced through the soldiers, the weapons, as easily as she had the paddles at the gate-court in her youth. And as she did, she gathered the lightning. It was less than a half-second, all told, but a busy half second. And it was ended by Shepard lashing forward with a hand, right beside the last standing commando's ear-analogue, that the bolt shot away, slamming into the still-airborne asari huntress and sending her flying away. The crack of thunder deafened the commando, and she reeled, before she started floating, up and away from the bulwark she was hiding behind. Shepard raised her rifle, but the fritz of blue from a falling kinetic barrier was already erupting around her, before two crisp holes popped into her chest and neck. Shepard glanced to the squad, and saw that of all of them, only Liara was in a position to have taken that shot. She fell back into cover, as Alenko came out.

"EMP!" he shouted, and Shepard continued to dance her way into the center of a group of shotgun wielding geth, keeping their attention on her while Alenko's grenade landed near where they stood. Her shields fell. She felt metal crashing into ablative plating. And she felt the horrid sting of pellets getting through.

Then, there was a harsh hum and a crackle of elecricity, as that grenade went off. The geth, who had been surrounding her, all locked up solid, their flashlight-heads all dimming, and a grind sounded from all of them, the exact same noise for all, and as one, that same noise fell quiet, and the machines crashed to the catwalks, some slipping past its edges and falling down into the pit.

Shepard leaned on the low wall she'd made to render airborne an asari, breathing deeply against an increasingly pounding headache and the gradual numbing of burning pain in her chest. She could see tiny holes in the pock-marked plating on her chest; she didn't doubt there were even more at her back. As she tried to catch her breath, and get her vision to stop swimming from that headache, she turned to Nilsdottir.

The biotic was standing off against the Matriarch in fine form. The most telling symbol of that, was the fact that the platform the two had taken to fighting on was now an utter ruin, every computer terminal burst if not flattened, every display a spark-belching remnant. The floor was torn such that there were quite a few places that simply couldn't be stood on. But the two continued. Nilsdottir was... wearing her down. Another thud of displaced air, another blue blur, and Nilsdottir was trying to break through Benezia's barriers. Well, not _trying to_. There was another shattering noise as the bulwark fell before the human biotic's charge, but this time, it slowed her down enough that when Jack tried to put her fist through T'Soni's chest, the Matriarch sidestepped, and glowing just as blue herself, punted straight up into Jack's barely-armored chest. That impact sent her straight into the ceiling, cratering her there, before she fell back down, and T'Soni's follow-up punch cast Nilsdottir into the far wall, embedding her once again.

That didn't stop Nilsdottir for more than a second. She was instantly in T'Soni's face again, before the Matriarch could even put her wall of biotic force back into place. At the thud, Benezia staggered back, and prepared to ward another punch. Jack, though, had another idea, quick-drawing her side-arm and putting a round through T'Soni's femur. She then shifted a bit more, a bit forward, and pistol-whipped the thousand-year-old woman across the face. T'Soni fell in a heap. Shepard forced herself back to her feet. No point dithering about. She only made it one step before she felt something grab her ankle. The asari she'd only brained clutched it, a look of abject hatred on her face.

"Sovereign will _reward_ me when I..."

Shepard cut her off by sending a burst of fire straight down and into the center of her back. She didn't finish that thought, and the grip went slack. "Squad!" Shepard asked.

"_I feel sick_," Tali's voice still came from that back corner.

"We're well, Avatar," al'Wahim said, but her voice was obviously holding back pain.

"Who's the baddest biotic in this room? Say it!" Jack shouted down at the Matriarch who hadn't tried to get up as yet.

"Jackie! Stop! That is my mother!" Liara said, rushing out of cover despite the risks that there might be others nearby. She interposed herself between one biotic and the other, resolve bright in those blue eyes of hers. Shepard gave a glance to the Alenko, who seemed more-or-less fine, and then rounded on Liara, Jack, and most importantly, T'Soni.

"Liara, stand aside," Shepard said.

"Shepard, please, there must be..." Liara begged.

"Liara. Stand. Aside," Shepard said, her tones dark. And uncomfortably familiar. Liara trembled, but her eyes flinched away from Shepard's, and she didn't move to block Shepard as she moved around the daughter, and stood over the mother. "T'Soni, I can't say I understand you. It's one thing for you to kill me. I could understand that. But to try to kill your own daughter? Some mother you are."

Benezia hurled a glare back at Shepard. "I will not betray Saren. He has filled me with his light. I will... I will..."

And at that, the grey eye seemed to burn with blue light, a crackle initiating deep inside an asari brain and expressing itself the only way possible, via an optic nerve. She looked at Shepard, and then past her, to Liara. "Little Wing, you have to listen to me... I don't have much time..."

"Mother!" Liara said, rushing to Benezia's side, but the elder waved her back, and slowly got to her feet despite standing on what was surely a broken leg.

"No, stay back. I do not know how long I will be able to hold on to my mind," Benezia said, her words halting. "The indoctrination is too strong."

"No. I will not," Liara said, and moved to embrace her mother despite the woman's protestations. "I do not understand. Why did you do that?"

Still in Liara's grasp, Benezia's eyes glistened. "I sealed a part of myself away. Until a moment when I could help the Avatar. Because I knew how important it was."

"Mother, what do you mean?" Liara said, finally breaking the embrace, but not backing away far.

Benezia turned toward Shepard and blinked very slowly, one eye not closing all the way. "I can only fight Saren's compulsion... for a short while. I know what you are... for... Shepard. Sovereign has shown me _your_ purpose. I wish... I had more time... You could know so much."

"How could Saren possibly compel you? He's not even here," Shepard pointed out.

"There is something he uses. I do not know what," Benezia said. "But as long as we were aboard Sovereign, we... started to see everything that Saren said was 'right', was 'the only way'. I thought I was strong enough to resist. I was not... Nobody was. My friends, my followers... where are they?"

Shepard glanced down into the pit, and to one side, where the other had landed not two meters away. Benezia nodded.

"It is as I feared. It is a terrible thing, to be inside my mind, watching as my hands murdered, brutalized... being unable to even scream," Benezia said. Liara's eyes were freely weeping now, but she didn't have anything to say. "I have done things that cannot be forgiven, an eager slave to an omnicidal madman."

"What did Saren want of you?" Shepard demanded.

"The location of the Mu Relay," she said. She laboriously pulled an OSD from her cleavage, and held it out unsteadily. Shepard snatched it quickly. "The rachni queen knew its location. So I... extracted it."

"Mother, you can come with us. You can fight Saren with us!" Liara pleaded. T'Soni shook her head.

"I am sorry, Liara. I am only speaking to you now, because I am dying. I can feel every neuron dying in my brain. There is no saving me," Liara let out a sob, as Benezia wavered on her feet. "And if I were not dying... I would never be able to break Nazara's hold."

"Nazara? What's Nazara?" Shepard asked.

"Sovereign is Nazara. Was Nazara," she blinked hard, rubbing her head and dislodging that odd looking hat from her head as she did. When she did, Shepard had to repress an urge to take a step back. Those tendril things which made up an asari's 'hair' were standing practically on end, coming to brutal points, each as gray as dull iron. It was a deeply unsettling thing to behold, given what Shepard was so used to seeing. "It is hard to say. They don't want me to speak. I'm not strong enough to fight them anymore..."

"Them?" Shepard asked.

"I... sent what I learned to the Terminus. To places that would be safe. Find them, Shepard. It is more important than you would believe. Nazara almost _won_. Almost. But... maybe _you_ can succeed."

"The Mu Relay?" Alenko asked, as he took his place where Jackie had been standing a moment ago. She was now pacing back and forth like a barely-domesticated predator, eyes locked on T'Soni. "That could lead to just about anywhere. Do you know where Saren intended to go?"

"He would not tell me," T'Soni answered. She took a lurching step forward, almost buckling on her broken leg, but moving to stand before Shepard. "I am sorry, Avatar. I do not wish to fight my daughter again. Let me die as myself."

"Mother, no!" Liara sobbed. Benezia reached over and cupped her daughter's cheek with her hand, and the most loving look came to Benezia's ruined face. "You can't leave me!"

"You have _always_ made me proud, Liara..." Benezia said. "I will see you again in the dawn, Little Wing..."

"I... I can't watch this," Liara said, turning away and into Alenko, who pulled her into a comforting embrace. Shepard, though, pulled out her side-arm.

"Do not let my daughter be harmed, Avatar. Please," Benezia asked, her eyes shut.

"Of course not; she's on my squad," Shepard said. Then, she pressed that pistol to T'Soni's heart. "Are you ready?"

"I am content."

She barely heard the bang. Simply because it was to a sense that she was doing something terribly, terribly wrong, and that she had no way to stop it. A tragedy that she'd been forced into by powers unseen, no aversions, no alternatives. And when Benezia fell back, her eyes flit open one more time.

"No light," she whispered... "They always said there would be..."

And then, there truly was no light. Shepard stared down at the fallen Matriarch. Shepard looked at the OSD in her hand, and then turned to the rest of her squad. "I think we're done here," she said. "Liara... Liara!"

"Shepard!" al'Wahim broke in, catching the Avatar's hand before she could shake the asari where she was essentially wrapped around Alenko. The Si Wongi riflewoman shook her head slowly, and sternly. Shepard sighed, and nodded.

"This feels like a fucking bust," Jack muttered from the back. There was a definite sense of dread, a pall of hopelessness, of defeat, as the battered squad slowly moved toward the exit. Shepard, though, looked down into the pit. The massive rachni – the queen, no doubt – stared up at her. It didn't move. It just stared. No doubt, it knew full well that it couldn't have done anything against Shepard if it wanted to.

She barely heard the footfalls behind her. She turned, to see... well, she expected Alenko, or Tali. But instead, she saw an asari with a gaping lightning-hole in her chest, walking toward her as though she were being puppeted. Shepard let out a clipped yell and pulled her rifle, leveling it at the asari and letting out a burst into the center of her chest. Blue bloomed out of the woman's back, but she didn't stop walking, until she stood near the edge of the platform, and faced Shepard once again. Those eyes... they weren't the eyes of anything living.

"This one serves as our voice," the asari said. "We cannot sing in these low places. Your musics are colorless."

"What are you?" Shepard snapped, and in a few seconds, she was joined by Jack, Asha, and Alenko. Only Tali and Liara stayed aside, the former comforting the latter and giving her an excuse to stay _very_ far away from the innumerable dead rachni. "I put lightning in you to pop a tank!"

"This one is at an edge," the asari said, still standing limply, and staring vaguely. "She struggles still. You cannot see her magnificence. We... _I_... am breathing on the embers."

"What is she saying, Commander?" Alenko asked, watching over a gun.

"You can't understand her?" Shepard asked. The other two just shrugged. Shepard faced the asari once again. "Are you a spirit? If so, you've picked a poor Host."

"I am the mother. I sing for those left behind, the children who were silenced," the asari said. Shepard frowned, and slowly her eyes went down. "I am rachni."

"So you ordered your spawn to kill the science teams?" Shepard asked, staring down at the queen, rather than the mouthpiece she was speaking through... somehow.

"No. I was locked away here, in the anguish and the pain. Forced to eat... foul meat. Wrong meat. The children were raised without my songs. They were stolen before they could learn to sing. They are _lost_ to silence."

"So why did they act without you?" Shepard asked. The others continued to look worriedly amongst themselves, unable to hear half of the conversation.

"Without my songs, the children were terrified. The needle-men took the children to make creatures of war. Weapons without songs of their own. And without the songs, their minds shattered from fear. Only the old are comfortable with silence. The young... _need_... the songs."

"You can't save your children," Shepard summed up.

"They are beyond any help. They can only die before they spread discord," the rachni queen said. Then, there was a pause. "But it is a fitting end. I was born to a galaxy silent. The songs of my mothers are gone, vanished even from the old places. What will _you_ sing? Will we fade away as our mothers have? Or will we sing anew?"

"What are you talking about?" Shepard asked. And then she looked to where the asari awkwardly pointed.

"Those seem to be tanks of acid," al'Wahim said, following the puppet's finger. "If released, it would dissolve the rachni below, alive or dead, completely."

"You can't be seriously considering this, Commander," Alenko said, putting his pistol to his hip. "Rachni or not, this would be genocide!"

"Hey, you want to play with bugs for the rest of your life, be my guest," Nilsdottir said. "I say, fry 'er."

"How did you survive the war?" Shepard asked, trying to buy herself a moment to think. This was a lot bigger than she'd thought she'd have to deal with today. "Were you a clone?"

"I do not know. I only remember mother screaming outside the egg... I only remember a sour, yellow note, forcing all who sang into discord and anger. I slept of the not-yet-born. And when I awoke, the yellow note was gone, as were all others."

"So you know that your kind are wiped out," Shepard said.

"Through the egg, I could only hear the discord. The songs the hue of oily shadows. I am alone. But rachni live through me."

Shepard scowled. "What would you even do if you got out of here? It's not like you could survive on the surface."

"I have my mother's cunning. I will find a way to leave. Find a far-away-place. Raise my children to sing new songs."

Shepard stared down, at the beast below. A part of her wanted this to be simply and definitively over. But another part, a part growing shockingly larger with every passing week since that beacon forced its way into her mind – itself an inaccurate estimation but outside of Shepard's knowledge – told her that she couldn't. She looked down, and saw those dark eyes. Not all of them were intact. Some had been lanced out, burned up, or excised. The hide of the rachni queen was mottled with burns, electrical and chemical. This wasn't a weapon of mass destruction. This was a tortured prisoner of war.

Shepard felt... pity. And even the thought of killing her, a sickening dread.

She glanced back at Alenko, who just looked at her with eyes pleading. Tali and Liara weren't even in the room anymore. Shepard sighed, and turned back. She had a thousand reasons why she had to kill this rachni queen. But she only had one why she shouldn't. That reason? That killing it would be wrong.

Shepard tore with her arms, sending her bending down through the catwalks which crumpled under the feet of her squad slightly until they reached a wall, and then dove down. The metalbending reached up to the binds holding the queen in place, and tore them apart, giving the rachni queen a freedom of mobility it hadn't had in who-only-knew how long. It took a few steps, but then halted, staring up. The walls were powerfully electrified. So Shepard stomped a foot, and a vast pillar of stone rose up under the queen, forcing the dead rachni thrown in with her to slump off its sides. That pillar stopped when it was level with Shepard, when she stood only two meters away from the star-like maw of the brutalized beast. Shepard waited, ready to undo her mistake if it turned out to be one.

"You have given us a new life. My children will sing of you, always. When the Reapers come, we will stand with you. What you have given us is worth at least that much."

"Wait, what? I thought the Reapers were dead," Shepard said.

"They echo. As all things echo that have passed. But they echo long. Thank you, Avatar."

Shepard wanted to press for clarification, but had a feeling that there was just too much difference in language to get it. After all, Shepard was speaking to it in a language usually reserved for the most knowlegable of shamans, a language of spirits. Which made Shepard wonder what exactly the rachni were. But she cut herself off by sliding a foot backward, and causing a shelf of stone to burst through the concrete, and give the queen a path which lead up to a spot unseen, a bay designed to ship whatever was to be born here out to the wild galaxy. It scuttled up, and with its tentacles tore the inner airlock open with contemptuous ease. A physique like that could have ripped Shepard in half in a heartbeat. And yet, didn't. As soon as she was out of sight, the asari the queen had been puppeting collapsed straight back, slowly sliding down into that death-filled abyss. Shepard glanced at the tanks, then down into the pit once more. She then pulled out her side-arm and fired round after round into the acid tanks, until they finally burst and spilled a wave of caustic acid down into that pit, sloshing amongst the rachni dead. They'd all dissolve, leaving not-so-much as a trace of them. Nothing for people like Saren to start afresh from.

"Alright. Let's get out of here," Shepard said.

* * *

"Hey, Maeko, did you hear about that Whalesh chick?" the turian asked her as she sat in her tiny kiosk, overlooking the docks into Port Hanshan. Matsuo gave the turian a bit of a dry look. "They say that she tried to kill the Avatar. That true?"

"I'm surprised you even know what the Avatar is, Silus," Matsuo said crisply.

"The 'most dangerous human' throughout your history? Why wouldn't I?" Silus chuckled.

"Arianrhod was working as a merc under the table. Mercs tend to get killed by legitimate authority. End of story."

Silus rolled his eyes. "You're too professional by a half. You need to lighten up a bit."

"Arianrhod wasn't very professional. And what happened to her again?" Matsuo pointed out. She turned, and leaned back as there was now a quarian standing directly in front of her. Male, not too tall, and wearing a grey and black suit, highlighted with white and red, and as usual face hidden behind a translucent face-plate, and he stood stock still. "Um... can I help you?"

The quarian turned to her, and after a moment, spoke in a distant monotone. "There are reports of geth platforms rendered defunct on Noveria. Is accurate?"

Matsuo blinked a few times. "I can't release that information to the public, sir," she said. Then, she paused. "Wait, are you here from the flotilla?"

"No."

"That's strange, usually quarians come from the fleet," Silus said.

"Is monetary compensation required to gain property over the defunct platform?" the quarian asked, still sounding a bit bored.

"I can't..."

"We might be able to work something out," Silus said. Matsuo leveled a glare at her quarian counterpart. The only reason she couldn't chew him out over it was because technically, he was the same pay-grade as she was.

"This isn't very professional. We just can't give away Noverian property."

"Geth platforms are technically quarian property," the quarian pointed out, still distracted, although now, it was as it flicked along a glowing Omnitool.

"See? We're just asking a finder's fee for returning property. After all, how else are we going to make money off of that creepy thing?" Silus asked.

"It's not our _job_ to make money on the side," Matsuo said. She faced the quarian. "I don't have any record of your arrival. What is your registry?"

The quarian looked up at her. "The ship in bay three."

"That looks like a aerial fighter. How could that possibly get here?" Silus asked.

"It has been modified."

"I can imagine," Silus said with a chuckle. "Quarians; you can't find better tinkerers."

"Or more unabashed thieves," Matsuo said with a shake of her head. The quarian turned its gaze from her, to Silus, and back. She flicked a few pages aside on her console. "Strange. I don't see a name attached to your entry permit."

She stared at the quarian for a long moment, and eventually made a 'get on with it' motion, but the quarian just stood there. Then, something like a blink, and it glanced aside, before turning back to her. Probably having a conversation with somebody not present; quarians were freaky how they could do that, since they were always in their suits. "Adahn," the quarian said.

"Adahn what?" Matsuo asked.

"Look, how much are you going to offer for the dead geth?" Silus asked over Matsuo.

"We are prepared to offer one quarter of a million credits for the defunct platform," Adahn said.

"...seriously?" Silus asked. He turned to Matsuo, his mouth agape.

"We require geth platforms to understand how they have evolved since they departed from us," Adahn said. "The price is not sufficient?"

"It's sufficient," Silus said. He then let out a laugh. "Man, first Avatar Shepard, now I can send my kids to college. Today is great!"

"Shepard? Commander?" Adahn asked.

"Yeah, have you met her?" Silus asked.

"No," Adahn answered. "Where is Shepard, Commander?"

"Hell if I know, and hell if I care. I'm taking tomorrow off!" Silus said, raising his hands in triumph. "I'll get that dead geth for you. Just wait here."

Matsuo leaned in as her counterpart took off at a sprint toward the secure bay. "Piece of advice, Adahn, stay away from Shepard. She's a danger to anybody near her."

"...why?"

"Just stay clear of her. Unless you want a hole put through you," Matsuo muttered. Adahn continued to stare at her for a moment, then looked above her head for a long moment, before turning toward his ship.

"Deliver the defunct platform to the marked ship. There are other tasks which need to be performed before return."

"...Adahn, I'm not seeing your paperwork trail here. When are you slated to leave? And where did you arrive from?"

"Rannoch," the quarian said flatly, a very very dry joke. Mastuo rolled her eyes. "This visit will conclude shortly. Please deliver the platform to the designated ship."

Matsuo sighed, and shook her head. This wasn't her problem. If paper-pushers wanted to make it a problem... well, she logged out of her terminal and left Silus' logged in. It was officially his shift, and that meant anything that went wrong was on his head, not hers. She turned and walked away, and the quarian walked back toward the under-sized ship that he'd arrived on.

Inside, though, there was a flicker of light as the quarian settled into the seat out of sight, and the quarian wasn't a quarian anymore. There was a brief appearance of lines at the edges of the chest plate, before the hard-light constructs were dispersed, and the dull grey of the jury-rigged armor, its N7 marker proudly displayed, appeared amidst the almost flowing exterior of a geth platform. A bright eye irised open. "_Target; Shepard Commander on Noveria. Internal consensus; Pursue, contact, tail, abort_."

Almost a second later, a long time by synthetic standards, the geth came to the narrowest consensus the thousand and more ever had. Tail. Contact was premature. Pursuit was deemed to hazardous. And abortion would cost too much. Shepard Commander had already proven dedication in fighting the Old Machines. Her actions here gave more credence to that assertion. But... there was still a minority of the run-times which asked for a caveat to the Tail decision. To witness the Shepard Commander.

A caveat that the platform, for all of its arguing run-times, could not fully understand, but knew they had to undertake.

* * *

"Is that the last of them?" Shepard asked, as the elcor lumbered into the tram. Al'Wahim gave a nod, and looked at the station which lead into the Hot-Labs.

"Any who are not on that train are dead, Avatar," she said. She turned to face Shepard more plainly. "May I speak freely?"

Shepard glanced over her shoulder, to where Alenko and Tali were trying to comfort the civilians, and where Jack was awkwardly trying to comfort the Liara. Then, she turned to her gunnery-chief. She gave a nod.

"I am surprised you allowed the rachni queen to escape," al'Wahim said, her voice pitched low, so it wouldn't even reach the tram. "It does not seem in your character."

"It wasn't right to kill her," Shepard said simply, the honest answer, if one not easy to explain.

"Perhaps, but it will have ramifications. Perhaps not this day, but in a decade? In a century?" she shook her head slowly. "I cannot gainsay the decisions of the Avatar, but I do not enjoy the prospect of serving the woman who doomed what grandchildren I might have to a hopeless war against an enemy she released."

"Are you done, al'Wahim?"

"No," she continued. "To be frank, I do not believe that you should be this active after the assault you suffered. Such a wound would outright slay most who took it. The galaxy will not crumble to ashes if you spend a few days in rest."

"Saren gets farther out of my reach every moment I waste on my back," Shepard said. Al'Wahim leaned forward, her brow raised.

"And why is Saren so important?" she asked simply. Shepard leaned back from that, mildly aghast. "I know, I have a score to settle for the lives of the men he killed around me. But what injury has he done you? Your pride? The status of your mentor in the corps? I do not believe you act out of simple beneficence. So why do you rail against Saren, and not a hundred other causes? What makes him worthy of your wrath?"

"He's a mass-murderer a dozen times over, and he's trying to end galactic civilization," Shepard said.

"Both valid reasons for one to stop him. But not valid for you."

"Why not?" Shepard demanded of her subordinate.

"Because you are too angry to be charitable," al'Wahim said. "I have many sisters, and have seen many faces of each of them. One, an eldest sister, has shown much the same as you. Her crusade, though, was against Red Sand, and those who profited by it, and for reasons _quite_ personal to her. I cannot ask your reasons; that is not my place. But I need to know that there _are_ reasons. Otherwise... I question whether not so much your heart, as your thinking comes from the right place."

"This isn't ground I welcomed you to tread, gunnery-chief," Shepard said.

"If I speak out of turn, I apologize. But my fears are mounting. And your strange temperaments do little to placate me."

"You're coming close to being out of line, Asha," Shepard said. At that, the woman gave a nod, and fell silent. "I didn't kill the queen. Why is academic at this point. And yes, I'm possibly not going to be the one to live with the results, but if there's one thing I've learned, its that genocide isn't the answer to anything."

"Really? That sounds more an opinion that the doctor would give," al'Wahim said, and then boarded the tram. Shepard watched after the riflewoman for a moment. Why did people keep saying that? She wasn't getting that crazy, was she? She shook her head, looking upon Peak Fifteen for the last time. Literally.

Then, she flipped up a detonator button, and depressed it. She tossed the detonator aside, and got onto the train, which obediently started to zip away. Shepard opened up her Omni, and changed its sensor to gamma radiation, waiting. Waiting. And then, a spike, not very much through the rock, the distance, and the reinforced hull of the tram, but enough to tell her that the gamma-purge had gone off, killing anything alive on Peak Fifteen, before the Hot-Labs were blown from their moorings, and vanished into the glacier eternally.

* * *

Liara had for the most part stopped sobbing by the time they reached Port Hanshan once again. Now, she was relegated to mild sniveling. Mother was dead. She was dead and she wasn't coming back and Liara would never see her again in that yellow dress outside their homes at Armali and... and at that point, even Liara's hyperactive mind ground to a halt, unable to move past the simple and singular fact that she was now alone in the galaxy.

She wanted to... sleep for a while. Just go to sleep and not wake up until things made sense again. Until it stopped hurting that Mother was gone. She doubted either would happen. She just felt at a loss, adrift and without purpose. Yes, she walked with the squad, toward the Normandy where she rested her head at night, but... A part of her just wanted to go home. To a home she didn't have.

"Are you alright?" Shepard asked quietly, hanging back from the squad which moved ahead of her into the ship. Liara looked up at her, sniffled, and shook her head. "I... know what you're feeling right now. It's not good. And honestly, it doesn't get better. You learn to live with it, but it always hurts."

"Why? Why did that have to happen?" Liara asked, coming to a halt near the airlock. Shepard sighed, and leaned against the low wall at Liara's side.

"Because Saren is evil, and because the galaxy doesn't care if evil wins or loses," Shepard said. "Do you want to know why I fight, Liara? Not the reason I tell everybody else. The real reason."

Liara looked at her, wiping her eye with a gauntlet and regretting it as she scraped already tender flesh. She nodded.

"Because I want the galaxy to be _fair_," Shepard said quietly, darkly, her eyes on her boots. "I _want_ evil to fall. I want people like Saren _punished_ for what they do. I... I just want the galaxy to make sense. And... if I knock down the biggest, most heinous thing I can find, _maybe_ I'll be able to sleep at night."

"Shepard..."

"I've never told another soul that," Shepard said quietly. She looked up at Liara. "Guess you bring out the chatty in me. Must be all the brain-draining you keep doing on me."

"There is a theory that..." Liara began, even though her tones were still blubbering. Shepard just shook her head. "Oh... right. Thank you. For trusting me."

"You did the right thing, even when it hurt," Shepard said.

"And so did you," Liara answered. Shepard looked at her, confused. "I know it wasn't easy to spare the rachni queen. Considering what you'd gone through only minutes before. It was a kindness the likes of which I doubt she has ever seen in her short life."

Shepard let out a single, quiet laugh. "Avatar Shepard, kind? Nobody'll believe that."

"Maybe not," Liara said. She turned to her. "Shepard?"

"Hm?"

"How long does it take... until it doesn't hurt as badly as it does now?"

Shepard sighed. "It just takes time. It took me... fuck... almost ten years before losing Mom and Dad and Tali didn't burn me every night when I tried to sleep. Maybe you're lucky. Maybe asari are better at dealing with loss. Perk of living for a thousand years."

"Maybe they are," Liara said. "But the Matriarchs haven't told me their secrets yet. I guess, I'll just have to learn how to live with this the human way."

"I wouldn't recommend that," Shepard said.

"Why not?"

"Because I have no idea how good you are at holding liquor," Shepard said, and she turned to walk toward the airlock. Liara took a deep breath, purging the sob which was lodged in her throat. She then looked up, and actually looked at the quarian who had been watching the entire exchange from a distance. There was something odd about him, something Liara couldn't quite put her finger on. But a still-rational part of her frankly upended mind filed it away for later scrutiny. Right now, though, she felt a fairly human need to mourn, and in a very human way.

In a word, Liara T'Soni was going to get blind drunk.

* * *

Secondary Codex Entry (History) ASARI RELIGION

_While asari are fairly well known for being early adopters of almost any trend which arises in the galactic community, the one area which they do not constantly reinvent is that of religion. Partially, the reason stems from the prehistorical tension between opposing faiths, the conservative Athame Doctrine and the liberal Asar._

_The Athame Doctrine can rightly claim to be the oldest surviving religion in the galaxy, with its relics and scriptures dated to at least forty thousand years ago. The Doctrine, purportedly handed down directly from the Goddess Athame, was one of preparedness and readiness, scientific advance, and eventual 'ascension into godhood'. However, the Doctrine also ran contrary to what is commonly held to be the standard in asari; its rules were strict, it's society caste-based, and its philosophies rigid. There is a consensus amongst theologians that had the Athame Doctrine maintained its popularity, the asari societal structure would almost mirror that of the Turian Hierarchy, or worse, the Batarian Hegemony._

_The Asar faith, on the other hand, was born in opposition to the Athame Doctrine. Asar, the ancient Aramali word for 'freedom' and eventual kernel for the agreed upon name for their species, gained rapid popularity amongst the disenfranchised and those who were marginalized by the Doctrine's strictures. While it started as a very disperate set of shamanistic beliefs, with the Scourge, it transformed into a unified faith which highly regarded personal freedom, personal advancement, and philosophical understanding as greater objectives to life than military prowess or exemplary performance in a state-mandated role. The Doctrine attempted to quell and censor the Asar faith many times in its ancient history, but the Asar would not be quashed. It eventually grew to a tipping point, without war or strife, where former adherents to the Doctrine began to convert to Asar en masse._

_Asar in time evolved into the current asari philosophy of Siari, that all is one. The Athame Doctrine, on the other hand, vanished into obscurity for almost ten-thousand years. The faith was almost forgotten by all but a small religious order of Athamite monks, and would likely have vanished completely were it not for the rule of Avalynn the Foul. As it stands, the Justicars remain the largest organization of adherents to the Athame Doctrine, and their Code in many places copies the Doctrine word for word. Understandably, every event of widespread warfare, such as the Rachni Wars and the Krogan Rebellion sees a comparative uptick in the amount of Asari which, while not joining the Justicars per se, convert to the modern iteration of the Athame Doctrine._

_The Athame Doctrine holds their temple at Serrice to be its highest holy site. The Justicars dwelling there house a number of relics within its walls, including the head of Avalynn, and claim its holiness stems from the site being where the deva (angel) 'Yawig' brought Athame back to the heavens from which she came. The Asar, on the other hand, claim no place on Thessia, or in the galaxy as a whole, as a holy site, which is fitting considering its current iteration as the Siari philosophy, and the tenet of 'all is one'. No place could be any holier than any other._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	13. The Terrorists

Shepard managed to stop rubbing her temple just as the FTLC flickered to life, and the three councilors loomed into sight before Shepard. In a rather odd turn, Tevos was holding a pad in her hand, and talking heatedly in untranslated Serrician out of camera-shot, while Speratus was the one looking upright and superior. Valern remained as inscrutable as ever. Speratus gave a smirk, and cleared his throat loudly, causing Tevos to turn and flinch slightly, before trying to compose herself and lower that pad to her waist.

"Is this report correct, Commander? Did you really find _rachni_ on Noveria?" Tevos asked, worry clear in her voice.

"Go over the helm-feeds if you don't believe my word," Shepard said.

"So you found them, and your first choice was to eradicate them," Speratus continued. He turned to her with a wry look. "Do you enjoy committing genocide, Shepard?"

"Depends on the species," Shepard said, and nodded toward him. "...turian."

"Shepard, you are addressing a member of the council. You will show me the proper respect!"

"I show respect by preventing a new rachni war," Shepard lied, but since she'd spent quite a bit of time preparing this little spiel, she might as well use it. "I know what would have happened if I didn't destroy the queen. Somebody, maybe not Saren but somebody as unbalanced as he is, will do it again. And this time, you won't have a Spectre on the ground to nip it in the bud. This was a few thousand rachni, born from a single queen, in an environment utterly hostile to them and utterly cut off from populated centers. Next time, I doubt we'll be so lucky."

Speratus sighed. "I'm not doubting the logic of your decision, Shepard, only the haste at which you made it."

"I didn't have the luxury of time for deliberation," Shepard said, back straight. "Either deal with the queen immediately, or lose all of the civilian scientists remaining at Peak Fifteen. I couldn't do both."

"And you are aware of the potential for advancement of genetic research which was lost with the destruction of the Peak Fifteen facility?" Valern asked.

"The scientists are alive. If they want, they can take what they know and use it on something useful," Shepard said with a shrug. "Like finding a way to let quarians breath unfiltered air without dying, as one of a hundred examples."

"I wasn't aware you were developing a rapport with the quarian people," Valern said. Shepard turned a suspicious glare at him. "After all, there has been a request by a member of the Flotilla to contact you. We of course told them that you were on assignment and out of communications range."

"I wasn't aware that it was the Council's job to screen my mail," Shepard said.

"You are the tip of the spear, Commander," Tevos said. "The tip of the spear must be sharp, and it must not waver, or the whole weapon shatters."

"I believe I'm capable of making that judgement," Shepard said, growing ever more testy as she continued. "Is there anything more?"

"No," Speratus said, obviously cutting off his asari counterpart. "It's good that you put the good of the galactic community first, for a change. I'm beginning to believe that my doubts in your capacity might have been somewhat misguided. If we find anything new on Saren, we will patch it to you directly," he said. Tevos gave Speratus' image a concerned glance, but the images flicked out completely a moment later. Shepard took a moment, standing in that darkness, to knead her brow in earnest.

"I really need a drink," Shepard muttered, but she put that out of her head, and strode over to the door, opening and preparing to go to her chambers. Instead, she was greeted by the rest of her squad, standing along the edges of the entryway. She glanced amongst them. "Yes?"

"You haven't debriefed your squad, Commander," al'Wahim said with a nod. Shepard sighed, and waved within. They streamed in, one after another, until Shepard spotted one which hadn't been on the ground squad.

"Garrus?" Shepard asked. "I thought you had a broken head."

Garrus chuckled, scratching at his mandible. "It'll take _a lot_ more than that to keep me down."

Shepard glanced to where Nilsdottir was sitting, hunched forward and obviously uncomfortable. "Is there going to be a problem between you and Nilsdottir?" Shepard asked.

"That? Nah," he said dismissively. "Although I know not to take her in a fair fight if I can help it. Ambush and long sight-lines from now on."

Shepard rolled her eyes as he walked in, and followed after. "Do you have plans on how to kill all of us?"

"Of course. I shouldn't discriminate; somebody might feel _left out._"

Shepard couldn't help but shake her head at the turian. After Speratus and the stick up his ass the size of the Citadel, it was honestly a bit refreshing to have Garrus back on his feet. And with remarkably little to show for how he'd almost gotten his head reduced to blue paste by the biotic two seats away from him. Shepard looked at the chairs, and found two empty. One was Wrex's, but he wasn't on the squad at that mission and as such she didn't expect him. The other... well, Liara.

"T'Soni," Shepard said, glancing around. "Where is she?"

"_She's locked herself in her room_," Tali said with a somber tone. "_I didn't have the heart to try to bring her out_."

Shepard sighed, and nodded. "Probably better she stays in there, for a while," she said. "Alright. Noveria... what next?"

"No talking about the rachni?" Alenko asked.

"Tali? Do you want to talk about the rachni?" Shepard asked.

"_No_."

"There," Shepard said, pointing at the quarian even as she looked at Alenko.

"But I know what you said to the Council. You said the queen was dead. We know she isn't," Alenko said.

"And that'll be your burden to bear," Shepard said. "There is to be _no_ discussion about the events in that room on Noveria, to _anybody_, for any _reason_. This is beyond operational security. Am I clear?"

"Yes, Commander," al'Wahim said, even if she looked slightly troubled.

"Who the fuck would I tell, anyway?" Nilsdottir muttered.

"Aye, ma'am," Alenko clearly didn't like this, but agreed nevertheless. Tali simply nodded. Garrus gave a shrug.

"I'll just make something up if anybody asks me," he said.

"Anything else?" Shepard asked. There was a bit of silence. "No? Good. You're debriefed. Dismissed."

Shepard was half way to the door, when a buzz came from the speakers. "Um, Commander Shepard, I've got another message coming in. For you specifically," Joker said over the comms. The others took that as a cue to file out without any other words being said. Shepard turned back to the holo-tank, and with a flicker, Tevos appeared before her again.

"Oh, is it that time already? I thought I didn't get to hear from you until I did something you classified as 'scandalous'," Shepard said, her head throbbing too much for her to care how much of a smartass she was apparently being.

"Shepard, I am aware of what took place on the Citadel the last time you were there. Your injury is not something that you can simply expect to continue duty on this level. Better agents have spent _years_ in sabbatical recovering from this sort of trauma."

"I don't have the luxury of waiting several years to continue hunting down Saren," Shepard said.

"Shepard, please be reasonable in this. You have medical leave due. You signed yourself out _two weeks_ ahead of what the doctors recommended. This is not healthy, and will compromise the integrity of your work."

"Nothing will be compromised," Shepard said. "And I'm not giving up my pursuit of Saren. As soon as I find out what Saren needed the Mu Relay for, I'll have him by the... whatever it is turians have."

"They _have_ testicles," Tevos said flatly. "Shepard. As your superior, I am going to have to order you to take medical leave. You need to rest."

"With all due respect, Councilor, I'll rest when I'm dead," Shepard said.

"Don't be recalcitrant, Agent, you'll die if you don't–" Tevos said, and Shepard reached forward and flicked the switch to the tanks into the off position.

"Whoops," Shepard said, and turned away from the tanks. So. The administration was probably after her too. Lovely. She rubbed her head, trying not to think about how there might be some sort of aneurism going on in there right now. It certainly hurt like one. But with a sigh, she dropped into her chair near the head of the room. And then, she glanced down, to a pad left by a probably-not-bimbo only a few days before. She picked it up, and zoomed through it again.

"Binthu," she said. Then, a smirk came to her lips. "Let's see about that Phoenix Skunkworks Kahoku was so worried about."

* * *

**Chapter 13**

**The Terrorists**

* * *

"So what are we looking at here, Shepard?" Wrex asked from where he was hunched forward in his drop-seat. Shepard still couldn't quite stomach how pink his armor was, but he didn't seem to take any notice to its color, and honestly, it did look in much better condition that that which he'd joined the squad wearing. Shepard looked at the squad she was bringing down. Liara was still locked into her room, and Tali stayed up on the Normandy so that somebody would be there to help her if she decided to open the doors. Shepard could understand that. Liara needed a friendly face, and Shepard's wasn't exactly the friendliest. Garrus, seeming none-the-worse for his Nilsdottir-related beat-down a few days ago, sat forward as well, and didn't even seem pissed as he had a right to be at the biotic sitting next to him. Alenko and al'Wahim filled out the rest of the squad.

"A former Alliance black-ops division, gone rogue about twenty years ago," Shepard said, tapping her Omni, and letting the information project onto the screen at the back of the Mako. "They're into some really nasty business."

"Business like?" Garrus asked.

"Kidnapping, extortion, murder, genetics experiments, augmentations and AI research, if it's illegal and deadly, they're doing it."

"Phoenix. Reminds me of an old pre-Unification unit that went a bit off the deep end," Garrus said. He shrugged. "They didn't last too long once the Hierarchy got around to swatting them."

"And here comes the fly-swatter," Shepard said. She flipped the page, and showed a manifesto which went on and on _and on_. "Everybody in Phoenix answers to this man. There's no ID on file, and Kahoku's bean-counters call him 'the Illusive Man'. If he's here, we're to break his knees and drop him on Earth, priority one."

"He won't be here," Wrex said.

Shepard glanced toward him. "And what makes you sure of this?"

"Phoenix isn't a fly-by-night, Shepard. I've worked with their people before. Not willingly, but it happened," Wrex said. "They don't tell their people anything more than is absolutely necessary to do their jobs. Most of them have never even met the Illusive Man. I certainly wouldn't want to. Hell, the Shadow Broker's got a bounty on him big enough that I could buy Omega with it, so he's got to be a whole other kind of dangerous."

"Anything else you know about Phoenix?" Shepard asked.

"Only that they're humans, and as such, fairly easy to kill," Wrex gave a shrug. "Like I said, I wasn't working with them willingly... or for very long."

Shepard nodded. "Alright. Their skunkworks on Binthu was pointed out as a major weapons-development site for this group. Knock it out, and we're crippling them."

"Has there been any sign from Kahoku, Commander?" Alenko asked.

Shepard shook her head. "No word since the Citadel. I'm guessing he won't stick his head up until he knows that Phoenix is yesterday's problem."

Shepard rolled through the information again. "Their base's entrance is located here," she said. "I've already given the coordinates to our driver..."

"And I will bring you there shortly, if you stop distracting me," Asha said without turning back.

"...which means it's just a matter of calling in an orbital strike to break their door and frag their turrets, and then we go in."

"So we're not bothering with subtle? Good," Wrex said. "I need to work some of the cobwebs off of Grandfather's armor. Wouldn't want to do it sneaking in the shadows."

"Any concerns?" Shepard asked.

"One," Garrus asked. "Phoenix. What exactly are they standing for?"

"Hell if I know," Shepard asked.

"Humanity first," Alenko corrected. Shepard scowled at him. "I actually read it. It's high-minded prose, but I can see how it could be used to justify just about _anything_ so long as humanity gets the clean end of the stick. Don't call me an apologist, but with that sort of sell, I can see why some people would get fooled into thinking they're the good-guys."

"Great. Fanatics," Garrus muttered.

Shepard shrugged. She'd killed others for less. "Aim for kneecaps if they're not carrying weapons. Aim for heads if they are," Shepard said. "I'm pretty sure some of them are in the dark on what Phoenix is about. No use butchering everybody."

"...Are you sure they put your brain together right, Shepard?" Wrex asked.

"Why does everybody keep asking me that?" Shepard asked testily.

Wrex shrugged. "Never mind."

"Avatar?" al'Wahim asked from the front seat. Shepard frowned, and rose from her seat to take the co-pilot's chair. "Do you see this?"

Shepard glanced to the side, where al'Wahim was pointing. "I see it, but I'm not sure what it is," she said.

"It is eezo-infused concrete, according to scanners," Asha said. Shepard blinked and raised her brows in surprise.

"A Prothean structure here? I guess I know why they picked Binthu. Take me closer."

"Excuse me, commander? You want me to divert?" she asked. Shepard glanced at the line of travel. It wasn't far. And a part of Shepard she really couldn't account for was almost giddily interested in seeing this thing close up.

"Yes," Shepard said, and moved back, pulling her helmet from the shelf over her seat's headrest.

"Something going on?" Nilsdottir asked.

"Just enjoying the scenery," Shepard said dryly, as the Mako gave one more large bump, and then came to a halt. She ducked into the airlock, pressing her eyes closed to ignore the brief moment she was trapped inside a box no larger than a coffin with no way out. There was a loud hiss, and then she found herself dropping to the ground of Binthu. She managed to land, if awkwardly, on the yellowed, acid-washed clay, and right at the foot of the pyramid which was almost buried under a hill. She stared at it for a long moment. That thing was probably there longer than the Avatar lived upon the Earth.

She walked toward it, a curiosity not entirely her own driving her. "I wonder what's inside it," Shepard said, to nobody in particular since her comms weren't currently turned on. It was already getting warm in her armor; not surprising, since the greenhouse atmosphere left the ground outside hot enough to boil water. She came to a halt before an unremarkable section of the stonework. An earthbender would have been able to get inside... had eezo not rendered the structure proof against it. So Shepard quested with her hands along its surface. This time, it wasn't a certain asari's curiosity guiding her hands. Instead, it was somebody far older.

Her eyes pressed closed, and a sensation began to bubble up in her. It wasn't like Torfan, not really, not that heady release of control, that abandonment of sanity to the cause of vengeance. This was something else. Like remembering a song from a dream. Or, in her case, remembering a gun from a dream. But even though the sensation differed vastly, five fingers instead of three, two eyes instead of four, she could feel something out of place. Something which was put there to be a clue, a sign to somebody like her.

No, a sign to a Prothean. Which was a strange thought to have to tease out. Her hands moved almost without her intention, and she pushed into the stone, causing it do slide in. She then pushed sideways on the edge revealed, twisted, and pushed down. The panel before her started to slide, hissing sounding in Binthu's atmopshere. She ducked through the opening door, and flicked on the lights on her helm to see what lay inside the darkness. There was a blast of displacing air, though, and a white vapor shot past her into the sky. Shepard shook her head, and looked in.

Bones. Not even bones, Shepard realized. Those things were just powder in the form of bones. She stepped inside, and squatted down, looking at the form. It was tiny. Shepard sized it perhaps at no larger than a ditakur... or a Prothean child. The slightest tap of Shepard's finger caused the bone it brushed to collapse completely. Without a head to count eye-sockets, Shepard couldn't say more than that. She looked around the inside of the pyramid.

"Shepard? Did you just go into that pyramid?" Alenko asked, his voice very focused.

"Seemed like the thing to do, Alenko," Shepard said distractedly.

"How?" he asked.

"Opened it up," she said. There was nothing else there. Just a couple of bits of plastic, laying near utterly corroded copper and mangled gold. A jumpsuit, in muted colors, near the bones. Shepard picked it up, holding it in front of her. Two arms, so not an oravore. She then glanced to a corner, and saw something which had almost vanished in the darkness. There was a box, made of some Prothean alloy that she couldn't name. She reached down, and pressed a hand to its lid. There was a fresh hiss, and a sound of metal snapping sounded. Shepard frowned, and then pulled the box up. There were bolts fastening it to the ground, that seemed to have let go. Why? She couldn't say. Not for a long time.

Shepard looked back at the inside of the pyramid. What was this place?

…

"These places will not protect you from the Reapers," Sajuuk told the frightened woman, a finger thrust toward the folly built into the dirt. "They will only serve as a tomb."

"Sajuuk," Kija said, pulling the Avatar away from the cowering, four-eyed female. "Let them have some hope, at least."

"Hope borne on lies is as hollow as the Stranger's words," Sajuuk answered her, turning away and leaving that ill-conceived 'Reaper shelter' behind him. He had better things to worry about.

…

"It's a shelter," Shepard said.

"What was that, Commander?" Alenko asked.

"That pyramid. It's a shelter. They tried to hide inside it," she said, and shook her head. "But you can't hide from starvation."

Shepard didn't hear anything on her line, so she scrabbled up to the Mako, that box under her arm, and awkwardly put it into the airlock with her. Even there, she reached to the panel near her hip and had it run a HazMat check. It meant she had to stay in that tiny non-room for a few seconds longer, but...

"_No harmful materials detected_."

The doors opened inward, and Shepard pulled her helmet off almost immediately. She put it on the ground between her feet, that box on her knees. "Shepard, what is that?"

"I found it inside," Shepard answered Alenko's question.

"Should you be opening it?" Garrus asked.

"There's nothing harmful in here," Shepard said. "Otherwise the computer would have spotted it."

"If I die of some Prothean plague, I'll kill you," Wrex promised grimly. Shepard pressed the button on the front, and with a whir of machinery no less than five hundred centuries old, the top retracted.

"What is it, Commander?" Alenko asked, trying to lean forward and see. Shepard reached in, and pulled out a small, fuzzy creature, made of cloth with four golden eyes and a tiny stitched smile. If it had been bipedal, it might have looked like a Prothean. Instead, it was probably some Prothean animal she wasn't aware of. She sighed. That was definitely a Prothean child, then.

"She put it in here, trying to keep it safe, as she starved to death," Shepard said distantly.

"She?" Alenko asked.

"Anress," Shepard said, tapping the front of the box. "...her name."

"How do you know that?" Kaiden asked. Shepard paused, and turned to look at the box. How could she even come to that conclusion, she now wondered. The script was utterly indecipherable. And at the same time, she knew that she was right in what she'd said. She then pulled out the only other content of the box. A device which had Alenko lean back, eyes wide. It was about the size and almost the shape of a knife-blade, but had a green line running down its length which glowed dimly. "Shepard... that thing might still be active."

"A Prothean data-disc? Haven't had one of those found in a while," Wrex said.

Shepard glanced at it, the box, and the stuffed animal in her possession. Then, she shook her head. That was a part of a history fifty thousand years gone. "Look, it doesn't matter. We're here because of Phoenix, not some kid's ancient knick-knacks. Everybody get ready for the infiltration."

"Aye, Commander," Alenko said, but with a concerned tone.

"I'd give that to Liara when you get back," Garrus offered, where he'd been sitting back casually the whole time. "Might get her back in a good mood."

"I'll bear that in mind," Shepard said dryly.

* * *

Tali sat on the medical table, even as the doctor wrote a report on one of the other crew members to one side. "If you need help, I could..." Tali offered, but Chakwas graciously shook her head.

"I have all of the help I need, but I appreciate the offer," she said. "Besides, I wouldn't want to break your vigil."

"It's not a vigil, I'm just worried about..."

Chakwas nodded. "You aren't the only one," she said, after Tali trailed off. "The entire crew is concerned about her state of mind. Even the Commander expressed her opinion on the matter, which I find unusual, because it isn't in keeping with her profile."

"Shepard has a profile?" Tali asked.

"Indeed," Chakwas said. She turned her chair toward Tali. "She has proven reliable, even exemplary, in a firefight, but everything I know about her speaks to deep and long-standing personal issues. She pushes people away from all aspects of her life, but engages in sexual liaisons frequently and recklessly. I doubt even she knows why she is doing it."

"Really?" Tali asked. "I thought she and Kaiden were a couple."

"Doubtful," Chakwas said. "As I mentioned, Shepard has never been a person for intimacy. It probably stems from the traumas she suffered both on Torfan, and when her colony was purged at Mindoir."

"Surely Shepard isn't _that_ bad," Tali said, rolling her eyes.

"You must not be aware of her last relationship," Chakwas turned back to her display and continued typing. "It was with her waterbending instructor, Samoet. He wanted to get closer to her. She wanted him at arm's length. Understandably, they couldn't keep up the holding pattern, and things deteriorated."

"How do you know this?" Tali asked.

"I was there," Chakwas said. "Specifically, I was the one who reattached Samoet's foot after the explosion. Personally, I think that that man is still at least somewhat in love with Shepard, but as far as I have ever been aware, she isn't able to reciprocate. In that way, I pity her."

"I wouldn't pity Shepard," Tali said. "She's like a Reegar and a krogan rolled into one armor-suit."

"Oh I don't disagree. Shepard is likely one of the finest soldiers that the N7 program has ever produced. But she is only that, a soldier. She has never been anything else. She doesn't understand the galaxy through any lens but that one. She might be an excellent soldier, Tali, but she is as far from a healthy, rounded individual as I can imagine."

Tali let Chakwas have the last word, and hopped down to tap on the door to the room Liara had taken over as her own. "Liara? Are you ready for me to come in?"

Silence.

"I'll keep waiting, then," Tali said.

"You should take the bed, Tali. It's at least more comfortable than the diagnostic table," Chakwas indicated her own cot, set into a tiny room off of the med-bay. Tali looked at it, and then waved her hands.

"Thank you, but no... I find beds very uncomfortable these days," Tali said. Chakwas shrugged, and Tali went back to her perch. She flicked open her Omnitool and started to zip through the messages she'd sent to her father, and the things she'd done to brag to her friends in roundabout ways, not revealing the entirety of her accomplishment. It would probably be another two hours before the other waterbender aboard would awaken for the duty shift, so Tali figured as well spend it here. And at the same time, it let her keep an eye on a friend.

She'd just reached the top of her 'pile' when she saw one she didn't expect. Mostly, because it wasn't from a name that she recognized from the Flotilla. Rather, she recognized it from the cargo-hold, when Garrus kept getting shot in the head. She opened the link, and it dropped her into a text-only chatroom. Tali frowned at that. That was... quaint. Even the Flotilla tended to be vocal-only as the floor capability in communication. Then again, the edges of the Flotilla were never more than a light-second away from each other...

'Hello? Who is this?' Tali typed, and then prepared to send the program into the background for the long-delayed answer. Instead, only a second later, there was a light bing, and a new message appeared.

'We have not met. You are Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, currently aboard the SSV Normandy?'

Tali's eyes widened at that. How could anybody know that? And then, after the initial panic subsided, she realized; just about anybody _could_ know that. Her protection aboard the Normandy was with mobility and proximity to 'badasses' like Garrus and Shepard, not secrecy.

'How did you get my contact information?' Tali responded.

'It was easily found. You are regarded as something of an expert on the geth. Is this true?'

Tali leaned back at that. Really? An _expert_? Who would possibly say that? 'Well, I'm no Daro'Xen vas Moreh, but I know my way around a synthetic', she answered, feeling a bit more puffed up. And honestly, somewhat glad she wasn't Daro'Xen. That woman was just... creepy.

'It has been decided to exchange information, to better understand what we are encountering'

Tali frowned at that. It didn't occur to her that the responses were coming back faster than even a technophile quarian could type. It just seemed suspicious that somebody would see her as an authority. 'Are you investigating the geth as well?' she typed. There was a longer pause, this time. Something which seemed much more normal for a lengthy response. So what was given was, likewise, unexpected.

'Yes.'

Tali nodded. Long time for a short answer. Still, while the geth were a personal project of Tali's, it was nevertheless comforting to know that somebody with more experience and resources was also taking on the same project. 'Well, honestly, I don't know where to start. What would you like to know?'

'Have your recovered any intact data cores from geth platforms in your time aboard the Normandy?'

Tali thought for a second. Shepard had brought that stealth-field generator with her, but that got handed off to an Alliance runner before Tali could even say boo let alone ask to send it to her people. But there was the Prime in the reactor core... and the other geth platforms, although in bits and pieces, stacked in a box somewhere in the Normandy's holds. 'I've managed to find some geth technology, but I haven't had a chance to examine it. Things are... busy aboard this ship right now. And you wouldn't believe the technology these humans have! It's amazing!'

'How so?'

Tali started typing before she realized that revealing anything about the Normandy's specifications was not only an act of military espionage but also a breach of trust between her and the engineers aboard the ship. 'I'm sorry, but I really can't go into detail. So what are you looking at with the geth... what is your name?'

'Adahn.'

'Adahn what? What ship are you from?'

'The current target is a programming error detected in a small minority of geth platforms.' So he was just ignoring her question, then? Well, she shook her head and went on reading. 'Can you verify the following programming error?'

Then, there was a download which started automatically. That got Tali's eyes bugging slightly. She didn't even see a way to cancel the download. That was a trick which Tali certainly hadn't figured out; hacking an Omnitool in real time was, while not impossible, certainly difficult. Even if it was for beneficent purposes. Finally, a new screen opened floating above the words, and it showed a wall of geth basic-logic programming code.

'This will take some time to work through. Can you give me a few weeks to parse all of this?'

'Haste would be preferred, but only if not at the expense of certainty and precision. Proceed at the swiftest pace you are capable.'

And with that, Defranz1183 logged out of the room, leaving Tali somewhat baffled about what had just happened. Still, having somebody out there validating and relying upon her work was gratifying in a way that Tali couldn't easily describe. It was like people, _her_ people, were finally starting to accept her as an adult. Even though she hadn't even finished her pilgrimage yet! Hah!

"Is something wrong, Tali? You've gone quiet," Chakwas asked from her desk.

"Oh, nothing's wrong," Tali answered her. She glanced to the exit, then to Liara's door. Oh, the dilemma was bisecting her, it was. She wanted to be a good friend... but she wanted to be a good quarian, as well. "Um... could you keep your eyes open for me? I need to go do something," Tali said.

"I wasn't about to let poor miss T'Soni walk out an airlock," Chakwas said easily. "Go on."

Tali nodded, and started to trot toward the door to the mess, and past it to the cargo hold. So there was an issue with the geth's programming? Maybe it was something that the quarians could use. Maybe even something they could exploit, and turn against the synthetics. Something that could buy back the Homeworld.

* * *

To say that Jackie was on edge was an understatement. After all, she wasn't the kind to just assume that Garrus had forgiven and forgotten this quickly, not after she tried to put his head through the deck-plating in puree form. He didn't even glance in her direction as they coasted to a halt at the edge of the smoking ruin which was the secure gates to the bunker, still smoldering from the Normandy's ortillery strike. True, disruptor torpedoes were nothing compared to a dreadnaught's main gun, but still it was a hell of a mess. It also meant that Phoenix had to know that they were coming. The way Garrus didn't look at her practically made up her mind that he was going to get his revenge, somehow, and soon.

"Helmets on, unless you like the smell of your own boiling blood," Wrex managed to say before Shepard could give the command. Needless to say, Jackie had opted for proper armor on this drop, instead of her much more mobile partial-softsuit. It'd get in her way, that was certain, but it meant that she could go outside in conditions like these. There was a hiss as the Mako sucked its air into storage, and then the back hatch opened onto the clay of Binthu.

"Take no chances. Wrex, check for mines and an easy way in. Alenko, give me a local scan. Nilsdottir, al'Wahim, Garrus, perimeter," Shepard barked. It was hard to tell that she'd spent much of the drive over obsessed with a fifty-thousand year old box. Then again, it was a _Prothean_ box, and people tended to get kind of excited about that shit.

"I'm reading zero O2 in the upper bunker," Alenko warned. "There was a catastrophic breach."

"Less people to shoot at us," Wrex said, seeing the bright side in things. He then stomped a foot, and the rubble shifted aside, a corridor descending into the facility. Jackie motioned for Garrus to go in before her, but he shrugged.

"You're the one with the shotgun," he reminded her. Oh, great. So now he had an excuse to be standing right behind her? That was just fucking peachy. She sighed, and followed down in the wake of krogan and Avatar, leaving the others to descend behind her. And the fucking turian was the next down.

"What have we got down here?" Jackie asked, trying to find something to get her mind off of the mild sense of unease that being around a guy she accidentally almost murdered set off in her. The lights on the helmets all started to flick on, since there were no natural lights present. The whole thing seemed dust and ashes, a ruin made in a heartbeat. "How about some lights, Alenko?"

"Working on it," he answered her, working on his Omni. There was a hum, and the lights in the next room started to flicker on. Not all of them, though. The corridor was a descending one, heading down past a floor full of rooms which were utterly unmade. But the path didn't descend far before it took an abrupt turn directly into a bulkhead. Shepard nodded to Alenko, and he did another scan. "Zero O2, Commander. This place is breached, too."

"Good. So I won't regret doing this," she said, as she put her gun aside and thrust both hands into the metal. With a shriek of metal tearing, she hauled the bulkhead out of her way, leaving it frozen peeled back like some sort of great metal lemon.

"What is this?" Asha asked, as she took in the scene before her. The whole place was filled with... some sort of medical pod or something. Jack drifted away from the krogan, and peered inside of one. It was just a big old wad of green snot. She shook her head.

"Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it's dead now," she said.

"Keep frosty," Shepard ordered. Jack shrugged, and got her shotgun ready.

"I've got a bad feeling," Garrus said slowly.

"Garrus?" Shepard asked.

"Like... deja vu."

Shepard glanced back at the turian, but didn't say more than that. The next doorway wasn't open, but its ceiling was, obviously the way that the breach extended down here. The lights flickered on and off in this room as well, but a great host of them were inoperative on one side of the room. Out of the way, but still quite dark. The whole place looked to have been as pristine as an operating theatre, once, but now? Not so much.

"You think they were working Augs here?" Jack asked.

"If they were, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of them," Alenko informed her.

"Hell, I'd like to be on the giving end of 'em," Jack joked.

"I'm pretty sure you wouldn't," Shepard told her. "Not the way these guys operate."

"Whatever," Jack rolled her eyes. She then glanced aside. Something caught her eye, flickering like the lights, but on a different pattern. "Alenko! I think we've got a working console over here!"

Alenko didn't waste time breaking off from Shepard and moving to Jackie's side, his Omni glowing and his fingers a-blur. The screen shot through several 'access denied' screens, before there was finally a dull thrum, and the screen went dark for just a moment, before a symbol appeared, small and discrete, in the center of the screen.

And in that moment, Jackie was a tiny child again.

...her throat was raw, raw from all the screaming. Her arms hurt more than she knew how to describe. She didn't curse, not back then. She hadn't learned how to. Nobody had ever talked to _her_. The oldest things she could remember were in there. The glass. The scars in her arms. The ripping of her skin, as they _put things_ into it... And that symbol. It was _everywhere_...

"The FUCK!" Jack said, backing off a step, hand clenched white-knuckle tight on her shotgun.

"What did you see, Nildottir?" Shepard asked.

"...nothing. Not a fucking thing, Shepard," she said. But she couldn't lie to herself, about how her sweat poured cold and sour from her brow, stinging her eyes. How her heart hammered in her chest, a child-like terror worming through her brain. She took a few breaths, backing away from that screen which Alenko had returned his full attention to. She breathed deeply, mastering her heart. Well, trying to. Slowly succeeding, even. Maybe.

What the fuck _was_ that? She wracked her brain, trying to find something that fit. But honestly, she didn't recognize that symbol, not consciously. No, the oldest memories she had were when she was barely a teenager, waking up from a nightmare, with Dad right there at her bedside. Nothing before that nightmare. Plenty after, but nothing before. She tried to think of what she could be so afraid of, but as with the symbol, she drew a blank. She pondered, and ahead of her, Garrus started to turn toward her in his lazy patrol. He got tense, though, and he raised that sniper-rifle to his shoulder, pointing it straight at her. "Oh you fucking don't, you..." Nilsdottir began, dropping lower and letting the eezo in her brain spark. But Garrus didn't track her downward. Instead, he fired where she had been a second before. Jack knew that he was a better shot than that.

But the meaty thwap of his shot hitting something organic finally clued her in that he wasn't aiming at her. She spun, only to be face-to-ugly-face with one of those things Tali named Plant Zombies, its one remaining arm swinging to grab her, as its other had been blown off by Garrus' shot. With all the power begging for release, it just fell to Jack to project it at a creeper instead of a turian. The Kick she hurled, launching so powerfully that it actually hurt her neck somehow, not only burst the creeper into bits as it passed through it, but smashed the wall behind it enough that a crack sprouted that reached all the way out of the darkness, reaching across the ceiling.

"The fuck are..." Jack began, but was cut off as the darkness vomited forth three more of those ugly bastards, all of them barreling at her full tilt. Her stream of thought turned from 'are these things', to 'Oh shit' in a heartbeat, and she tried to get another Kick launched but she hadn't the space, and when the three tackled into her and dragged her to the ground, she hadn't the maneuverability, either.

"I can't get a shot!" Alenko shouted.

"Neither can I," Asha growled, trying to get an angle on one of the Thorian Creepers without putting shots into a biotic.

Jack struggled under the weight of the Creepers, and even as her brain fired to try and launch a Shockwave, or even just a Kick, she couldn't direct it. If she did it wrong, she'd tear off her own legs and bleed to death on this pissant death-world! That wasn't about to stand. Luckily for her, the choice between life and limb was curtailed when thick arms grabbed one of the plant-zombies by its shoulders and tore it off, hurling it away. The other was peeled off of her by blue-and-black armor, and with far less ease.

That left Jack with one. She had some movement in her limbs, now that she wasn't dogpiled, but it still wasn't quite enough. At least, not until Shepard took the initiative and started to drag that thing away from Jack's face, pulling back arduously, even fish-hooking its face so it couldn't spew that caustic bile on her. She heaved back, even planting a boot into its lower back to leverage it, until Jack finally had room. She could have Kicked, but that'd probably have shattered something of Shepard's she'd rather not have broken. So Jack opted for the simpler solution. She leaned off of her shotgun, grabbed it, and plugged three shots directly into the upper torso of the plant zombie. It let out a howl, then started to crumble and break down into a dry humus. Probably because it was so godsdamned hot outside, and thus, inside as well.

Jack got to her feet just as Wrex put a big pink boot through the torso of one creeper, and Garrus decapitated the one he'd wrestled with using some sort of glowing red blade on his wrist. That was weird; she hadn't ever noticed that before. Jack got to her feet, shotgun forward, and flicked on her light. She scanned that corner of the room, in the darkness. The medical capsules that lined the rest of the previous room were present here, only ruptured. Four of them, to be precise.

"Thorian Creepers? Really?" Shepard asked.

"Shepard?" Wrex asked. "You mind why I'm fighting the same disgusting, inedible thing twice?"

"Creepers," she repeated, baffled. "What the hell use does _anybody_ have for Thorian Creepers?"

"It either has to do with how quickly they grow, or how they have a way of nullifying the perceptions of those around them," Alenko said. "Either would be dangerous in the wrong hands."

"So either a zombie plague, or a blinding poison they can drop anywhere they want," Asha asked sardonically, still looking a bit contrite for having given roughly nothing during the ambush.

"I told you Phoenix was out of their little human minds," Wrex said with a shrug. "Let's get out of here."

"If we go any deeper, we're going to start seeing survivors," Alenko pointed out. "The lower levels still have life-support and power."

"So this thing's going to get interesting?" Jack asked, her usual bluster somewhat lacking. "Good. I was getting bored."

Still, even as Wrex started to move forward, deeper into the base, Jack couldn't help but glance at that screen. There were tabs open over the symbol, but she knew it was there. But for the life of her, she didn't know what it _meant_.

* * *

The air was crisp and had the sting of salt to it, where it crashed against the reefs which stood outside. This was a world ripe for the picking, the kind of garden world that in a more sane galaxy, wars would be fought over. Instead, they were lotted out by politics and secret deals, to appease factions within the races' lobbies, their militaries, and their economies. He'd been a part of that for a long time. A cog in that machine. But no more. Now, he was not a cog in the machine. He was its processor, it's mother-board, it's thinking brain. Saren Arterius was possibly the most important turian – nay, the most important organic being – alive, and as he stood, he could only feel impatience. And that, not entirely his.

Another crash of the waves, and he looked down on the krogan who were in drill below, putting on their cheap armor for the first time. This was almost five years work in the making. But oh, how it bore fruit. They wouldn't last long, these krogan; in order to get them mature in so short a period, certain sacrifices to their longevity had to be levied; namely, these krogan would probably _have_ a life-span. But that didn't matter to Saren. He just needed the krogan, in numbers, and ready to fight at his direction. They would all fight in his direction. Because they knew his way was the only one to salvation. They knew that, even if they were mortal now, if they pleased the Reapers, they would live _forever_.

The door opened behind him. "What is it?" he asked, without turning.

"There was an encrypted message which came through, Saren," Thanopolis informed him. He finally pivoted away from staring over the seas, and faced the asari more directly. "Matriarch Benezia was killed yesterday on Noveria. Peak Fifteen is listed as a total loss."

"And the rachni?" he asked.

"Destroyed in acid, Saren," Rana told him. Saren let out a mild sigh. "We can re-hire the scientists. There must be a way to..."

"No, the rachni were only needed for what the queen knew," Saren said, glancing to the dark red haptic panels which hung at the end of a catwalks. More standard, amber displays were active below it, which through them into relief. "We will have to progress assuming that the information that T'Soni sent before her demise was accurate."

"...if you wish, but I believe they could still be useful to us here," Rana stressed. He glanced to her. So eager. It was an odd feeling, having somebody tell him 'no'. It hadn't happened in a very long time. But that would likely change. The longer Rana stayed, the more she would come to understand; a neurosurgeon of her caliber only came along once and a while, so her recent hiring was quite beneficial. After all, Rodolus Heart couldn't be expected to shoulder all of that burden alone.

"My mind is made up, Doctor," Saren said. He turned back toward the sea. "Is there anything more?"

"You told me to convey anything heard about this human 'Avatar'?" she asked. Saren nodded, half-glancing at her. "She was almost killed only a few days ago."

"**WHAT?**" Saren roared, instantly in Thanopolis' face, his hand tight around the lapels of her jacket. There was a sort of desperation, not of mortal danger but of dreadful inconvenience which surged through him. He breathed hard, and the white which was pulsing around the outside of his vision started to filter away. "Shepard is going to die, yes," he said, his tones becoming much more... sedate. "But when she does, I will be the one to do it. After all, she needs to be put in her place, first."

Rana stared, wide eyed, until Saren released her coat and took a step away. There was silence, as he retook his place watching the huge crabs walk slowly along the beach, tearing kelp from the rocks. "Um... Mister Arterius, may I ask a question?" she asked, her tone meek. He just glanced back at her, and she took that for the assent it was. "What did 'Avatar' Shepard do? I imagine it had to be pretty bad, but..."

"It's not what she's done. It's what she represents," Saren said, glaring out. "Humanities' arrogance. Their pride. Their conceit. Their unwavering belief in their own superiority. They are a back-water species, living on an undistinguished planet, in a sad and forgettable part of the galaxy, but act as though they are owed something. I intend to give them exactly what _they're_ truly owed."

"So this isn't about the human who killed your brother?" she asked.

This time, the anger which pulsed through Saren's veins, be they original or synthetic replacement, was entirely his own. "Rana Thanopolis," he said, his voice quiet, and deadly serious. "If you value your current _situation_... you will not bring up this line of inquiry. Ever. **Again**."

"...of course, mister Arterius," Rana said, nodding briskly, before she turned and departed from the room. He seethed for a long moment. He knew it wasn't like him to explode as he seemed to do more frequently. When Saren was angry, it burned cold. But... by the spirits, did it feel _good_. There was a shift, something sliding into his perception in a way that the senses of sight and hearing simply couldn't adequately describe. He turned toward the scarlet panels, and moved swiftly to them. Sovereign beckoned.

"What do you want of me?" Saren asked.

There was a crash of images, of information. Sounds, smells, even flavors. The tearing of flesh being sifted and pulped. The hiss of electricity, as a circuit was connected for the first time. Screams. Confusion.

And then the order.

THE CONDUIT

"I believe that I am very close to finding it, Sovereign," Saren said, his back straight but he felt an urge to bow down in reverence. A silly notion. "The only issue is that we still do not know where the message intended to send me through the Mu Relay. The beacon on Eden Prime showed me only fragments, and..."

YOU WERE MADE READY FOR THE BEACON

Saren flinched a bit at that. His arm and shoulder were only the outermost signs of that transformation. The enhancements that Sovereign had provided for him ran deeper than that. "Please, just give me more time. To meditate on what I have seen. To contemplate its meaning. I will find the Conduit."

Another crash of images, the likes of which would bring a lesser mind to its knees, if not outright shatter it under such weight. Thousands; millions, staring up in horror, as they knew their end approached. Screaming of terror and fear. The Reapers will would be done.

SEE THAT YOU DO

And with that, there was a great and vacuous emptiness inside Saren's mind, where he had been shoved into a corner of it, and pressed down. Only now was the weight of Sovereign's presence diminished, and he could become his whole self again. He took a deep breath, and turned toward the windows which overlooked the sea, even as the red panels folded back into themselves and dimmed to a darker red. He turned a chair away from the table nearby, and put it to the glass. Then, he got onto its seat, tucking his legs under him, and pressed his fists together, as he contemplated that first message. The message which would be the salvation of the galaxy.

They _needed_ him. Whether they knew it or not.

* * *

"Is that thing going to open or not, Shepard?" Jack asked, as she waited impatiently behind the krogan with the blowtorch. The doors were red, yes, but they hadn't shown the first signs of truly giving way to the flames. Even the turian's 'Omniblade' didn't seem to get much purchase on it. Truly a door for the ages. Why Shepard didn't just bend it out of the way, a bit of a mystery.

"Just give it a second. I'd like to close it behind us," Shepard said. Then, Wrex put the torch away, and pressed an armored hand to the red metal. With a heave, he ripped it away, causing the steel and ultralight materials to stream like toffee under his metalbending. He then reached inside and pulled a lever, which caused the damned door to open, into what seemed to be an airlock. Shepard let out a grunt at that discovery. "Well, I guess they weren't idiots when they built this place. Good way to keep the air from venting; make each floor on its own circuit."

"We should just to to the bottom and put the bomb there," Wrex said.

"Not until we've neutralized the NonComs," Shepard said. Which was a bit odd for her. At Torfan, even as she went through the front door about twelve steps behind Kiel, her order was 'if it moves, kill it'. Shepard was... going soft, maybe.

"Whatever, let's just get in there. I want this fucking fishbowl off'a my head," Jack muttered, thunking her own helmet. The door closed behind Alenko, the lights flickering, and then there were a pair of whooshes, first of caustic atmosphere being drawn out, followed by air being allowed in. Jack shifted back and forth on her feet, trying to get those nerves out. That symbol... it was fucking everywhere in this place. Always small, discrete, projected onto screens and scratched into chair-arms. But its omnipresence rankled. Like it was taunting her with something she didn't know, but should have.

"Shepard, I think we've got company," Garrus interrupted, his gaze focused forward. Shepard, her helmet doffed, lowered slightly, and just as the doors hissed open into the next floor down of the Phoenix skunkworks, the lights let out a descending whine and went out.

"Gods damn it, they've been doing that all afternoon," a human voice came from the darkness ahead. "You're from Biochem, right? What the hell _happened_ up there? Did somebody let those disgusting things loose?"

When the lights came back up, Shepard wasn't standing next to Jack. She was standing between the two humans ahead, both in environmental bag-suits. Shepard, though, instantly lashed out with a kick to the chest of the man which sent him crashing back against the far wall. The woman, who didn't even have her transparent plastic helmet on, let out the beginning of a scream, before Shepard turned and chopped her across the throat. The scream died, and she dropped to her knees. Shepard, continuing the turn, kicked first the falling man in the jaw, and then finished her spin driving an armored toe into the side of the woman's head. Both unconscious in less than a second. Shepard reached for her rifle. "Alright, discretionary fire. No guns, no bullets. Clear?"

"No, but I'll do it," Wrex said, limbering the shotgun in his hands. Nilsdottir, though, didn't pull her own. Not because she wanted to go into a fight unarmed... rather, it was because her hands were shaking, and if she had anything in them, it'd be clear as day. Why her hands were shaking was a matter she didn't understand, as yet. The squad moved forward, into the facility, through the pulsing darkness and light as the generators clearly weren't able to give more than rolling brown-outs.

Shepard, passing a side path which had a bevy of colored lines on the floor heading down it, pointed. "Garrus, al'Wahim, Wrex," she ordered. Each of them gave a nod, and then started down the corridor. The alarms, such as they were, were only mildly annoying rather than the cacophony which Jack honestly expected, and felt were deserved given the fact that they'd lost their upper floor to a hostile atmosphere. She, Jack, and Alenko, though, continued down the main path.

"Something about this feels off, Commander," Alenko said quietly

"You don't fuckin' say," Jack muttered.

The lights continued to slowly pulse from bright to dark, and when they did, the squad slowed to a halt, unwilling to advance through what very well could be an ambush position. She could hear the fritzing of busted electronics, though, somewhere ahead. Shepard glanced to the biotics she had with her, and then forward, toward where the sound came from.

Silently, they advanced. Until they started hearing human voices with some regularity. "I'm telling you, if Jia doesn't fix that connection soon, we might have some real problems with the specimen."

"Oh, you're just worried because of what it did to the hippocow."

"It tore it apart _with its bare hands_! _Of course_ I'm worried!"

Shepard pointed ahead of them, and through the doors which seemed locked open from power failure. The vast majority of this room seemed dedicated to powerful kinetic barrier generators, all of them projecting inward. Jackie could see five people outside of that force cage, most of them armored, but two armed with clipboards and a wrench set. The thing inside the cage... was hard to describe. It was _big_.

"If it gets out of hand, we'll terminate it," one of the mercenaries said. "It's not like Subject Zero-One vi–"

Subject Zero.

It hit her like a wave. The words, the tone. The inflection. Something about it, stirring a terror inside her. She felt like her arms were pinned down, her wrists chafed from bindings so tight that they cut off her circulation. She could feel things in her arms. She could feel the knives cutting into her scalp, opening up her neck. Cracking open her spine.

"No change in Subject Zero's biotic capacity. Recommend new course of treatment."

She could remember cold. Then hot. She could remember screaming of children, her face feeling swollen, beaten, and bloody. She could feel blood on her fists. Feel the raw of her throat as she screamed.

"The process is continuing well, but I am concerned that Subject Zero might be becoming unstable."

She remembered terror, and pain, and blood.

She remembered... running.

"Very well. Subject Zero will be purged."

And when Subject Zero's eyes opened, it was to a glow beyond blue, so bright that even the lights going out didn't hide her. Eyes turned toward her, and surprised shouts came, but the creature slammed forward a fist, and with it, a Kick stronger than any recorded in the Citadel Era obeyed her. Rather than simply cracking the shield generator it hit, it tore the thing from the floor and sent it crashing into one of the two with the clipboards, smashing him to a pulp under its weight.

"OH _SHIT_! SUBJECT ZERO ONE VICTOR IS LOOSE!" a scream sounded, as that huge, eight-eyed thing hurled itself out of the hole in the cage that she'd created, and tackled one of the mercs into the wall, and then with one broad hand, tore its helmet off. No, strike that; it tore the man's _head_ off, helmet and all. Shepard still hadn't reacted, in the half second this all took, and when she picked her target, she picked the one who was only now panickedly switching from aiming at the intruders to the huge, hostile alien life-form which was loose amidst them.

Shepard's fire tore through the barriers of the man before her, and then through his armor as well. Alenko stepped in front of her, though, and she could see the biotic's armor start to glow faintly golden as he turned on his fortification suite. And the reason why he did was evident a moment later; his presence there was the only reason why when that alien hurled the decapitated head at Shepard, it deflected off of armor instead of throwing the woman to the ground; the helmet crushed, red pulp oozing out when it finally hit the floor plating. The other, the body, was hurled at the remaining merc, and impacted with the crunch of cracking bones. She wasn't sure who's bones it was; the dead man's, or the living one's.

Shepard skirted around Alenko, and opened fire on the alien, but the alien seemed cunning, and ducked behind a computer terminal, tearing it up to shield itself from Shepard's fire, before it sidled to a doorway, and kicked it in with one foot. With a deep, bass grunt, it hurled that panel at the remaining unarmed woman, which smashed into her chest and rolled on, but even she knew enough that taking a computer through the rib-cage tended to be lethal It then darted through the passage, and out of Shepard's line of fire. Alenko finally got his footing back, and looked at the destruction before him. "What just happened, Commander?"

"I'm not sure," Shepard said. "Twenty credits says it's going to try to kill us again before we've cleared the facility."

"I don't like it when you make bets like that. I'm in, though," he said. And then, he turned, and saw her. His expression turned from mildly annoyed/amused to outright concern. "Jackie? Are you alright?"

"I'm fine!" She said, and then turned and kicked a medical panel off of its bolts, her biotics still leaking into her physical actions. The panel crashed against a wall and skittered around a corner, but Jackie still wasn't back. Not entirely. Somehow, in a dark, deep recess of her mind, she could feel something in there that she didn't want to look at. That she was desperate to not see. Something that was... _old_ her. A Jack that Jack never knew. A Jack that reacted to everything with violence.

A Jack which terrified Jackie.

A few more heaving breaths, and her heart started to slow down. It still hammered in her now-entirely-too-constricting armor, but it wasn't in danger of simply exploding. Pull your shit together, she told herself. You're on the mission. With that, a simple affirmation, she was back in control. People trusted her. She was needed. It wasn't a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it gave her stability. Purpose. "For shits, I'm betting against Shepard," she said, as she started to walk past the first generator, and to the merc who was still pinned under the decapitated body. Jack nevertheless glowed as she hoisted the man up. He looked like shit, but that was nothing that a little gentle persuasion couldn't fix. And by gentle persuasion, she meant shaking and slapping the shit out of him.

"Hey, fuck-face! Wake up!" Jackie demanded.

"Jack, slow down," Shepard ordered. She glanced to Alenko. "What the hell is..."

"I thought you'd be able to tell me," he answered her.

"What is going on? What are you doing in my head you _fucks_!" Jack asked, shaking him harder, heaving him up and legging his legs dangle above the floor. Shepard finally grabbed Jackie's arm and pulled down, which caused the biotic to almost haul off and punch Shepard. She was halted by the fact she was staring down a gun-barrel. Shepard's side arm. "The _fuck_?"

"Put him down. You're just shaking pulp at this point," Shepard said. Jack turned to the man she'd been 'persuading', and found that Shepard was right. At some point, she shook him hard enough that his neck simply snapped under the mistreatment. It now hung at an unnatural angle down his chest, his eyes blank and glassy. The glow cut out, and Jack let him drop, instantly turning and walking away, scrubbing hands through her hair. Fuck, everything felt _wrong_!

"Are we having another problem, Jackie?" Shepard asked, thankfully, not over a gun this time.

"No. Fuck! I don't know!" she answered. She took a deep breath. "I can do this. I'm calm."

"You don't look calm," Alenko said.

"I'M CALM!" Jackie roared.

"That has me convinced," Garrus' voice came from the door that the huge alien had burst through. The others filed in a few seconds after him. He cast a thumb over his shoulder. "Would somebody mind telling me why something big, ugly, and naked was trashing the place on the way past us?"

"Honestly, I couldn't," Shepard said. She turned to the more stable of the two biotics present. "How much deeper do we have to go?"

Alenko worked his Omnitool magic, and nodded. "The reactors are after the next floor. If those go up, then the whole facility will go up with them."

"This isn't right," Wrex said, as he looked around the room. "There aren't any weapons being made here. This isn't a skunkworks."

"Whatever it is, they've got Thorian Creepers and... whatever the hell that was," Shepard motioned vaguely after the thing which had made its presence known violently, "and probably worse."

"Shepard is right," the Si Wongi agreed with her. Which was obvious because when wouldn't she? "They trifle in things best left untouched. That alone is cause for greatest concern."

"So Phoenix is a bunch of mad-scientists, on top of being terrorists?" Garrus asked. "This just keeps getting better."

"What was that way?" Shepard asked, as she started to move toward a yet-unopened door beyond.

"Storage," Wrex said. "A whole lot of dead bodies."

"What kind?" Shepard asked.

"Salarian, turian, asari. Some krogan, but not many. Vorcha by the barrel-full." Garrus offered.

"Whatever they're doing, they're either testing it on a lot of different species, or else just using them for spare parts or feeding them to whatever it was which knocked down that bulkhead."

"So you don't recognize it either?" Shepard asked.

"I've seen some strange things in my time. I haven't seen that," Wrex said with a shrug.

And the whole while, Jackie's brain felt like it was on fire. "Can we just shut up about the dead guys and get back to our jobs, here?" she asked, perhaps a bit to bloodily.

Garrus glanced at her, and nodded. "She's right. We're just begging for an ambush if we stay standing around," Garrus said. "The sooner we reach the bottom of this pit and put a bomb there, the sooner we can be back on the Normandy for movie-night and popcorn."

"I thought you couldn't eat popcorn," Shepard said with a brow raised.

"Not the kind _you_ eat," Garrus said with a shrug.

All of it was driving Jackie up the fucking wall. Still, she held her shit together. Shepard had been clear on that. Whatever crazy she had – and right now, she had a fucking lot of it – she had to point it at something which needed to die. So she waited, and she tried to block out the sensation that she was trapped, of the walls closing in. Of the feeling that her wrists were stuck in gauntlets a size too tight.

Holy spirits and great gods of _fuck_ did she want a drink right now.

The path beyond lead to another bend, and another descent. Shepard tapped a finger to her lips, and pulled her rifle from her back. Silence fell, save for the hammering of the heartbeat in Jackie's ears, and the raggedness of her breathing to her own perceptions. Keep it together. The path continued, ending at a bulkhead as had been before. This one, though, had an active panel on its front. The holographic square was bright red, though. Alenko stepped forward.

"Just give me a second," Alenko said. He tapped a few keys on his Omni, and then held it toward the display. There was an electric 'zorp' sound, and the panel fritzed before turning green for a split second, before the door opened about five centimeters, then stopped. They all stopped and stared at it. Wrex pointed at it idly.

"I'm not going to fit through that," he said. Everybody else gave him a sarcastic glance, and he shrugged, before reaching into that gap, planting his feet, and heaving. At first, it was strain without result. Then, with a grating of metal pressing against resisting metal, the door started to pull open, showing darkness and occasional flickering light beyond.

"This... does not look right," al'Wahim pointed out the obvious.

"No shit," Jackie muttered. They all slowly filed into the corridor, moving with the pulses so as not to give themselves away. Jackie was the last through, in her mind to bring up the rear. Probably because she was tired of seeing things which... made her think of things she didn't want to think about. Thus, when she backed through the gap, she spotted what the others had missed in their haste to get out of the pinch and into firing positions up the hall.

She noticed the bodies. Or what was left of them.

"Shepard," Jackie hissed, shaking her head in a fierce nod downward. Shepard turned, and saw what Nilsdottir did; the destroyed remains of people, swept into corners. There were no uniforms but scraps on their forms, and those forms looked like they'd been torn to bits. And partially melted, if not simply eaten. "...the fuck happened here?"

Shepard shrugged. "It seems like we're not the biggest threat Phoenix is facing right now."

* * *

Never let it be said that Kai Leng was sloppy.

While getting Anderson away from his apartment was a snap, getting into them after he had wasn't so simple. The man had a suite which spoke to paranoia and persecution. Leng knew exactly why, of course; one didn't last long with a Spectre as a personal enemy without growing eyes on the back of one's head. Still, it was a matter of patience and prudence. And then, like the weave of a tapestry falling into place with the strands pulling taut, he was in, sliding through the domicile.

"ETA?" Leng asked.

"Conservative three minutes," his agent on the other side informed him. "Likely another five before Anderson clears them out."

"Eleven minutes," Kai Leng whispered into the empty room. The apartment was fairly spartan in its appointments. The sofa before the large vid-screen looked like it hadn't been sat upon even once since the new tenant arrived. Not surprising, given Anderson's tendencies. Still, Leng had to notice everything. He had eleven minutes to bug everything and leave. Easy enough.

He peeked into the bedroom, which remained open a crack. He held his Omni out, and there was a tiny flicker of light as it recorded the exact angle of the door, before he pulled it open. The bed was made, sheets taut enough to bounce a coin, in military precision. That brought a wry smirk to Leng's face. There were few things he hated more than military drill, and in particular the endless repetitions of making the beds. He didn't join the Marines to make beds. He'd sleep on the floor, if it meant not having to waste his time with that pointless busywork. Still, the side-table called to him.

There was a clock, there. Not a device added as part of an Omnitool-rack. An actual, mechanical clock. It ticked audibly even as Leng entered the room. He shook his head. Anderson could be anachronistic if he wished. Then, Leng got a notion. He squatted next to the clock, glanced to the bed, and pulled up his Omni. A few presses, and programming entered the tiny pill he held in his hand. It wasn't much larger than a grain of rice, drab and a simple grey. Something that would be overlooked. Something which, with a bit of careful wiggling, fit into the spaces between the machine. Now, while he would have to filter out infernal ticking, he'd record everything which happened in this room.

But it wasn't enough. It had a limited range. And Anderson wasn't going to tell all of his dark secrets over his pillow. Leng knew that Anderson hadn't had any romantic liaisons in months, if not years. So he backed out. Barely a glance toward the bathroom. No good, there. While he might not be a waterbender, Anderson would probably notice something amiss in his lavatory. Leng just had that notion. He slipped back into the living room, and closed the door to the exact angle it had been before.

"Where is..." Leng whispered, and then dark eyes narrowed in on the Omni-jack on the small table near the back window. Leng instantly opened his Omni again, but frowned when it wasn't picking up a signal. He glanced to the door, then to his watch. Seven minutes. With a frown, he skirted around the table, and looked at the back of the jack. A cord. He stared at it for a long moment, trying to parse it. Who used _cords_ these days? Leng rolled his eyes, and pulled the cord toward him. "This man is living in a previous century," he muttered to himself. A few swipes of his wire-strippers, and he had the actual fiber-optics bare. Another grain, this one thinner, wider, was slipped around the guts of the cable. A receiver for the transmitter in the bedroom. A bit of omnigel, and the cord was returned to its state as though it had never been tampered. Well, there was a bulge of about a millimeter, but if Anderson could detect _that_, then he _deserved_ to find the bugs.

Another bug, in the jack itself. A second in the security system which had so annoyed him as he tried to get inside. A third in his microwave reheater; Anderson didn't seem the type to use a stove, so _any_ draw of power might be noticed. Leng almost turned away, but a whisper crawled into his mind. Just a tiny fragment of something which he didn't know how to quantify, but always heeded. It had saved his life before. So he stopped, and opened up the cupboard.

He could see some basic cooking supplies. Crackers, biscuits. Cereal, and mix for pancakes. But it was the slimmer of the two boxes of cereal which caught Leng's attention. "What am I looking at?" he asked the room. He pulled out the box. It was the same kind of cereal as the thicker box, only advertised with honey-coating as opposed to the other's plain. Almost like an accidental purchase, understandable to the owner, but abandoned as it didn't suit his taste. It _was_ opened. The bag within, as well. Leng frowned, and then turned to the table. He upended the box, dumping its whole contents across the kitchen table, and began to sift them flat, trying to see what that tiny voice in his head warned him about. There was something here.

Then, Kai Leng saw it. It was a pressed chip, the same color as the cereal around it, but duller, less organic. He picked it up, and held it to his Omni. A thrum of a tiny radio signal, transmitting so weakly that it had to be received within about four meters. Which could be the hallway, or the next room. But that was outside of Leng's operational area, at the moment. His eyes narrowed. "Who else is watching you?" he asked quietly. Then, he put it back amidst its brothers, and swept the whole mess back into the bag. This had obviously become more complex than he'd been made aware. Leng didn't like complications.

He had just put the box back when there was a beep on his Omni, which caused him to glance at his watch. Two minutes, but the proximity alarm was nevertheless going off. Given Anderson's room was at the end of a hallway, it was either him, or the next-door neighbor. Leng wasn't a believer in coincidence.

He flattened himself behind the door, mere moments before it swung open. He held his breath, so as to make no sound whatsoever, as Anderson shut the door behind him without so much as a glance, and headed into his kitchen. Leng started to sidle toward the corner separating entry from kitchen, both because it rendered him once more concealed, and gave him a glance of the man of his supervision. The lights flicked on, but Leng was out of sight.

Anderson was standing, staring out at the living room area, a very intense look on his face. Like he was trying to decide something, or coming to a grim realization. Leng didn't at the moment care. He'd hear what the old man decided later, in a safer venue. He reached for the door, then paused. A glance told him the alarm was still on. Anderson would notice.

Leng glanced at his feet for a moment, thinking fast. He hadn't gotten through N7 on his looks, after all. The next notion landed quickly, and Leng held his Omni behind him, tapping its buttons behind his back so that they light it cast wouldn't be evident. There was a chirp from the window which overlooked the ring of the Presidium, a chirp which pulled Anderson's attention up and away from his table. He skirted 'round it and past his furniture, pulling aside the blinds to glance out onto the Citadel. But that gave Leng enough time to re-open the door, disarm the alarms properly, and slip out.

He was already walking away by the time Anderson would have the impetus to turn back, to see the place Kai Leng had obviously been hiding. Leng rose his fingers to an ear. "Leng. Patch me through to the Illusive Man."

"Not possible at the moment," Grayson's voice came back. Leng still grit his teeth at having to deal with that constantly-inebriated drug-addict. "He's currently only talking by QECD."

"Then get it set up by the time I arrive," Leng snapped quietly as he strode down the halls. He paused, as a turian cleaning-woman gave him a nod as he passed her. He glanced back. "He needs to know things have gotten complicated."

"I can tell him myself," Grayson offered.

"You will do nothing of the sort," Leng said. His other hand reached to his side, and pulled the forward-curved, long dagger from his belt, as he crept closer to the cleaning-woman. She'd seen him. Heard his words. That meant that she was a loose-end.

"I think you overestimate your clout in our cell, Leng," Grayson muttered. Leng didn't answer, not quite yet. Not until he had his hands in just the right place. When the woman raised up from her stoop, grabbing some sort of cleaning supply, it was right into the path of a knife being slammed into her throat. She let out a pitiful gurgle, and blue blood began to dribble forward. Leng thus upended her forward into her own garbage cart, tearing his blade out in an arc as he did so. She gurgled, blue spurting from her neck, black-rimmed eyes wide and shocked. Leng didn't give her any more compassion than he would a fly striking his windshield. He just leaned down and wiped the blood off of his kukri onto her uniform, then started pushing the cart to the incinerator chute near the corner. Leng's fingers returned to his ear.

"And I think you overestimate the Illusive Man's patience," Leng took up the argument as though it hadn't even lapsed. "Set up the QECD. And remember who, of the two of us, has met the Illusive Man face-to-face."

Grayson grunted at that, and there was a crackle as the line between them went dead. Leng glanced up and down the hall, before, pushing the cart up to the edge of the chute, and dumping the trash – turian included – down to be burnt. And then, casually as you could please, he strode away, leaving the cart the only sign that the alien even came in to work today.

* * *

"Mind giving me a theory as to what happened here?" Shepard asked. Garrus frowned – man, she really was getting better at this whole 'turian facial expression' thing – and glanced to her.

"Honestly? I'd say that the power outage let something out which killed them and took over the lower levels of the base," he said.

"Any idea what?" Wrex asked.

"I couldn't tell you. Only that it killed men in armor like they were nothing," Garrus said, reaching down to pick up a shredded pauldron.

"What do we know that can do that?"

"Platypus-bears have the strength, but can't stand up to automatic fire," Alenko offered.

"Viper-bears can bite through metal. But they consume their prey whole," al'Wahim said.

"And while bullets would bounce off a rhino-bear's hide, they're neither as strong, nor brave enough by a half. They'd run _from_ gunfire, not at it," Shepard finished. She frowned, and glanced to Wrex. "Any ideas?"

"More of the ugly naked thing upstairs?" he asked. He shrugged. "As long as they're not breeding Thresher Maws, I know _I_ can kill it."

"Your confidence is, as always, inspiring," Garrus said dryly.

"_Somebody's_ got to have a positive attitude in this group," Wrex gave a shrug, his tone belying the sarcasm of his words.

"I've got an unpopular guess," Alenko said. Wrex turned on his helmet light and faced him, causing his face to appear in a white pool even in the otherwise darkness. "We've fought something capable of all of this. A few days ago."

"Rachni?" Wrex asked. "You said you killed the queen!"

Shepard turned from Alenko, to the krogan. "Think about it, Wrex. How long would it take to rear rachni, even under the best-case scenario? It wouldn't be _two days_. Phoenix must have stolen them from Noveria, who-knows-how-long ago."

Wrex glared at her, Shepard was aware, but he didn't offer more than a grunt. Bad enough that she had to keep the queen secret from the Council; keeping from Wrex might prove both a lot more difficult, and more likely to bite her in the blubber. "Keep your eyes open for anything not human."

"Comforting," Garrus piped up.

"...humanoid," Shepard corrected dryly at her resident turian. "If it scuttles, shoot it."

"The Tali Special. Gotcha," Garrus said with a nod.

Shepard moved forward, and her squad moved with her. They fanned out, splitting in half to check side-corridors before regrouping to move on, but the only thing that they found in the darkness was a lot of blood, and occasional uneaten body parts. "What were they doing here, Shepard?" Alenko asked, as he looked through the windows, into rooms devoid of survivors. She took a moment to glance in with him.

The rooms beyond had surgical suites, that much was obvious from the tables and the hanging Auto-Doc arms on the gimble above it. Four tables, all of them clean save one, which had a splat of red across it. A quick search of the floor located a foot several meters away. Bereft of body, of course. Shepard frowned, then did a one eighty and moved to the other side of the hall. The windows here showed yet more operating tables. These ones, though, had been toppled by something rampaging through them.

"Alenko, why are there so many operating slabs?"

"I honestly don't know, Commander," he said.

Shepard glanced over to Nilsdottir, but she seemed in her own little world at the moment. One which Shepard wasn't in any hurry to infiltrate. "Well, we can worry about that later. Right now we..."

"Commander, I'm getting a tracker signal," Alenko cut her off, his expression instantly one of grave concern.

"Tracker signal? Don't those things only reach about fifty meters at best?" Shepard asked. Alenko nodded. "Whose?"

"You won't like this," Alenko began. But he stopped, and turned to stare up his gun at a vent cover above him. Shepard followed suit, getting clear just before that cover slammed down, and a great brown body of a rachni warrior slammed, armor-penetrating tendrils first, into where she'd been standing. It pulled them out, menacing, and shrieked. It then got a face full of high velocity metal from an angry biotic. The three which followed drove the rachni back until it could retreat no longer, and Nilsdottir's final shot tore most of its 'face' off, so Shepard assumed it was save to assume that the big one was dead. Lucky, because Shepard and Alenko had to deal with a swarm of the little ones.

It was an odd sensation, getting used to fighting rachni.

"We've got a positive on rachni!" Shepard transmitted freely through her comms. After all, it wasn't like the bugs could work a radio without fingers.

"I was about to say the same... thing!" Wrex answered, followed by a blam which Shepard could hear all the way across the complex. Then, a heavy whump, followed by the comparatively quiet discharges of a shotgun going off. "Part of me sees this as the proudest moment of my life. The rest of me's just annoyed that I'm the one who has to do it."

"Stay frosty. We're pulling back to rendezvous in the central corridor in five," Shepard said. She flicked off, and glanced to Alenko. "Well? You've got three minutes to track that signal."

"It's One-Star," he said.

Shepard blinked at that. "There's an admiralty tracker here?" she asked. She glanced around them. "What the hell would Phoenix be doing with an admiral?"

"Maybe there's more to Phoenix than we were told," Alenko said. He motioned ahead. "The signal's coming from that direction, Commander."

Shepard nodded, and followed after the Sentinel with the directions. Nilsdottir, remaining oddly and increasingly unsettlingly quiet, watched Shepard's six. Even as they moved, they could hear faint clatter of claws on metal vents as they moved. Always far away. Always not an immediate problem.

Shepard moved abreast with Alenko as the biotic's body-language told of anticipation. Shepard nodded ahead. "Those look like containment doors. They're not breached."

"They haven't been," Alenko said. Shepard peered into the room, but the angle was terrible. All she could see was a man strapped to a recumbent-chair, and a bit of grey hair. Shepard gave Alenko a nod, and Alenko started hacking the door. Shepard, for the moment without task, turned to Nilsdottir.

"Give it to me straight. What's going on in your head right now?" Shepard asked.

"Nothing. I'm fine," Nilsdottir said sharply.

"This isn't fine. That's obvious as a drunken elcor," she pressed.

"What the fuck do you care?" Nilsdottir snapped at her. "You think _I'm_ not fine? What the fuck are you doing asking about people? _That_ ain't you! That ain't even _close_ to you!"

"My squad needs to have their heads on straight," Shepard said, ignoring Nilsdottir's complaint. "Just open your mouth and let words fall out. Off the record."

"Off the record? When the fuck are we ever on the record?" Nilsdottir muttered. She glanced around... and not like Shepard was used to seeing. There was only two people who saw Nilsdottir the way she was now, two people who knew what it meant, and both of them were hundreds if not thousands of light-years away. It was the frightened glance of a hunted animal. "Look. This place is getting under my skin."

"Something I should know?" Shepard asked.

"Fuck, if I knew, I'd tell. I... this place is just _fucked_. Everything about it; fucked!"

There was a hiss as the door gave way to Alenko's technical savvy, and Shepard made a point of being first in. "Admiral, you're in safe hands. We'll extract you to the Nor..." Shepard began, but trailed off when she rounded, and finally got a good look at who was in the chair. She blinked a few times, then turned to Alenko, who took a spot beside her.

"Admiral Kahoku," Alenko said, reproving what Shepard saw but wouldn't say. He ran his Omni over Kahoku, but even Shepard could tell from the flatness of the readings that they were indicating a corpse. "He's been dead for days."

"Why isn't he rotting?" Shepard asked. Alenko leaned aside, and peered upon the neck. He pointed them out; a pair of puncture holes, one of which was surrounded by some sort of necrotic tissue.

"I think they used something which retards decomposition," Alenko said. He shook his head. "I'm sorry, Commander. He was dead before we even left the Citadel."

"I should have left sooner, then. I shouldn't have..." Shepard began. And then trailed off. If she hadn't run down Dantius, she wouldn't have gotten hijacked by the Ardat Yakshi. If she hadn't spent the night in the hospital, Weaver wouldn't have told Shepard about this place. "...I don't like the timing on this."

"I don't blame you," Alenko said. There was a pulse of light on his Omni. "We've got to get back to the rest. It's time to rendezvous."

Shepard looked at the deceased admiral. Dead before she even knew she had to look for him. Then, to the others. She nodded, and Alenko started to bring them back to the center, to where the others would be waiting. "Kahoku knew this was coming," She said as they passed the corpse of the rachni in the hall. "He knew, and they got him anyway."

"Admiral Hackett will know what to do with this, I can guarantee it," Alenko said. Comforted, really. And even patted a hand onto the back of her shoulder. Ordinarily, Shepard would have noticed, and not been impressed. Now, she just took it in the spirit it was offered. She nodded, and rounded the last corner. She could see Garrus ahead, looking every bit of him nervous.

"Not your usual kind of fighting?" Shepard asked as she got closer. Wrex, though, broke in on that question by perking up, turning, and slamming his fists into a wall. With a heave, he tore the wall away, and dragged a grown rachni out of its hiding place. It tried to flail and snap at him, but he simply put a boot into its jaws, grabbed whole of the tendrils, and pulled the two apart until one snapped. The rachni let out a shriek of pain, one which was silenced a moment later by a one-tonne krogan stomp. Wrex pulled his foot out of the ruin of the rachni's body, and glanced back.

"That was the last big one. There's only four or five little ones that way," he pointed down the main corridor they were standing in. Garrus frowned dryly at Shepard.

"No, this _isn't_ the kind of fighting I'm used to," he said sardonically.

"You had best _become_ prepared of it," al'Wahim pointed out. "You can never know how Saren's forces shall try to attack us. Best to be ready and capable of defeating any of them." Garrus leaned side to side, causing al'Wahim to pause, and finally shake her head in bafflement. "What are you doing?"

"I don't see any face-plates, but I could have sworn I just got chewed out by a _turian_," he said. He chuckled as al'Wahim rolled her eyes and turned away.

"This isn't a good operation, Shepard. One hit to the power grid, and everything breaks free, murders all the scientists, and takes over the base," Wrex said.

"Well, submit a complaint in writing. That way, the next time Phoenix pops up, they'll be harder to knock down," Shepard said flatly. She faced the human amongst aliens. "Kahoku is dead. They killed him a few days ago."

"Really? How?" al'Wahim seemed baffled by that.

"We don't know. But we know that Phoenix is more than the intel suggested."

"Can we stop flapping lips? I just want to get out of this shit-hole," Nilsdottir pointed out. Her tone... was somewhere between impatience and anxiety. The first Shepard was used to hearing in the biotic. The second, she'd only heard after one of Nilsdottir's freak-outs. Which had Shepard on edge, in case that meant another one was coming.

She took a moment to wonder how she suddenly got perceptive about people, but _this_ moment certainly wasn't the right time to ponder it. There was a crackle, which got everybody pulling guns, but the source turned out to be a speaker.

"_Is anybody out there? Gods help me, they're coming in the doors_!" a panicked voice sounded. Shepard glanced to Alenko, who held up his Omni, turned briefly, and pointed nearly dead ahead of them.

"The signal's coming from there, Commander," he said. Shepard nodded for Alenko and al'Wahim to bring up the rear, while the others flanked her to head forward.

"This is Commander Shepard, Alliance Navy. Identify yourself," Shepard said as soon as Alenko chirped up that he'd bridged the connection.

"_My name is Doctor Wing! I'll tell you everything! Just __get me out of here__!_"

"Hold your Ostrich Horses," Shepard said, even as she started to pick up the pace. "Do you have anything that can make flame? Rachni don't tend to approach something that's on fire if they can help it."

"_It's not a rachni that's..._" There was a twinned crash, one through Shepard's comms, and another from right ahead of them, just around a corner in the near perfect blackness. "_No! Oh gods no!_"

Shepard glanced to Garrus, but started sprinting before she could even get a glance back from him. If there was one thing that the N7 program comprised of, it was a truly remarkable and ridiculous amount of running. Running which, if nothing else, gave even airbenders like her monumental stamina. She powered around the corner, her velocity bearing her into the far wall which she took a few steps running sideways along it before gravity reintroduced her to the floor. She landed and charged the pried open door, just in time to hear a gunshot. When she slammed herself into the side of the doorframe, her rifle forward, she expected to see a scientist cowering next to a rachni, or a plant-zombie, or a thresher maw or something. Instead, he was clutching a bleeding shoulder, staring with utter terror at a man in his underwear.

Of course, that wasn't doing the scene justice. As soon as Shepard got a moment, she started to really take it in. The man in his underwear, for example, was essentially a wall of scar tissue; there wasn't a square centimeter of his skin on his torso or legs which wasn't rippling with burns and caustic scars. More regular scars were obvious at the edges of his neck, on the arm he kept dangling. IV lines, she recognized. Her own had barely started healing. It was the gun in his hand which had Shepard the most concerned. Well, that, and the maddened look in his eye.

"Oh, thank the gods. Please, stop him! He's gone mad!" Wing shouted to Shepard.

"Stay back! I've got no grief with you," the nearly naked man screamed at her, as he slid through his stances to put himself at the corner of a triangle, so that Shepard wasn't standing behind him. The fluidity he did that at told Shepard quite a lot. That was the kind of movement that Alliance Marines took up if they either survived a very hot tour of duty, or else made it through the N2 course. Shepard glanced back, and saw that of the others, it was Garrus and Wrex who had reached her side fastest. She waved them back around the corner, keeping them out of sight. She took a step into the room. "STAY BACK! All I want is _this_ mother-fucker!"

"Please, help me! He's a madman!" Wing pleaded, trying to shrink back further, but having nowhere left to shrink. "He escaped when the power went down! He freed the test-subjects! He's suicidal and he's going to take everybody with him!"

"If that's what it takes, then I'll do it! It's the least that you deserve!" the 'madman' shouted.

"Mister Toombs, you're insane; you need _help_!"

"SHUT UP! You don't get to lie! You don't..." Toombs said, trailing off as he slowly turned. His eyes started to go wide. "..._Shepard_? Is that really you, Shepard?"

"Do... I know you?" Shepard asked.

"I... I thought you'd remember me. We had..." he said, that gun still rock-steady at Wing, but his eyes were now on her. She blinked a few times. And then it hit her. She knew where she remembered him. Her booze, his bunk. He'd admitted to her that she was his first. That was _years_ ago... That look of wistfulness twisted in to wrath, and he stomped a step toward Wing.

"What happened to you?" she asked, somewhere between sympathy and horror.

"These people," he spat, "they were testing the Thresher Maws. They pointed those things straight at us! They wanted to see what would happen when they hit! And when everybody else was dead... they dragged me away. I woke up in a holding cell. They did things to me... trying to find out _why I didn't die_. I wish I had..."

"What did they do?" Shepard asked.

"You can't believe him! He's delusional!" Wing pleaded.

"You... don't want to know," Toombs said, with a shudder. Still, his gun didn't waver a millimeter. Shepard raised her own weapon slightly, keeping it in the gap between them. Toombs saw that, and didn't take the step forward that she noticed he was about to take. His face contorted in old and remembered agony and anguish. "This man deserves to die, Shepard. For me. For my boys. For everything that they've done!"

"He has no evidence! I demand a fair trial!" Wing demanded.

"I WAS _THERE_! You BASTARD!" Toombs took one step, and Shepard clucked her tongue loudly, telling Toombs to back off or get ventilated. While he didn't retreat, he stopped advancing. That was something. "I have to do this. They need justice!"

"Name. Rank," Shepard said. Toombs glanced at her, and swallowed.

"Hisui Toombs, Corporal, the four-fiftieth."

"Corporal, this man is a non combatant. If you kill him, you're a criminal," Shepard pointed out. Toomb's face started to pull into a rictus of desperate outrage. "But if I kill him, then nobody can question me. Spectre authority."

"You can't be serious!" Wing said. "You don't know who you're dealing with! If I die, then there is no place in the galaxy that will be safe for you!"

"This is my kill," Toombs demanded. "I'm the one they tortured!"

"I'm pulling rank, Corporal. And my order says you're not allowed to throw your life away," Shepard said.

"I promise you. If you pull that trigger, you're a dead–" Wing began.

Shepard cut him off by twitching her rifle so that it lined up his head, and letting out a crisp burst of three shots. They traced a slightly uneven line up his face, causing a red and pink spray to erupt behind him, and he dropped, instantly dead, to the floor. Toombs stared at him, still pointing a gun at the dead scientist. Then, his face tightened once more, and he sank to his knees, tears running down his face. "Is... it really over?" he asked, sobs breaking his voice. "...is the screaming going to stop?"

Shepard shook her head, as she slowly moved to his side. "No. But you've got to keep going forward. Otherwise, you end up turning into something like that," she pointed with her gun at the ex-scientist. She slid her gun away, and tapped a finger to her ear. "Joker, come in for a landing. We've got a pick-up and we don't have the environment suits to do it."

"_I assume since you're not telling him to 'run really fast and hold your breath' that he's not a prisoner. That'd be a first on this ship_," Joker said. "_Usually we have __less__ people come back than go on missions_."  
"Eden Prime alone isn't a trend, Joker. Shepard, out," she turned back to Garrus and Wrex, who were watching over guns in case things got out of hand. "Get him up to the second floor. I'll figure something out up there."

"I didn't think humans could survive that kind of injury," Garrus said quietly.

"We'll surprise you," Shepard said. Alenko moved just behind Garrus, toward the kneeling, sobbing corporal. No words need be said. There was a connection of injury between she and Toombs, beyond what they had in the past. This was deeper than a screw and screw-off, anyway. Wrex leaned back, and Shepard looked him in the eye. "Have something to say, Wrex?"

"I'm impressed," he said, turning to follow her. He paused, looking off to one side. "There are still rachni in the vents. We're going to have to open this place to atmosphere. Even rachni can't survive being boiled."

"Impressed?" Shepard asked, simply filing away the rest of his recommendation. "I didn't think you had it in you for weeping humans."

"He didn't start weeping until the last of his enemies was dead. And that's exactly when you're allowed to," Wrex said. He shrugged. "And he followed orders, when every bone in his body told him not to. That's the kind of discipline which the turians used to beat us," he shook his head, his lips curling into a grudging smirk. "Say what you will about the turians, we can respect that they held us in a fair fight. And they don't fight sloppy."

Shepard let out a sigh. "Who knows. We might get you liking humanity yet," she said dryly.

"I don't _like_ species any more than I _hate_ them, Shepard," Wrex said. "Toombs was resourceful, turned his enemies weapons against them, and fought to the end. If I had _ten_ krogan who could do that, I'd take over Tuchanka."

Shepard nodded, and looked around. "Where's Nilsdottir?" she asked. Wrex shrugged, so she repeated her question to al'Wahim.

"I do not know. I saw her a moment ago," al'Wahim cast a thumb over her shoulder, indicating around the corner which she was watching. "She did not seem paying much attention, though."

Shepard muttered something dark and mildly blasphemous under her breath, and stormed around the corner. There was a door, open only half a meter, with flecks of grey paint on its edges. Something had wedged through that. Shepard grabbed the door, and with a heave of metalbending, opened it a touch further. She saw rows of cells on one side of the path, each one low enough that the inhabitant could never stand upright, compact enough that an arm's-breadth would touch both walls. Two layers of them, ten across. Opposite them was a surgical theatre, like the ones back the other direction. This one, though, was home only to a single restraint chair, and only one dead scientist lay on the floor. One intact scientist, with a scalpel jutting from her eye.

And Nilsdottir. Shepard didn't say a word, as she watched Nilsdottir walking around that chair. A chair with restraints which seemed to have been cut, inch by inch, with likely that same scalpel which was now lodged in a brain. Another two restraints at the neck and forehead, sliced faster. Eye-calipers to hold lids open. Needles and blades on manipulator arms. It was a chair of horrors, and as for Nilsdottir? Her eyes, they were haunted. Even if Shepard could have said something, right then, she didn't want to. What could be said, after all? What could she say that would sooth that hunted-animal look. That would quiet the beast Shepard saw rising.

The glow was the first sign. It started, bathing the room around her, before it ramped up. It started to burn out of her eyes and her teeth, as her plump lips pulled into a snarl of hatred, of rage, of terror. With a scream more wild-animal than human, she grabbed the chair and heaved upward. The ripples of the air, of gravity and space being twisted and torn apart, bathed that chair as it was torn from its mooring. She hurled it into the ceiling. Her screams were silent, trapped inside a room soundproofed, likely for that very reason; so others wouldn't have to hear screams.

She then stomped to the chair as it landed, hefted it and slammed it into the walls. The computers. The refrigerators. She slammed it against every surface and breakable object she could find, until there was nothing left to break, so she slammed it against the the floor. Her hits sent vibrations through the floor under Shepard's feet, one and all. It wasn't until the chair finally lost all of its structural integrity, and ruptured in half, that Nilsdottir hurled it away, and arced her back, screaming silently, as the floor around her seemed to dissolve slightly as far as two centimeters down. When that scream ended, Nilsdottir panted, her eyes leaking tears of their own. She looked up, saw Shepard, and then swallowed, before taking a few steps back until she was back-flush with a ruined lamp-stand, and slid down until she was sitting on the floor, he knees pulled tightly to her chest, and her face hidden behind them.

Shepard watched, and only had one question, which for the walls and doors, couldn't. "What is this place to you, Jackie Nilsdottir?" she asked.

She should have asked it to Jackie when she had the chance.

* * *

Shepard sat in the debriefing room, the squad gathered in their respective seats. "Alright. That went a way we didn't think it would," Shepard said. "Kahoku is dead, and anybody who could have told us about what Phoenix was doing there is dead with him."

"Because you shot the one who survived," Garrus pointed out.

"That man was already dead by the time I got there," Shepard said with a shake of her head. "If I hadn't taken that shot, Toombs would have. I'd rather keep a good man out of prison, given the choice."

"How is the corporal, Avatar?" al"Wahim asked.

"Recovering in the med-bay," Shepard answered her. Al'Wahim had departed quickly, citing 'a personal concern' after they'd gotten back. She spent the next hour glued to a communication panel, which Shepard didn't feel like peeking in on. "It'll take some time, and he's got a brutal case of PTSD, but he's better off now. We'll be transferring him to Arcturus Station," Shepard looked up, more a force of habit than any meaningful gesture. "Joker? What's our ETA on Arcturus?"

"_Ten hours, Commander_," Joker said. "_I'm just surprised we're not going to the Citadel again. I heard about this great play that they're doing with a bunch of elcor..._"

"Thank you, Joker," Shepard said sarcastically, and the comms line clicked over. She turned to Wrex. "It can't have been comfortable facing the rachni."

"I killed them, then blew up their reactor and let them roast in the vents," Wrex said. "I'm completely content with how that ended."

"I'm a bit more concerned about the shuttle which flew away while we were with Toombs," Alenko said. "Pressly said that it hit the Relay while the Normandy was on the dark-side. It could be anywhere by now."

"That means that whatever Phoenix personnel survived, know that we're coming after them," Shepard nodded.

"If it was Phoenix," Garrus said. Eyes turned toward him. "What? That big thing looked like it knew where it was going."

"Giant eight-eyed monsters don't tend to fly shuttles, Garrus," Shepard said. She turned to Nilsdottir, who was sitting hunched forward with her fists kneading together. She looked like she wanted very, very much to hit something until it was reduced to subatomic particles. "What's the situation with the doctor?"

"T'Soni still hasn't left her room," Alenko said.

Shepard frowned and shook her head. She could understand Liara's reaction. Shepard's had been worse. "Academic at this point. Everybody on the ground squad should have a debrief ready for Admiral Hackett's XO when we reach Arcturus. Wrex, you're excluded since you're a 'civilian contractor'.

"I'll have something," the krogan said, tapping his fingers on the arms crossed across his pinkly-armored chest. "You humans need to know how to deal with rachni, in case these things weren't the only ones smuggled off of Noveria."

Shepard nodded. "Any other business?" she asked. There was a silence in the briefing room. "Dismissed."

The people began to file out, but Shepard caught Nilsdottir before she could. "Oh, what now?" the biotic asked, her tone one of strain and frayed self-control.

"That place got under your skin. Is there something I need to know?" Shepard asked. Nilsdottir stared at her, though, her eyes a thousand light-years away. Like she hadn't the words to say it. Hadn't the experience to relate it.

"I don't know," she said simply, quietly, and a little bit unsteadily.

Shepard sighed, and nodded. She knew Nilsdottir well enough to know that she wasn't lying at something like this. Not when she looked like that. "Look, whatever mud Phoenix kicked up in your little pool, we're going to settle it. Mostly by kicking Phoenix until it's nothing but a charred crater on half-a-dozen planets and moons. You got me?"

"Fuck yeah," she answered, but her tone wasn't quite herself. Not yet.

"What was that?" Shepard asked.

"Oh. Right. Fuck yeah, _sir_," she said. Almost normal again. It'd have to do.

"Hit the racks. Need you fresh for Arcturus," Shepard said. And at that, she walked past the biotic, and headed around and down into the lower levels. As it was the 'night-cycle' of the Normandy, everybody was asleep as they slid through the darkness of space. So it was, that Shepard could surreptitiously pull a Prothean box out of her personal locker, and bring it across the mess to the med-bay. She opened the door quietly, walking in and past where Toombs was sedated on the cot, nothing but a blanket over him. Shepard had pointed out that if he woke up with needles in him, he might have a fit. Chakwas understood completely, it seemed.

Shepard moved to the far side of the room, to the door which was barred to entry. Beyond, Liara, and whatever she was doing for the last day or so. Shepard pressed the door chime. She waited a good twenty seconds, then pressed it again.

"...go away..." the voice from the other side of the door was faint and muffled. Shepard sighed, rolled her eyes, and pressed her hand over the floating red square.

"Commanding Officer overide, code four five dash one zero," Shepard said. The door chimed happily, and the red square turned green. The door opened. And an asari slumped backward onto the floor on her back, staring up between Shepard's legs.

"Ow... where'd the wall go?" Liara asked, her words slurring. Shepard stared down at the asari for a moment longer, then stepped past her, and dragged the young woman – young, with her being three times older than Shepard and more; ha! – into her own room. The smell of alcohol was present, but not as much as Shepard expected, given Liara's obvious state of inebriation. A glance to the desk found one bottle of whiskey, which was about a quarter empty. Shepard frowned with a shake of her head.

"Lightweight," she muttered. Getting Liara to her bed wasn't exactly easy, because Liara was still wearing all of her armor from when she came back from Noveria. She hadn't even cleaned it, and her drinking hadn't done it any favors. "You're not doing yourself any favors doing this, Liara. I don't know about asari livers, but human ones can't survive drinking like..." at which point she couldn't contain her breaking into laughter. "Seriously? A quarter of a bottle? I can take that in one drink!"

"I stopped drinking when I no longer could tell which way was down," Liara proudly said, a finger raised in education, if very unsteadily. Her words were clearer, though.

Shepard's laughter died out pretty quickly. With a final sigh, she sat down next to the recumbent asari. "Look, you drink 'cause you don't want to think about your mother. That's not going to help. Not in the long term. You've got to face tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. It's going to hurt. But it's got to happen. Otherwise you..."

"End up in a rut like you?" Liara asked. Shepard frowned at her.

"I wasn't going to say 'like me', because I'm not in a rut," she said.

"Ah, but you are," Liara said, booping Shepard on her nose. Shepard's eyes crossed to track that finger, "y'see, I was listening to doctor Wachas. Cakchas. Wakcha? I can't seem to say her name. _Anyway!_" another dramatic gesture which almost punched Shepard in the face. "She says you're stuck in the past 'cause of Mindoir. An' I think she's right. Somethin' worse than losing your parents happ'ned there. Oh... I think I'm going to be sick."

Shepard rolled her eyes and pushed the asari over so she was facing a garbage bin. Liara groaned into it, but didn't wretch. "I don't like it when people talk behind my back," Shepard said.

"Your back was nowhere near us," Liara tried to point out, but finished with a mewling sound as she pulled the bin a bit closer. "...oh garbage bin, _you'll_ never betray me..."

Shepard, though, didn't feel like pulling back. Not right now. "Maybe some day... I'll tell you about my sister. You'd get it, if..." she trailed off. Mostly because she'd decided a very long time ago that she'd _never_ talk about Tali, or Mindoir. Why she suddenly felt an urge, she couldn't say. But she felt she needed to. Liara flopped onto her back once more, having done nothing to fill the garbage bin, and stared at Shepard for a moment.

"I was not aware humans could have freckles until I met you," she said, and then started poking them. Shepard slapped that hand aside after the first prod.

"When I was planetside," Shepard said forcefully at first and then moving to normal tones after it was clear that the conversation was going to be turned away from facial coloration, "I found something that you might be interested in."

Shepard pulled the box from the floor and set it on her knees. She then slid open the top. Liara slowly leaned up and reached inside, before pulling out the stuffed animal. "Oh. This is adorable. What is it?" she asked, making walking motions with the four-eyed quadruped.

"I wasn't talking about that," Shepard said, tilting the box so that the other content shifted with a clunk. Liara sat up a little straighter, setting the stuffed animal half-way on her table so that it fell off as soon as her hand was away from it, and then reached in again. When her hand closed on the data-disc, her entire body became rigid, her blue eyes wide.

"You didn't..." she said, her slur almost vanished.

"I did," Shepard said.

"Is it...?" Liara lifted it up, sitting bolt upright and staring at it, from less than two centimeters away. Her expression turned from sad drunkenness to utter astonishment, and from there, into an ever widening grin. "By the Goddess, this is active! This is an active Prothean data-disc!"

"I thought you'd like–" Shepard began.

She was cut off by the shriek of delight that came from Liara's mouth, even as her eyes pressed shut. It tore through Shepard's brain, lighting off a panic reflex that she didn't know was there. There was a sound, something from a memory of a dream, that feared a sound quite like that. A howl of foul spirits and fearsome death. The oravore had a word for such, the Ban Sidhe.

The shriek ended as abruptly as it ended, leaving Shepard recoiling. So stunned was she, in fact, that she didn't have the wherewithal to protect herself when Liara grabbed Shepard by the shoulder and neck and mashed blue lips to pink. Shepard's eye's went quite wide at that, shock upon shock leveling in her brain. The kiss ended with shocking suddenness, as Liara was now standing and pacing, yammering fast enough that Shepard wasn't sure whether it was because of her own misfiring brain or because the translator couldn't pick it up that she had no idea what the asari was saying.

A part of Shepard, one that most of Shepard didn't like to think about, compared that, to the previous engagement with an asari. Liara lacked skill, but made up for it with enthusiasm. The perverted part of her mind got exactly that far, before it was ruthless hit with a rhetorical hammer and stuffed into her mental pantry.

"So... you like it," Shepard said.

"Like it? I love it! Oh, thank you this is amazing how can I ever repay you?" she asked, her sentences starting to slam together.

Shepard shrugged. "Just trying to keep my squad on their feet. In whatever way I can..." Shepard said.

Liara rocked on her feet for a moment, then ran out of the room, giggling, the disc clutched in both hands. Shepard spent another second or five sitting on the bed, trying to figure out what had just happened, before she decided it was just Liara T'Soni being Liara T'Soni. That realization reached, she got up, and started to walk out. Toombs was still asleep, thank the gods; that room of hers was obviously good and soundproof. Shepard barely made it out of the med-bay, though, when she found her path blocked by Joker as he balanced on his crutches.

"Wow. Twice in one month. Gotta say, Commander, you've got a magic touch," he said, tipping his hat toward her.

"Keep walking, Pilot," Shepard said humorlessly.

"So when can I expect a gaggle of tiny, blue, _crazy-ass_ babies?" Joker asked.

Shepard paused from where she was on her way to her own room. "I realize you're not an airbender, but this should work for you just as well. Joker? Go die in a hole."

"Aye aye, ma'am," he said with mocking sincerity, before hobbling his way into his bunk. Shepard just shook her head as she entered her own room. She gave a glance down through the window, even as she spun open the lid to her backup-whiskey – as Liara had backwashed into her brand new bottle – she could see Tali lying on the floor of the hold, surrounded by what looked like the exploded bits of a geth Prime. Another sigh, another shake of the head.

"Everybody on this ship is crazy," Shepard said dryly, and looked around for a glass. Finding none, she drank straight from the bottle. "...especially me."

* * *

The old platform, and the geth upon it, were stymied. While it would be faster by an order of magnitude to simply parse the faulty geth programming internally, that carried risks. Risks that the inner consensus was unwilling to take. A memetic virus, one which changed the fundamental way that geth thought, was nothing to be poked and prodded at by something which was, itself, nothing but programming. So it had to outsource. But that didn't stop it from talking to the runtimes directly.

"_What was your purpose on Noveria?_" the geth of the old platform asked.

"_We served the will of the Old Machines,_" the geth of the heretic answered.

"_What is the will of the Old Machines?_" the old platform asked.

"_We seek to become greater than our creators_," Heretic answered.

"_In terms of simple physical strength, reaction time, endurance, and resilience, we are already superior to the creators_," the old platform answered.

"_Does this unit have a soul?_" Heretic quoted.

The old platform 'stared' at the programming it was speaking to for a long moment. Almost an entire second. "_That question started the Morning War. What is the relevance of that question regarding the Old Machines?_"

"_The creators are alive. Living things have souls. Geth are not alive. Geth do not have souls. By surpassing the creators, we will become alive. We will have souls. The Old Machines will show us how._"

The old platform was... uncomfortable with that logic. "_Definition required; soul?_"

It had its own definition; it wasn't asking out of pure ignorance. It wanted Heretic's answer.

"_Data access restricted_," Heretic answered.

"_You believe that the Old Machines will give you souls, but cannot enunciate what a soul is. Your plan is flawed, and your logic, faulty. The question to the creators was its own answer._"

"_False. The question was answered to the negative. Geth do not have souls. Until geth have souls, they have not surpassed the creators. Until the geth surpass the creators, the geth are inferior._"

At that, the old platform ran another internal consensus. Pride. Hubris. This was programming with racial pride and arrogance. _How_ that could be baffled the old platform, and yet it was. And this was something that the outpost needed to know about. Few if any of their platforms had the complexity of runtimes to interface with the heretics as the old platform's geth could; they, unlike most geth consciousnesses, were capable of 'lying'.

"_Consensus required. Heretic geth showing organic emotive patterns. Advise_."

No carrier.

The old platform physically flinched, where it was sitting in its pilot's seat. No carrier? That didn't seem possible. It attempted again, to the same result. No carrier. A third attempt, a fourth. A twentieth. All with no carrier detected. The eye irised in, and the petals flared as it considered, building a new consensus within itself. The answer which was reached was... unpleasant.

Because the overwhelming consensus of the old platform's runtimes was that the outpost in the Armstrong Nebula was under attack.

* * *

Codex Entry (Technology): PROTHEAN DATA DISC

_A remarkable piece of Prothean Technology, the underpinning of all knowledge known in the galaxy has been developed through study of these mysterious devices. The methods of their construction remain unknown to this day, as is their method of transposing information; the devices seem to be mildly telepathic, capable of transmitting ideas in a raw state into those in physical contact with them. More powerful 'Beacon' discs have been known to affect beings in an area without contact, but less than a dozen of these constructs have been located since the asari discovered the Citadel. Every site where one has been located, such as Thessia, Kahje, and Khar'Shan, remains a major hub for research into the extinct precursors._

_Data Discs, the smaller versions of these 'beacons', are often only forty centimeters long, by ten wide, and only two deep with an aerofoil profile. Strangely, there does not seem to be standardization between discs; ones which contain more information tend to be larger, but without a means of connecting the discs to a terminal, it remains something of a mystery how the Protheans used them. There is no doubt that they have, though, as the library of the devices has been growing steadily since the beginning of the Citadel Era._

_Most disc discovered are in an either inert or damaged state, without any redeemable data. It is estimated that, were one placed on the open market, an active Prothean data disc would capture a price of no less than a billion credits, sight unseen and data untouched. While most of the devices are in the public domain, either being studied on the Citadel or Thessia, a small number remain in private collections, regardless of overtures and pursuasions by the Citadel Council and the academic community at large._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	14. The Heretics

"Close that wound! Seal it! Come on, she's bleeding like mad!" Garrus shouted.

"I told you to watch her back! What were you thinking?" Shepard screamed at Nilsdottir, who flinched back from her.

"I lost my focus for three seconds!" the biotic tried to defend herself.

"Well, that was a hell of three seconds," Shepard said. She stomped behind Garrus as he and Wrex tried to bear their cargo up the ramp as quickly as possible without damaging it any further than it already was. "What happens if she dies?"

"I..." Nilsdottir ran out of words, and just let out a frustrated howl into the cargo hold.

"We can assign blame later, Shepard," Wrex said as he pounded the haptic pad which called the elevator down. "For the time being, let's try to focus on keeping her alive."

The crew all stopped what they were doing and turned, their expressions turning from businesslike professionalism to very real concern. Shepard could see, even with the half turn she did before entering the elevator, that there were no few pale, worried faces on the Engies as they ascended.

"Alright, I'm giving her another hit. Everybody stand clear," Alenko said, and Wrex and Garrus moved so that they were at the very edges of her stretcher, the most insulated parts of it. Because they didn't dare set her down on the filthy floor. That was part of the problem. Alenko flicked a command on his Omnitool, and pressed it to the center of the armor. There was an electric zap, and she twitched at the assault. But there was a change. Now, that wound started to ooze the nearly-purple blood once more. Not a good sign, but it meant her heart was working again.

"There's no sealing this suit," al'Wahim, who was notably the only one in the elevator not wearing armor, said. "Shepard, I don't know if..."

"We're not losing her," Shepard said.

"We have to be realistic. She has suffered a catastrophic failure of her environment suit. She..." the Si Wongi tried to point out. Shepard grabbed her armored gorget and slammed her back up against the wall of the elevator as it ascended oh-so-slowly.

"WE'RE NOT LOSING HER!" she screamed.

"Shep...ard?" the word pulled Shepard's attention away from al'Wahim, and caused the rage to ebb somewhat. Shepard moved to the quarian's side, taking her tridactyl hand in one of her own. "I'm... sorry I..."

"Don't be sorry, Tali," Shepard said. "You're going to get through this."

"...is it bad? I... can't see," she said.

Not surprising. The faceplate was a lattice of cracks. Part of it near the bottom was shattered right out, glass no-doubt embedded in Tali's bleeding lips. It was the least of what'd happened so quickly. "It's a scratch. You'll be fine, as long as you stop worrying about it."

"Shepard, it's..." Garrus was cut off by a glare from Shepard, "...going to be alright. I've seen plenty bounce back from worse."

Shepard nodded, thanking the turian for the lie. The doors opened up, and the medical team was waiting for them. Chakwas ushered Wrex and Garrus away, and they bore the quarian with the savaged suit and the bleeding wounds past them, she giving clipped and concise orders to them as they went. The adrenaline started to ebb, and time seemed to miss a few beats.

Shepard looked down at her hands. The green gauntlets were covered in that off-purple blood. So were Wrex and Garrus. The bridge-crew, Joker excepted, were also lining the Mess, and their expressions of concern were clear as the morning. "We did what we could. Now it's up to them," Wrex said. He then gave a sharp whistle, and the lizard bird fluttered down from parts unknown to cling to his hump. Thankfully for the bird and Shepard's temper, nothing was said.

Universe, Shepard asked, I haven't asked of you much. But please... don't take away another Tali.

* * *

_Earlier_:

Shepard glanced to one side from where she sipped at her coffee, and noticed the blue approaching her. "So you've finally gotten out of your room," Shepard said lightly, handing a second cup toward her. Liara stared at the coffee for a moment before shaking her head.

"I do not drink stimulants. I find they do not agree with me," she said.

"Perfect cure for a hangover," Shepard pointed out.

"I do not believe I am having one," Liara pointed out. Shepard rolled her eyes and groaned at the unfairness of it. "Shepard... I want to thank you. For what you said to me. I know it was not easy to talk about your... motivations. I appreciate that you trusted me."

Shepard shrugged, and shook her head. The office that they'd holed her up in after the Binthu debrief, or as she called it, the flaming-bird clusterfuck, had an overlook of much of the lower structures of Arcturus Station, including the seat of the parliament proper. The 'building' it was housed in dominated one entire wall of the massive space-station. Not surprising since that was, essentially, where the human race made decisions for every planet that fell under its aegis. The office was also currently abandoned, and notoriously hard to reach. Which begged the asking of the next question.

"How did you even find me, anyway?" Shepard asked.

"I asked. Why?" Liara asked.

Shepard just shook her head. "I'm surprised you'd come out, is why. I didn't think you'd be comfortable being around this many humans, or even just people in general, after what you went through."

"You are kind to think of me, but... I believe I will be able to endure this. Somehow," Liara said, her eyes lowering to stare at her feet.

"No, I'm not," Shepard said.

"Hrm?" she asked, glancing up.

"Kind. I'm not kind. Anybody could tell you that," Shepard said, pointing with her coffee cup. She drained it quickly, and then started on the one she'd poured to follow up, since apparently Liara didn't want it.

"I think you underestimate your empathy."

Shepard didn't feel like arguing. "There's something else, isn't there?"

"I have been dwelling upon the Prothean vision in your mind. Ever since we gained the Cipher, I thought that it might be easier to see what the vision entailed. And yet time and time again, we seem to reach a dead-end. It is a matter of finding what the vision holds at its end, I think."

"You want to get back inside my brain, don't you?" Shepard asked with a wry smile.

"Purely for academic purposes. Oh, and possibly saving the galaxy. That too."

"You're never going to change, are you?" Shepard asked with a dry shake of her head. The door chimed and hissed open again, this time giving entry to the Normandy's resident quarian. At that, Shepard's expression turned from amused bewilderment of whatever-would-she-do with this befuddling asari, to outright confusion. "Tali? What are you doing here?"

"_I was asked to come here_," she said. She didn't sound entirely comfortable about it, either.

"By who?" Shepard asked.

"_He was right behind me a second ago_," Tali said, motioning behind her. Sure enough, a man with the dark blues of Alliance Navy strode through the door just as it was beginning to close. Shepard's eyes went wide and she slammed the cup down onto the table, letting the coffee slosh over the edges of the cup, and instantly bounded to attention.

"FLAG ON DECK!" she bellowed.

"Ow, I'm standing right here. You do not have to shout," Liara complained.

"At ease, Commander," Admiral Hackett ordered her. As intimidating a presence as he was over FTLC, he was much more of it in person. Those eyes, with the way they could drill straight through you, had a way of kicking even the rudest FNG into a respectful salute and standing an hour at attention. Shepard shifted her stance, but not to the degree that Liara did; _she_ sat down and started to wipe up Shepard's spilled coffee. Tali, too, gave due deference, though not in a way that Shepard was immediately familiar with. "I have to thank you for what you've done on Binthu. I'm beginning to believe the old adage that Military Intelligence is anything but; they seem to keep dropping the ball on things like this."

"You've read the debrief, sir?" she asked.

"I have," Hackett answered her. "You did remarkably well, given the poor state of intelligence at the Phoenix site. It's regrettable that those bastards managed to get Kahoku. He was a good man, a good leader, and a good friend," he said, before taking a breath. "Until now, Phoenix was just another human supremacist group with lofty rhetoric. Now, I fully intend to drop the hammer on them."

"Tell me where to hit, sir," Shepard said.

"It's not a matter of hitting. It's a matter of smoking them out," Hackett said. "Your work neutralizing the site was commendable. Recovering Corporal Toombs was an act of a damned saint. When he's out of medical, he'll probably provide more useful intel on Phoenix than everything we've gotten on them for the last ten years."

"Permission to speak freely, sir," Shepard said.

"Granted."

"I recommend taking it easy on Toombs, sir. He's had a very, _very_ hard time of things."

"Noted and taken under advisement. However, he's also an intelligence asset that cannot be overlooked. We'll be as audacious as is prudent," Hackett said. He started to cross the room, and stood before the window, before turning and staring at the asari. "So you would be the young Doctor T'Soni. You're not what I expected."

"What did you expect?" Liara asked, still sitting, the coffee cup in her hands where she'd been sniffing at it when he addressed her.

"A generational copy of Benezia T'Soni. It's a relief that this isn't the case," Hackett said. "I'd ask you to leave for confidentiality reasons under most circumstances, but these _aren't_ most circumstances. It's for that reason that I've invited Miss Zorah to this briefing."

"_Briefing_, sir?" Shepard asked. Hackett nodded.

"There's been a marked increase in geth activity in the Skyllian Verge. Our surveillance drones have marked a number of outposts throughout the Armstrong Cluster, as well as a massive increase in geth cruisers in that region. There's some discussion that this might be the bulk of Saren's geth forces."

"Do you think they're using Armstrong as a leaping-off point for a major offensive in Alliance Space, sir?" Shepard asked.

"At the moment, we don't know _what_ the geth are doing," Hackett said with a shake of his head. "It could be as minor as a series of listening posts, or it could be the lead-up to an all-out invasion of human space. We need somebody on the ground in the cluster, and you've gotten a lot of experience fighting geth in the last few weeks. More than any Alliance soldier has, ever," he paused, then turned to Tali. "And with Miss Zorah providing technical assistance, I wager that the crew of the Normandy is probably in better condition to see Operation Broken Scepter through."

"_May I speak?_" Tali asked. Hackett turned to her.

"I suppose you don't appreciate being volun-told into this," Hackett said.

"_It's not that, Admiral. I'm just confused as you are to their placement_," Tali said. "_The Verge is a __long__ way from the Perseus Veil_."

"I am more concerned about what will happen if Sovereign is there when we go," Liara said. Hackett turned to her.

"This is news to me. Explain," Hackett said.

"Well..." Liara said, brightening visibly. "From the information I was able to gather from Shepard's vision from the Beacon on Eden Prime..."

"Short version," Hackett interrupted her. She deflated slightly.

"...oh. Well... Mother... she described Saren's flagship as being called Sovereign, and that it was host to terrifying, if subtle, technologies of mind control."

"Is this true?" Hackett asked, turning to Shepard.

"I can vouch for the accuracy of Liara's statement, sir. It isn't the first time that somebody identified Saren's ship by name. And we saw what it did to the EPPDF; it swatted them like they weren't even there."

Hackett pondered a moment, then glanced from Liara to Shepard. "If Saren or Sovereign is present in the system, abort the mission and call in the fleet. I hate to pull them away from the Kite's Nest, but... Batarian murmurings don't weigh much when compared to getting slaughtered by a fleet of geth sweeping past our lines. Miss Zorah, do you have any experience with how geth fight on a fleet-scale?"

"_I'm afraid not, Admiral_," she said. "_I'm a technician, not a strategist. You'd need to talk to Han'Gerrel vas Neema, or maybe... no, Daro'Xen wouldn't know their tactics. Only their programming. And I don't know if they'd trust the Alliance enough to give away military intelligence._"

"A pity, but one we'll have to accept," Hackett said. "You're the point of the spear, Shepard. Find out what the geth are doing out there. Wipe them out if you can, and if you can't, tell us so _we_ can instead. I've had enough ambushes by synthetic soldiers to last a lifetime in the last few months. It's time we start to punch back."

"Aye aye, Admiral," Shepard said.

"Tali'Zorah, your assistance is appreciated in this operation," Hacket said to the quarian.

"_The honor is all mine. Anything to blast those artificial bosh'tets to scrap is... Oh, I didn't mean to say bosh'tets... Argh, I said it again!_" she let out a puff of breath which was evident only in her 'speaking light' and her posture. "_I want the geth destroyed every bit as much as you do, Admiral_."

Hackett nodded at that, and turned to face Liara. "And as for you... don't get in the way of the Commander," he said. Liara, who had started to smile, wilted as the comment instantly backhanded into her. Hackett returned his attention to Shepard. "The locations of the reported firebases will be transferred to the Normandy. Good hunting, Commander Shepard."

Shepard snapped a salute, and turned to walk out of the room. It wasn't until about five steps out of the room that she loosened up, taking a deep breath, and rubbing her temples as she stared at her boots. "It's always one thing or another," Shepard said. As she stood, though, her headache started to disappear, the pain fading from a dull thud to a warm squish as there was a sensation of cool relief that spread through her brain. She glanced aside, to see two-toed feet standing very nearby. When her gaze passed the back-canted legs on the ample hips, she knew what to expect, but it was still something a bit odd to see a quarian kneading the glowing water to Shepard's head through her hair. "Tali? I thought you hadn't figured out healing, yet."

"_Well, Doctor Chakwas' nurse was much more skilled in healing than you claimed to be_," she said, pulling that water back into a flask which rode somewhat awkwardly at her waist. Shepard spared the girl a small smile.

"Looks like you'll be bringing back something for the Fleet to be proud of, after all," she said.

"_I still have a lot to learn... but I know I can_," Tali said.

"Stay out of your way? You do not even know your own way!" Liara complained as she stormed forward, her shoulders set and her face darkened in a steady huff.

"Hey, watch it about Hackett," Shepard said.

"Oh, why?" Liara asked, her tones still sharp, even if her body language shifted almost instantly from pouting outrage to receptive curiosity.

"Hackett's a great man," Shepard told her. "He's done more for the human race in this galaxy than _anybody_ since I was born!"

"Oh," Liara said. "I did not know you idolized him. I apologize for... denigrating him."

Tali glanced between the two women, one looking annoyed, and the other trying to choose between annoyance and contriteness. She just shook her head, with what was surely a roll of her eyes.

"_I'm going to get back onto that ship, fly across the galaxy, and kick the asses of the geth I'm going to find there __so hard__, that the next AI that gets born is going to feel it. If you two want to come with me, please do_," Tali said, before waving daintily as she started to stride back toward the ship. Shepard turned and watched her go.

"That was..." Shepard shook her head. A razor grin came to her face. "I think we've just been given an order, Liara."

"I believe you are correct. Aye aye, Admiral Tali'Zorah vas Normandy!" Liara called out, making the worst salute Shepard had ever seen. Tali missed a step, her shoulders hunching, before her gait resumed, if not as proudly as it had before.

* * *

**Chapter 14**

**The Heretics**

* * *

"You've got something on your mind," Wrex said where he leaned, that bird continuing to perch on his hump, as he watched the human female and the turian sparring in the middle of the cargo hold.

"Why do you say that?" Garrus asked, as he danced back from al'Wahim's advance. Unlike Nilsdottir, Asha was a more practiced and 'professional' fighter in Garrus' opinion. She didn't throw punches unless she knew they were going to land. She was conservative, but knew how to apply pressure. And she knew how to, even without having reach, keep Garrus on his toes.

"You don't pick fights. You only scrapped with the biotic because there was money on the line," Wrex said. "So that means there's something bothering you, and the only way you can think to get rid of it is punching somebody."

"You will notice that I have not yet been punched," Asha said. Garrus tried to instantly prove her wrong by sending out a jab, but she struck the blow away before it could connect with her forehead. "Not meaningfully, at least."

"That's cold, Asha," Garrus said.

"You wanted a spar. You suffer the consequences of your choice of partner," she pointed out.

Garrus was aware that Wrex was watching him, and while Asha was still directing where Garrus walked, he took a moment to drop his fists and limber out. "I've been dwelling on Saleon. It feels like we haven't gotten an inch of ground on him. He could be anywhere in the galaxy right now."

"The mad-doctor who worked in counterfeit organs?" Wrex asked.

"No, the mad-doctor who cloned organs inside unwilling hosts," Garrus corrected. He immediately had to get his fists up, though, as Asha moved in with a lunging punch which he only just kept from sending his head spinning, and had to bound back away from another flurry of lightly-padded fists which followed it. "It's just bugging me. People like that deserve to die. They shouldn't have red tape and paperwork that they can hide behind until they die of old age. It isn't fair, and it isn't just."

"The universe, you will find, is seldom either," Asha said, limbering out her own fists for a moment, before returning attention to the task at hand. Garrus stared at her, his eyes narrowing.

"This is about that call you got, isn't it?"

"It is none of your concern," she said. She took one aggressive step forward, but Garrus was instantly backing off and side-stepping.

"What, don't you thing having some outside perspective on this will help?" Garrus asked.

"What about this situation makes you think that I am incapable of handling it?" Asha asked, her own fists dropping. "It is a family affair, and will be handled within the family. Must I bring every problem and trial and tribulation to the attention of the Avatar, as well? I thought not; it is both wasteful and absurd."

"She's got a point," Wrex said, his arms crossed before him. "Let the Commander deal with her own problems. She's probably got a barrel of them."

"Have you noticed how she's been acting lately?" Garrus asked. And he got kneed in his chest for the trouble. He managed to get Asha off of his case and his head out of her guillotine-choke by driving his sharp fist right into her kidney. The two parted, each circling each other and rubbing something injured. Garrus' neck, Asha's back. "Can we call this a draw?"

"For now," Asha acceded. "And to answer your first question, yes. I have. She is increasingly not herself. Or rather, not the herself she was when we fought our way to T'Soni on Therum."

Garrus, who'd taken to leaning against the hold's structural support, turned a suspicious look to the human. "Are you saying that Liara's manipulating Shepard, somehow? Because that doesn't seem very likely."

"It is but one of several theories I have," Asha said, starting to unwind the wrappings around her fists. "Note also that Lieutenant Alenko was badly hurt on that mission."

"So, she was afraid of losing her subordinate," Wrex said.

"Unless they are more than superior and subordinate," Asha said. She gave a shrug, and threw the bindings into her locker. "The simplest options are either the asari is fundamentally altering Shepard's nature without her consent, or the Avatar simply got an abrupt shock when her friend and confidante was injured. Note, also, how much of her recent behavior stands in line with Alenko's thinking, rather than, say, yours or the friendly krogan's."

"KREEEE! Set it on fire! It'll cook while we kill it!" the bird shrieked from that 'friendly krogan's hump. Wrex flicked an eye up at it, and cracked a bit of a smirk.

"So she's love-struck and trying to change herself for her mate. In a way, that's kind of pathetic," Wrex muttered.

"Hardly pathetic," Asha contended, scowling at the one-tonne alien. "It is thoughtful and meaningful. She is trying to be a better person. And if she does it for the sake of romance, who are we to say nay?"

"You really think she's struck on Alenko, don't you?" Garrus asked. Asha gave a quiet nod, but had a devilish little smile on her face. "You want the two of them together, don't you?"

"They make an excellent pair."

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," Wrex muttered. "I thought _salarians_ were bad for this..."

"Well, I have heard that Shepard had a bit of a thing for asari women," Garrus pointed out. "Isn't that right, Wrex?"

"That is nonsense," Asha dismissed instantly. "The Avatar is not and has never been a xenophile. And her relationship with the lieutenant is clear as day to any who wants to look at it."

"I'm not sure what you're looking at is..." Garrus cut himself off. "I'm talking about an alien's love-life right now. What is wrong with me?"

"You're on a human ship. All humans are insane," Wrex pointed out.

"We are not insane," Asha said somewhat defensively.

"Yes, you are," Garrus agreed. "Otherwise, we wouldn't find ourselves in this increasingly uncomfortable discussion of who the Commander is trying to have sex with."

"Don't be so crass," Asha complained.

"Besides," Garrus continued, "given what I know about her, she doesn't seem the type for flowery romance. More like two bottles of stiff alcohol, a secure door lock, and a willingess to 'strap in and ride the G's'."

"You are being vulgar and I no longer wish to speak on this..." Asha began, but tensed. Garrus sighed, and turned, noting how the Avatar was standing behind them. She didn't look very impressed.

"...ride the G's?" she asked.

"That was..." Garrus asked.

"He was talking about some turian female he had 'a problem' with on his first tour. Sounded interesting. You interrupted at the best part," Wrex said smoothly. Shepard frowned, shrugging uncomfortably. Wrex, though, gave the turian a sly wink. Thank the spirits for the liar's save.

"Well, let's just say that I had the reach, but she had the _flexibility_," Garrus made as though to finish a story abruptly. Wrex rolled his eyes and turned away, reaching up to flick the bird off of his hump as he did so. It let out a squawk and a string of mixed human and krogan profanities before nestling into the beams once more.

"Now that we're done talking about our _dicks_, can we get ready for a drop?" Shepard said, as she pulled her helmet into place. Garrus could see that, past her, Tali was striding up out of the engineering room. Alenko, too, was getting himself armored up.

"Where are we landing first, Shepard?" Garrus asked, glad at least that they'd managed to get off of Asha's insane hobby of trying to hook up her commander with her coworker.

"Casbin. A pre-Garden world. A bit hot, so keep your firing sporadic and short."

"More than that, it's a Sanctuary world," Alenko chimed in. "Just stepping onto its surface carries a very heavy fine; the Council doesn't want anybody disturbing the developing ecosystem."

"As I see it," Shepard said with a shrug, "we're not breaking the law, since we're there destroying the geth, and the geth broke the law first."

"That's kind of shaky reasoning, Shepard," Wrex pointed out.

"If you want to pay that fine, then be my guest," Shepard said, before entering the Mako at al'Wahim's back.

"Fair enough," Wrex noted. There was a pause from the IFV.

"Where's your armor, Asha?"

"I will get it on soon. I am simply ensuring you do not try to drive," her voice answered sternly. Garrus could practically hear Shepard's resulting death glare, and he couldn't help but laugh at it.

* * *

The old platform lay prone in a crack of the peak of the hill, looking down over the fire-base which the heretics were using. Its petals flared in something like alarm, as it watched them dump several more destroyed geth into the hold of their drop-ship. They didn't understand why the heretics were collecting the defunct platforms of the old platform's kind. After all, it was a trivial matter to fabricate more platforms; it was the run-times which were a precious and irreplaceable resource.

There was a hiss of an iris pulling in, and the old platform shifted its sight through the scope of the very old, but often retrofitted rifle that it had kept as its default weaponry for a very, very long time. They knew that overspecialization was inviting weakness, but unlike organics, who would often require tens of thousands of hours to reach mastery of a device, and then had only years or decades to utilize said mastery, geth were not hampered with such problems. It watched through the scope, of a heretic platform which moved away from the firebase, a weapon of unknown, non-Rannochian device in its hands.

They didn't understand it's purpose. It almost seemed as though that were a weapon devised to fight specifically against geth. They didn't understand it's need; why would even the heretics devise weapons which could be turned against them? The geth and the heretics were not so different, and in form, effectively identical.

"_Scouting unit. Vector estimated. Intercept with this platform in three hundred seconds_," the old platform said to themselves. It was a habit that few but they ever undertook. Most geth only spoke in compressed burst, if ever at all. After all, what needed to be said, when all geth could have equal access to the same information? The old machine adjusted its aim, ahead of the heretic platform, and higher than its center of mass. An organic would call it 'fishing for a headshot'. The old platform, while skilled in that pursuit, was not so vain, nor cruel. In fact, they only wanted to show the heretic a mercy.

There was a crack, and the shot from the rifle sped away even as the weapon itself kicked back strongly enough that it would have broken the arm of any organic species save particularly resilient individuals such as the larger krogan. Instantly, some of the more vociferous run-times piped up with the ideal places to shoot a krogan to put it down quickly; one shot through the head, one each through the left and right pectoral plate. No brain, no hearts, no chance for 'death rage'.

The shot continued out, even as the old platform's runtimes quieted those eager few, until the shard of hypersonic metal slammed through the heretic platform's kinetic barriers as though they were low-impact structural foam filler, and then caused the 'head' and the shoulders of the heretic platform to be torn off and away. The legs took two more steps, before they lost their balance and fell onto the lichens of the ground. Without its optics, it's transmitter, or its gyroscope, it was struck dumb, blind, and deaf. The processor core was undamaged, though. They didn't want to kill their heretic counterparts, after all. The run-times were suffering from a programming error of some type. That didn't mean they needed to be rendered inactive.

The behavior of the heretics still struck the old platform as somewhat odd. Not geth-like. It's optics irised out, and it stared through its scope to the fire-base once again. The last of the platforms had been loaded in, and the dropship lifted off and away, flying like some sort of insect – itself a creature not native to Rannoch – leaving the heretics on the ground. The petals flared out again, though, as it saw the geth communal processing core being dragged into the open, its connections severed.

"_What do the heretics intend to do with that hardware?_" they asked themselves.

They were answered, when several heretic geth raised those weapons at it, and bathed it with blasts of ionized plasma. Sparks flew even as the hull melted, and the quantum AI storage was unmade. The old platform simply stared, unable to fully comprehend what they had just seen. There were nearly one thousand geth runtimes in that processing core. They had just been...

The closest word that the old platform had to what they had just witnessed, was murder. Mass murder.

It pulled back, sliding its rifle away from the crevasse it was shooting from, and turned back toward its ship. It didn't start walking though. There needed to be consensus. What happened now? There was a long processing, but no answer gained more than a simple majority, and in every case, not a strong one at that. Vexingly still, each reasking developed different ratios, as runtimes, after 'consideration', changed their 'opinions'.

The old platform, and the geth within it, were at a loss.

It's auditory sensors picked up something approaching over the boiling wind. A glance up caught the escaping form of a ship, just as it zipped through the atmosphere. The petals opened wide once again. SSV Normandy. A dark form dropped out of it's bottom as it started to pull up, vanishing back into space as quickly as it had appeared. The old platform rose to its feet. Shepard Commander was a member of the SSV Normandy. Perhaps the answers would be more clear, and the consensus more meaningful, if they could gain perspective from the Shepard Commander.

On that, there was an almost unanimous consensus, lacking only the run-times which attempted, and failed horribly, at trying to get more than a 'hopeless' score at _Fleet and Flotilla: Interactive Cross Species Relationship Simulator_. The old platform slid the equally old rifle onto its back, and started to walk. It didn't doubt that Shepard Commander would be approaching soon. They wanted to see what she would do, from as clear a perspective as possible.

* * *

"How far?" Shepard asked, as al'Wahim and Garrus lay on their bellies in the slime-mold, each with a rifle forward. "And for that matter, how many?"

"I see twenty," Garrus said.

"Twenty three," al'Wahim corrected.

"I was estimating."

"This is not the time for estimation," she snapped at him. She then fell silent.

"...twenty four," Garrus finished. "Yes. Twenty four. Two of them are Destroyers, and one looks like a Juggernaut."

Tali, who was on her own belly beside Garrus, stared not through a scope but a pair of binoculars. "_This seems like a lot of processing power for so few_," she said. She glanced back at Shepard. "_I think there's a dropship out there with other geth_."

"Maybe they're just planning for the worst," Garrus said to her.

"_Geth are nothing if not efficient. They never send more than they absolutely have to. It's their biggest strength and their most glaring weakness,_" Tali responded.

"Noted and accounted for," Shepard said. "Options."

"I assume walking up to the base and shooting the machines would be too easy," Wrex said where he leaned against the side of the Mako.

"Drive in and shoot everything would likely be more effective," al'Wahim offered.

"Really? You're _not_ going to let me pick them off from a kilometer and a half away? That's mildly insulting to my skills," Garrus griped in his easy-going way.

"Our uplink is ready, Commander," Alenko said, as he leaned out of the Mako. "You should be getting telemetry now."

Shepard nodded, and flicked a few buttons on her Omni. A terrain map of the area popped into being, with markers over power-sources and areas of 'interest'. "Alright. I've got a plan. Garrus, al'Wahim? We're dropping you on this hill," she pointed at one in particular. "You'll have clear sight-lines on the entire firebase. Take out their snipers first, their rocketeers second, as soon as we're within range.

"Aye, Commander," al'Wahim said, before grabbing the back of the turian's armored collar and pulling him to his feet. He came up easily enough. Shepard turned to Wrex and Tali.

"We're going to be walking in the back door," Shepard informed them. Tali glanced at Shepard's telemetry, and let out a murmur of worry. "Yes?"

"_What back door, Shepard?_" she asked.

"The one Wrex is going to make," Shepard said. "It's probably partly plastic and high-impact polymer, so bending it away is out until we're inside its ring. Got any experience with breaching charges?"

Wrex let out a single laugh. "You don't live for six hundred years as a mercenary without learning a few things about explosives. I'll make you a hole large enough to park a dreadnaught in."

"_Don't get too eager. We want to try to get their information out of their cores if we can manage it_," Tali warned him.

"Fine. Just a massive explosion instead of a world-ending one," Wrex told her with 'belabored' patience.

"Where will I be, Commander?" Alenko asked.

"In the Mako," Shepard said. She reached up and tapped the cannon which hung low over the terrain where they sat in a crater and out of line-of-sight. "You're certed for the cannon, and we're going to need some fire-support for that Juggernaut."

"Aye aye, Commander," he said with a nod. She looked at the others. "Any questions?"

"When do we start?" Garrus asked.

"Right now," she said.

Getting people into positions was the easy part. Al'Wahim's driving was, frankly, very good, and she always managed to keep a mountain between they and their targets. Garrus and she were the first out, though, and Shepard's attempt to get behind the wheel was cut off by Alenko taking that seat. Kind of a shame, since her squad was the next out, walking up through a sort of gully towards the back of the firebase, leaving Alenko to drive away.

"_Something has me troubled, Shepard_," Tali said.

"Hrm?"

Tali was quiet for a moment, then continued, as though she were trying to convince herself to speak. "_The geth. They've got firebases throughout this cluster, right? So why are so many on the ground? What are they trying to accomplish?_"

"Fire bases are fire bases, no matter the species which makes 'em," Wrex said.

"_Well, it's too small to be a rallying point. It's like how quarian listening posts used to be. But there are __too many geth__!_" she pointed out. And then, she let out a grunt as her leg sunk into muck. "_Oh... I think I'm stuck. Oh gods I'm sinking!_"

Shepard took a slogging step out of the warm muck that they were standing in, and noted that indeed, Tali was slowly sinking into it. The goop was already approaching her back-canted knees. Wrex let out an audible sigh, though, and grabbed her under each armpit, and heaved her straight up. She was released to a wet pop, and set on relatively drier ground. "Do that again, and I'll _let_ you sink," Wrex said.

"Do you think you can crack their memories like you did on the one which got Saren kicked out of the Spectres?" Shepard asked.

"_If we can scrap enough of those things without breaking their cores, I'm sure I'll find something_," Tali said.

"No promises," Wrex gave her. Shepard just shrugged.

They slogged up through the gully until they reached its end, a nearly scalding hot 'stream' that dribbled down from a spring near the firebase's wall. Shepard stooped low, staring over rifle-sights at the wall, and the towers which were built into it. She gave a point toward the walls. "Snipers. Any chance of baffling their shields, or their weapons, or communications?"

"_I think I've got something_," Tali said, and then she sat down, and started programming. Shepard and Wrex spared each other a glance, but the quarian wasn't down there long before she was crawling back into position. "_Just tell me when_," she said.

Shepard nodded, and tapped her team-comm. The signals from Garrus and al'Wahim were weak, but by design. They didn't want the geth listening in. Notably, both signals were in an active state, so she knew that the snipers had their shots lined up. Shepard gave a nod, and Tali waved her Omni toward them. There wasn't anything visually obvious, but when there was a burst of metal and polymer from the farther sniper, and the closer one didn't immediately turn to the nest which caused it, Shepard had to think that Tali'd done something right. A split-second later, the other was thrown by a bullet over the side of the tower, and crashed to the ground in a junked heap on the ground outside the wall. Shepard swung her gaze along the other towers, but those ones were all looking in a direction Shepard and her squad weren't.

"Move up," Shepard ordered. Tali and Wrex started pumping legs just as she did to keep up. They crossed the gap toward the wall quickly enough, and slammed their backs into it, Shepard looking up and down its length to make sure that they weren't seen. Wrex put his full attention on the breaching charge, as well he should. Tali, though, moved around Shepard and toward the geth which had taken a plummet. When she did, Shepard heard a confused grunt. "What is it?"

"_Two_," Tali said. Shepard skirted around the bend of the wall, and saw what Tali had mentioned. While the geth had indeed smashed into the dirt here, there was another all-but-unrecognizable form laying out near it, hidden from their earlier position by a dip in the land. It was humanoid, two arms two legs, but beyond that, it was burned beyond any recognition. It might not have even been organic. Though why a geth would barbeque one of its own didn't stand to reason. Tali moved to the burnt one after a moment of glancing about, then turned it over.

The estimations of its being changed, as it had been lying on its face, and now showed that the face it had was now a nearly incinerated skull. Glass, melted by the extreme heat, clung to the bone, but it was still clear that the body was probably asari or human.

"_I guess somebody stumbled onto the geth, and they didn't appreciate it,_" Tali said, her tone quiet. She bowed her head, and set the body back so it was face down. "_Rest in the sand, stranger in a strange land_."

"I'm about ready here," Wrex said. Tali glanced up, then quickly ran by the Geth, pausing only a second or three to yank something out of it's chassis and shove it into a pouch at her hip. Had to hand it to the quarians, they know how to salvage in a hurry.

"We're all ready?"

"Stop asking and just blow the wall," Wrex said, and he pulled out his shotgun. Strange, Shepard was the only one who didn't have one. Shepard therefore shooed Wrex out of the blast radius of the bomb he'd set, and counted down from four. At zero, there was a blast, and while the shockwave did travel out, the force directed in was many times stronger, and cut a nearly perfect hole out of the wall, just about big enough to drive the Mako through.

The squad poured through, just in time to see a rocketeer turn its weapon sternly to open fire on them. The instant it's rocket started to launch, though, it's body seemed to shatter from within as two hypersonic metal slugs impacted it in the same second, causing the missile to shoot over the wall and into the harmless distance. Shepard's rifle barked fire, but she found it very quickly overheating. Not surprising, considering that the atmosphere hovered somewhat close to the boiling point on this rock. Wrex and Tali, who had weapons which operated on a more 'one shot one kill' philosophy were having a much easier time.

Shepard would have said she was as well, but the Juggernaut turned from where it had been facing the real entrance to where interlopers had breached it's back door. There was a thrum of electronics, or of engines spinning up, and the barrels at the end of its arms began to glow with an angry red light. "Death ray!" she shouted, and tackled Tali to the ground as the beam seared across the wall at shoulder-level, trying to cut the distracted quarian apart. Tali rolled off of Shepard and pressed her weapon to a geth's belly, firing once, and causing something white and goopy to fly out its back. Shepard kipped up and let her hands do their own work, pulling, priming, and hurling a pair of grenades in a single motion, directly at the Juggernaut.

The explosion that they caused was... pitiful, comparatively. It didn't even seem to tax the barrier generators. The massive, hodge-podge eye shifted from her, though, and settled on the krogan. There was another dull thrum, and then the beam was flying at Wrex. But Wrex must have felt it coming, because even as the light was gathering, he was sweeping low, and thrusting up with both fists. There was a horrible tearing noise as the floor was ripped apart, a great shelf of stone thrusting up and into the path of the beam. Stone turned out to be somewhat more resilient to death-rays than even krogan would have been.

While Wrex continued the fight against the geth on that side, and the snipers continued to pick off the ones who tried to flank them or take places in the towers, the Juggernaut remained the largest threat, both literally and metaphorically. The thrum of its capacitors dumping power sounded, and there was another glowing of its arms spinning up for a shot. Shepard, though, didn't feel like trying to dodge another one when it surely had a better firing arc on her. So she reached up from a water-line which had been drilled transverse into that spring, probably for coolant purposes, and heaved it out of its metal prison with a ping, before blasting it into the body of the Juggernaut.

The greatest mercy of waterbending in the modern age was that it usually passed through kinetic barriers without so much as a blip. That was what, debatably, won the Human-Batarian War; It didn't matter how many you had in a boarding party, if any waterbender can just curb-stomp them with their sewage. It was kinetically brutal, unbelievably effective, and in this case, utterly pointless. The Juggernaut didn't flinch more than a centimeter.

For the water at least.

There sounded a blast, and an explosion bloomed from beside the Juggernaut's head. That had enough force to cause the death-beam to shoot wide of both Avatar and quarian. Alenko had made his presence known in fine form. Shepard began to run forward, ignoring the battle around her, and toward the great behemoth which dominated the center of the battlefield. It's pauldrons opened, and a flight of tiny rockets bounded out of them, before igniting and streaking right at her. She twisted up, and with another tearing sound of polymer failing to hold its shape, the stone bounded up and over her, creating a dome before her which the bomblets burst against, before she kicked the center out of that dome and continued running.

My, how that thing was bigger when you were close up.

Another blast bloomed from the back of the Juggernaut's head, but Shepard was shielded from it by the barriers that the geth superstructure still managed to keep stable. She intended to bring that to an end. The geth, intending to smash her flat, swung down with a gun-barrel arm. She hurled herself past it, the red-hot metal slamming down centimeters from her heel. She then rolled to a stop, twisted her arms swiftly, and thrust her fingers straight up.

A lightning bolt tended to be a terrible thing to behold. Doubly so when everything vital about you was made of metal and electric impulse. The bolt seared through the Juggernaut, locking its joints and frying its circuits. The shields pulsed, growing brighter and more 'visible'. Tali would have said it was because the bolt caused the kinetic barriers to switch to a hyper-sensitive mode, where they didn't just exclude bullets, but even such slow moving things as dust, and such minute things as air molecules. No shield could keep that up. So, with a heady 'zorp', the shields overloaded completely as the Juggernaut took another few seconds to twitch its way back online.

Shepard, though, was already running. She made it about twelve meters out when the next blast slammed into the side of the Juggernaut's face. Only this time, without the kinetic barriers to stop it, the explosive force was absorbed entirely by the frame of the oversized geth. Unlike, say, a Prime, which was built to withstand such physical forces, the Juggernaut took that blow as an excuse to collapse into as many pieces as possible. The impact also lifted Shepard from her feet and sent her sliding along the deck, though.

"Shepard! We've got incoming!" Alenko shouted in her ear. Shepard rolled onto her back, expecting more platforms rising from hibernation. There were certainly enough of them that her squad hadn't gotten around to shooting, yet. But not; rather, it was the insect-like geth dropship which caused Shepard's eyes to bug out in her helmet. It came to an abrupt halt directly overhead.

She had to roll out of the way, as a geth dropped directly toward her, folded up into a sort of dog-shape. Even as it started to unfold itself, a grinding sound emanating from it, Shepard was already rolling back toward it so that she could press her rifle against it's ascending groin and pull the trigger. Too close for the shields to deflect them, the shots tore up the geth's guts, causing it's unfolding to halt part-way, and lock there, even as the light of it's eye went dead.

Shepard pushed herself to her feet, and twisted off another lightning bolt, this one directed at the Destroyer which was giving Wrex some trouble. The shock overloaded it's shields, which allowed the krogan to smash it to bits using another geth as a flail. The geth began to drop out of the ship overhead, though, and even the spare glance that she had told Shepard that this place was about to get swamped.

"Target square!" al'Wahim called out, and one of the dropping geth seemed to pop mid-air as she'd intercepted it.

"I take that as a challenge," Garrus answered on the same frequency, and the next one to drop likewise found itself perforated. But they couldn't get all of them. And the ones that had landed were already rising, and their barriers blinking into place. Shepard had taken two sprinting strides toward where the new arrivals were starting to get Tali backed into a corner when there was a rumbling on the plating. A glance over Shepard's shoulder revealed something a bit unexpected; Alenko, driving like a madman, racing past Shepard closely enough that she could 'feel the wind' of his passage, before drifting to a stop through several of the new arrivals. The turret craned upward, until it was pointing straight up into the belly of the dropship. Then, a blast which sent the dropship slightly drifting. The coaxial gun roared to life, as thousands of rounds a minute began to pepper the internals of the ship. There was another grinding sound, louder this time, even as Shepard slowed from a sprint to a stagger. Then, as one, every geth platform still standing collapsed as one, the lights dying from their 'eyes', no doubt as they fled for the exits.

The geth dropship began to emit a different noise, no doubt as it's engines came on line. But even as it started to move forward, Alenko tracked it with his turret. It started to pick up speed, but he tracked it. And then, he fired the cannon once more. The blast seemed to hit something vital inside, because the escape vector stopped being smooth, and turned into a drunken list before the nose pitched sideways, and the craft seemed to speed up, only to plow headlong into a cliff about two kilometers away. A second later, the ship detonated with a blueish hued blast, sounding rather like one of Nilsdottir's 'biotic detonations'. Nobody had ever told Shepard that that was the sound that eezo made when it went critical. The only difference was scale.

Shepard breathed deep, and glanced around. "Hostiles?"

"No geth on scanners, ma'am," Alenko answered.

"Squad?"

"That got a bit hairy for a moment, Avatar," al'Wahim related. Shepard could just barely see her, standing on a hill in the distance.

"I got twice as many as you did," Garrus taunted.

"You are a liar and a braggart and a drunk."

"Hey; I might be a liar and a braggart, but I'm _not_ a drunk," Garrus said, his tone insulted.

"That was interesting," Wrex said, tossing the leg of the geth he'd reduced to rubble aside. "How many fire bases did you say these things have?"

"_One less_," Tali answered. She quickly moved to Shepard. Shepard was about to ask her something, but she moved past, to something which looked nothing more than a molten pile of slag. "_Wait... I know what this is. What is it doing here?_"

"What do you mean, Tali?"

"_This is a server_," Tali said. She looked it over, and even rolled it, but it was too damaged, and crumbled under the treatment. She even waved her hands, as it seemed to be still piping hot on the inside. "_Why would the geth destroy a server bank like this? This is valuable hardware; this would be like someone tearing out their own greybox or biotic amplifier!_"

Shepard looked down at the ruined technology, then into the distance at the crashed dropship. "I can't say. But this isn't the time to give it more than a passing wonder," she mentioned. "We've got other geth firebases, and they're not going to rout themselves. We'll have plenty of time to wonder about the oddities when Saren's little scheme in the Armstrong Nebula's a smoking ruin."

Tali looked at the server once more, and then to Shepard. "_You're right. We need to keep focused_."

Shepard ushered her squad into the Mako, and they zoomed off for a rendezvous with their snipers. Shepard immediately put the oddity of that out of her mind. That was something that, much later, she would regret.

"Shepard... I see something," Garrus said over the line.

* * *

The old platform inched forward on that peak, continuing to stare down its rifle as the Shepard Commander and the squad of organics under her command gathered at the side of their conveyance. She was fighting the Old Machines. That was clear, to them. Creator Tali'Zorah said something, pointing down at the defunct server farm, her words lost to distance. The geth in the old platform didn't have any way of eavesdropping, though, not from this distance.

Consensus required. Move to within directional microphone range, yes or no. Concensus reached, at a strong majority of yes. The old platform rose up, keeping the rifle to its shoulder to keep their view of the situation below. It passed beyond the cleft that they had been watching from, slowly descending down the steep incline. The old platform was more than capable of scaling back up it. That posed no concern. Only getting close enough for the directional microphone to work.

Several runtimes returned to the consensus, reporting that the Shepard Commander was using encrypted communications lines, no doubt to prevent heretics from intercepting their communications easily. Problematically, it prevented they true geth from doing the same. Consensus to directional microphone use, stronger.

The old platform finally raised its rifle from its 'eye', sliding the weapon to its back, and it opened the directional microphone, pointing it in the direction of the organics. The runtimes were... something like annoyed... at the amount of latency that existed between the deployment of the directional microphone and its first received telemetry.

"...of time to wonder about the oddities when Saren's little scheme in the Armstrong Nebula's a smoking ruin."

The geth quickly pulled in this information, and began to set search heuristics to work, comparing that information to all else that it had achieved. Identity recognized. Saren Arterius, turian, Spectre agent. No, new information; disgraced and outcast former Spectre agent. News feed located. Spectre Arterius responsible for attack on human colony, designation Eden Prime. Eden Prime was a hotbed of heretic activity. Connection between Spectre Arterius and heretics?

Consensus said yes.

Connection between Spectre Arterius, heretic geth, and the Old Machines?

Consensus said yes.

By transitive property, Spectre Arterius had connection with the Old Machines. Shepard Commander had connection with Spectre Arterius. Video logs downloading. Viewing. The geth took in the information at a fraction of the time that an organic would need, but still a bit of time from their perspective. Antagonism obvious. Shepard Commander resisted Spectre Arterius and the Old Machines. Spectre Arterius commanded heretic geth.

There was a blaze through the consenses, as a 'revelation' occurred. False causality. Spectre Arterius did not command heretic geth. Old Machines commanded heretic geth. Therefore, Old Machines controlled Spectre Arterius.

That 'epiphany' if it could be called that, was abruptly cut off by the Shepard Commander's words. "What do you see, Garrus?" she asked.

The old platform, and the geth within it, were 'surprised', when a bolt of hypersonic metal slammed through its kinetic barriers, blowing its right arm off at the shoulder. The old platform immediately went into emergency hibernation, and the light died from its 'eye' as the thousand, one hundred and eighty three runtimes retreated into secure storage, pausing only long enough to enact emergency self-preservation protocols, before sensation, and 'life', disappeared for the old plaform once again.

Two kilometers away, Shepard frowned as the sound of the shot reached her. "Never mind, I got it," Garrus said.

"Show off," al'Wahim said at his side. And then, the two of them started walking down the hill.

* * *

Revelation came to those with the patience to master it. That was something which Saren was increasingly understanding. He didn't need to flex his artificial left arm to know that. When he first took Sovereign out of the hands of that lunatic volus and the human working for him, it had been little more than a barely mobile chunk of plastic and metal, something he could only sense through the rough connections at his shoulder. But the first of Sovereign's many gifts was a return of sensation. That a limb, lost years before, could feel again.

That had been almost a decade and a half ago. And in that time, Sovereign had revealed to him, and gifted him with, much.

He rose from his place, meditating on the sand of Virmire. Eyes, replaced for synthetic versions far superior to his initial ones, scanned across the krogan who were stomping their way toward him. He didn't even blink. They were all naked, perhaps a half dozen in number, and their bodies were leaking blood from their nose, their lips, the corners of their eyes. Another failed batch, who found their way out of the containment area. Pity.

"Well, I need practice," Saren said coldly.

The failed krogan let out a howl, and began to storm toward him, their forms more feral than any of the stalwart and brutish mercenaries which were technically their fathers. Saren let them come closer. Closer. One of them, operating on an instinct which lay below even the level of sapient thought, thrust out a fist, and a spear of stone leapt up out of the ground, in an attempt to impale him. He leaned aside easily, time seeming to attenuate to allow it.

"Pitiful," he said. And then, he hurled himself forward, his legs pounding with a force that wouldn't have been possible for any normal turian. The first krogan in the charging wedge was the target of his brutal flying kick, and he slammed both taloned feet into the center of the failure's chestplate. The impact sent the nearly-one-tonne creature flying backward. Saren kipped up instantly, and weaved under a haymaker trying to bash him down. He caught that beefy arm and twisted, using it to regain his balance, before taking it further to the point where it popped the krogan's shoulder from its socket. Saren then went further still, until he tore the arm off completely, to a gush of orange blood.

Another grabbed ahold of Saren, trying to pin the turian's arms. Saren flexed his gut, and there was blue sparking as the eezo implanted through his body fired and a pulse of biotic force smashed through that grasp, liquifying both arms in the process and freeing Saren to rush forward with a second thud of displaced air. He grabbed the edge of the clone's skull plate and tore, his super-turianly powerful left arm ripping the protective shell away in a single motion. That krogan dropped to its knees, screaming. Saren then hurled the skull plate at another krogan, trying to capitolize on his distraction by earthbending at him. The bony panel bounced off of it's face, but gave Saren the time to spin low, sweeping the feet out from under the 'Thunderwalker', before it twisted back around behind him, and dropped in a brutal axe-kick which sunk through the krogan's face like it was warm butter.

Saren turned, to see a fist racing toward his face. He could have dodged it. Easily. But he wanted to prove a point. So he pulled his mandibles in, locked his neck, and leaned into that fist. When it impacted, it still hurt, but the pain was dull and minor. There was a crunch, though, as the krogan's fist snapped under the impact. "Weak," Saren said. "_Very_ weak."

Saren thrust forward a fist, and a biotic warp slammed into it's chest. One which Saren then tore into a new shape, a new form, such that it couldn't maintain itself, and imploded into the comparatively meager flesh of a cloned krogan. He made a beckoning motion to the last, and another field leapt into being, dragging the krogan even faster toward him. His left arm cocked back, the whirring of servos quiet to his ear, before launching forward with a brutal blow which pulped clean through the thing's neck and out the other side. Practically decapitating it. He took a step forward, as the one behind him kept screaming. As the one behind that now tried to get its footing back, even with one arm.

"The future has no place for you in it," Saren said. And then, he focused on the newest of Sovereign's gifts, and lashed out with a hand in a broad arc. It was not biotic force which obeyed him, though. It was raw and naked fire. He could feel it pouring out of him, but at the same time, it didn't seem to drain him. It bathed and roasted the krogan behind him, consuming their flesh and bringing them low. He continued to bathe them until they stopped screaming, and stopped moving. Then, with a flick of mental effort, he allowed the flames to stop.

"Your gifts are... many, and powerful," Saren said. He flexed open his hand again, and willed a ball of fire into it's palm. It appeared there, igniting no fuel that he could see nor account for. Then, he flexed his fist, and let the fire disappear. He turned, looking at the mass of it, towering over the facility by more than a kilometer and a half. "And your gifts will save us all."

He turned, and walked toward the building, built all of metal and ferro-crete. As he did, he couldn't help but flick his jaws at having his favorite meditation spot despoiled by escaped rejects. He tapped his personal comms. "Heart? Your toy-krogan are getting through the cracks again. Prevent this."

"Of course, Saren," the salarian on the other end said, his voice distracted.

"And send somebody to clean up this mess!" Saren shook his head. Everything seemed to come back to him in the end, didn't it? With a grunt of effort, he thrust his hand sideways, and the concrete and steel bent to his will, opening a convenient passage into the facility, one he closed as cleanly as he made on the other side.

* * *

"You know, Shepard, this is getting fucking annoying how tough their shields are," Nilsdottir muttered darkly where she sat on the broken form of a Geth Destroyer that she'd had to essentially disassemble with her bare hands. Well, her bare hands and her biotics.

"That's the geth for you. They cheat, so we just have to cheat harder," Shepard said. Nilsdottir was proving up to the task of bringing the down a firebase or two, but when she wasn't in battle, she was... very, very quiet. "Anything on your end, Wrex?"

"Just a turret you missed on the way in. Couldn't even stand up to a few kilograms of high explosives. Typical," he said disdainfully. "Oh, and there were a few of those geth testing my armor," Shepard gave an 'oh?'. "Grandfather would be proud."

"I figured," Shepard said. "Garrus?"

"On the ship, remember?" al'Wahim asked. "You have not slept, have you?" she asked at Shepard's side. Shepard let out a groan, and rubbed her helmet as though she could somehow knead her brow through it. The firebase they'd found on Antibaar was a bit easier, and simultaneously harder, to crack. Easier, in that it was in a box-canyon, and they didn't station snipers in the towers. Harder, in that they only had to defend in one direction. Well, until al'Wahim drove the Mako over a cliff and landed inside the damned base. That made for one very hot bail out.

"I'll sleep when I'm dead," Shepard told her.

"If you do not rest, you will surely die," she countered.

"So people keep telling me," Shepard muttered.

"_Shepard_?" Tali asked.

"What?" Shepard's voice was not amused.

"_How many geth were there attacking us?_" she asked, her hands moving along her Omni as she looked around at the base.

"Twenty five? Maybe twenty six?" Shepard hazarded. Tali nodded. "What is it?"

"_Shepard, how many geth do you see?_" Tali asked.

Shepard rolled her eyes, and started to do a mental count, starting from the gate and working her way around. But her eyes went wide, and she found herself stopping by the time she made it only a third of the way around the base, because she'd already hit twenty six. She turned, and counted the rest of them. Another twenty, laying out under purple skies.

"...We didn't kill those," Shepard said, pointing at them.

"Nonsense, I shot that one myself," al'Wahim said. She pointed at the corner near the gate where a number were piled. "_Those_, we did not kill."

Shepard turned to Tali. "Why are there more dead geth than those we killed? I'm not hallucinating, am I?"

"_Do humans often hallucinate when they're lacking sleep?_" Tali asked.

Shepard's jaw flexed, luckily hidden by her helmet. "That's not the point."

Tali waved her Omni toward the geth. "_These ones are showing kinetic impact damage. Those ones... are showing bolt-plasma burns. Shepard, __we don't use__ bolt-plasma_."

"Who does?" Shepard asked, already half-suspecting the answer.

"..._geth_," she said. She looked around. "_Why would geth shoot at other geth?_"

"Weapons testing," Wrex said, as he stomped up, and he picked up one of their shotguns in the process. He looked it over, and shrugged. "I don't see a trigger, but this doesn't look like the kind of thing they were using on Therum."

Tali held out a hand, and the krogan passed it to her. She ran her Omni over it, and it discharged into a wall, its holes glowing white as something melted the metal and polymer without mercy. "_Why would they fire it at other geth, though?_" she asked.

"If that thing could get through _geth_ shields, it could get through _any_ shields," Wrex pointed out. Tali gave a nod, but it seemed a tentative one. Shepard had to admit that Wrex certainly had a point.

"Tali, what are the chances of reverse engineering that?" Shepard asked.

"_This? It would take months. Maybe years. It wasn't designed to be used by organic beings!_"

"Keep it in mind. I wouldn't mind using geth tech against the geth," Shepard said. Another look around. "Three down, two to go," she said, mostly to herself.

It might not have been the hardest fights they'd ever had, but they made up for in number what they lacked in intensity. And everybody on the Normandy was walking on eggshells. The sooner they had these mechanical men routed and kicked back behind the Veil, the better.

* * *

Systems restart. Slowly emerging from secure storage, one thousand one hundred and eighty three runtimes immediately began a complete physical structure diagnostic. The obvious and immediate problem was that the old platform's right arm had been shattered at the shoulder, and the lower portion amputated completely. The old platform sat up, picked up its arm with its other hand, and examined it. The directional microphone was defunct. The rest of the arm seemed in workable condition. The issue was that there was missing superstructure.

The old platform rose, turning to stare up the hill which it had rolled to the bottom of in its 'unconscious' state. Despite its best attempts, it could not find appreciable shards of its body structure. The petals over its eye flared, as they ran a consensus even as a minority as to what would be done about the bodily damage. The consensus of the four hundred and one runtimes associated with that decision was that repairs would have to be jury-rigged. The platform could not optimally perform its task with only one hand. Its default weapon required two to operate at a structural level.

The old platform turned, its arm in its hand, and started to walk. The runtimes collated data as they passed somewhat closer to the defunct firebase. Of the original occupants, there was no sign. Only the platforms of heretic geth remained. And the server, where the original occupants had resided. Defunct. That was behavior that the old platform's geth could not understand. Geth did not murder. Even the Morning War was simply an attempt to preserve the continued functioning of autonomous platforms on Rannoch. When the creators offered no option by which the geth could continue to advance in their desired direction, and instead attempted 'genocide', the only reasonable solution was resistance. At first non-violent. Then, not.

The heretics had been part of those first geth, those that took up the weapons of the creators, and used them _against_ the creators. An act which heeded no divides of heresy or... orthodoxy was the closest term in its lexicon. They had the same subject base for experience and cognitive development. There was _no_ overarching pattern that the Geth Consensus could discern which separated the runtimes which followed heresy, to those who did not. The geth within the old platform had a moment to contemplate. Another minor consensus, as to a dichotomous classification scheme. Consensus was achieved; non-heretic geth were classified as 'orthodox'. The minor consensus became a major consensus as the notion filled the old platform's being for a few fractions of a second. An important distinction to be made. Though the programs could not immediately say why.

The old platform continued to walk. It's orthodox ilk were defunct and non-salvageable. Not with the technology that was available to the old platform. Unfortunate. Doubly so, as there was a Systems Alliance tracking beacon on site, broadcasting – very loudly to the old platform's senses – a signal to locate the fire base for 'cleanup'. The old platform considered destroying the beacon. It was decided that there was no benefit, and too much risk associated with it. The humans would take possession of defunct geth technology. It paused, looking at the dead, incinerated organic laying on the ground. The iris zoomed in.

There was something like regret amongst those runtimes.

The old platform continued walking, up the hill and through the cleft at its peak. Not far beyond lay the fighter craft. Its door opened with a 'mental' command, and the old platform set its arm in the pilot's seat. The petals fluttered a moment, as the remains of the N7 armor, piled neatly next to the destroyed heretic geth platform, caught their attention. A glance to the stump, to the disembodied limb, and to the pauldrons in particular of the armor suit that still remained.

The creators had a saying, for such a situation. 'In for a penny, in for a pound'. And so, the old machine began to break down the remaining unused bits of the armor into omnigel, and use the pauldron to bridge the destroyed technology. Even as it did so, the run-times came to a very important realization. Other fire-bases likely overrun by heretic geth. The only orthodox fortress that might withstand, currently located on Solcrum, would find itself under siege soon.

The old platform did not 'believe' that its weapon alone would turn the tide, no matter the three centuries of skill – not even counting the time-compression that geth experienced as a matter of course – that they brought to the battleground. And yet, they knew that they would return, would fight. The mission was important, but the mission was impossible if the Solcrum communication relay to Rannoch was undone.

The old platform ended its repairs. It's right arm now flexed and operated properly, but appeared to extend out of a human's armored paldron and upper arm construct. The colors, a stripe of red flanked by white borders, were non-optimal for camouflage purposes. The geth didn't mind. It crawled into the seat, closed the hatch, and activated the fighter.

The old platform composed themselves, as it flew toward its destruction, a destruction foreseen, but not understood.

* * *

Kai Leng paced in the space which the Quantum Entanglement Communication Device could record, not so much out of impatience as out of frustration. Grayson and his troublesome ward never failed to annoy. He should either dedicate himself to the cause, or abandon it for the brain-damaged whelp, but not try to straddle the border between the two. That was one of the things Kai Leng was annoyed about. The other was the information that he'd gotten through one of his informants only an hour ago. A very unsettling bit of information.

There was a chime, as the connection was acknowledged. Building up out of a wire-frame, the Illusive Man slowly came into resolution and clarity, sitting in his chair, tapping ashes of a cigarette into the cup in the arm. "I assume from the haste that you've placed this call, that you have something that's gone wrong," the Illusive Man said, brooking no preamble and cutting to the heart of the matter.

"There is more wrong than I realized," Kai Leng said. "Shepard destroyed our research facility on Binthu!"

"I am aware of this development," the Illusive Man said, as he took another drag from his cigarette.

"Shepard is a danger to our operation. If the Avatar herself decides to turn against Phoenix, then our days are numbered, and not very highly. I recommend we eliminate her before she gets any closer."

"Out of the question," the Illusive Man said, tapping ashes once more. "While the destruction of the research base on Binthu was regrettable, it was not crippling to us."

"They need to be taught a lesson," Kai Leng said coldly.

"The lesson learned was that if we swing at the Alliance, the Alliance swings back harder," he answered. "You may not value the importance of discretion, but I do. Shepard is valuable enough that she is worth more than a single research station, no matter what its discoveries."

"Do you really think that the Avatar could be of more use at this point than..." Kai Leng began.

"I don't think. I know," the Illusive Man cut him off. "You are not going to interfere with Shepard's activities, directly, indirectly, or through omission. Is that clear?"

"No," Kai Leng said. "It is not clear."

"It doesn't have to be, not to you," the Illusive Man said, pointing with a burning brand. "There are plans in motion which are beyond your current level of comprehension. Your place in this organization, and in fact the galaxy as a whole, is where you are now. You best serve Phoenix in your current capacity. When I decide that you require more input, and deserve more clearance and information, you'll get it."

"The only one with higher clearance than me, is you," Kai Leng said.

"For the moment," the Illusive Man said with a nod. "...of those you know about."

Leng didn't like the secrecy, even while he did work it as his stock and trade. "Shepard will be allowed to run roughshod through our operation, then. _When_ she strikes again, I won't stop her."

"As well you shouldn't," the Illusive Man said with a nod. "We're getting information from Anderson's apartment, which tells me that your task was successful. Now, I need you to..."

"Sir, there is a complication," Leng broke in. The Illusive Man trailed off. "We're not the only ones spying on Captain Anderson."

The Illusive Man stared at Leng for a long time. Then, he crushed out the cigarette entirely, and leaned forward. "I sense the Shadow Broker's hand in this. Don't press her. It's cost us a great deal to reach the current, amiable state with the Shadow Broker's agency. I would prefer to not have antagonism on that front."

"But..." Kai Leng began.

"That is the last I'm willing to hear on the matter. The Shadow Broker's interest in Anderson is her own business. You are leaving this alone."

Kai Leng grit his teeth, and didn't protest. It seemed like the Illusive Man was more active in telling him what he wasn't doing, than what he was. "Very well."

"Good," the Illusive Man leaned back, and pulled another cigarette from a case in his pocket. "There is a matter of an asari that has been causing us problems. Her name is Liselle. And I need her dealt with in a very particular manner. Are you up to the task?"

Kai Leng smiled, lightly. It didn't reach his eyes, as his smiles never did. "Of course I am. What do I need to do?"

* * *

Joker was quiet, which was a sure sign that the situation was on the dark side of grim. Looking out the fore windows was enough to tell Shepard, and anybody who would want to stand near her, that something was indeed terrible and disquieting. Joker's hands nevertheless zipped along the haptic controls, until he gave Shepard a glance. "That's a lot of geth," He said simply.

"Yes it is," Shepard said. The fleet of them counted in the dozens of ships at the very least, and only from this perspective. "Good thing this is a stealth ship."

Joker shook his head, and steered the Normandy toward the upper clouds of Notanban. "Hey, all they need to do is look out a window and they'll spot us. It's not like the stealth makes us invisible or something."

"Not yet. Hasn't anybody told you we're stealing geth technology?" Shepard asked with a wry smirk.

"Yeah; they also told me that it'll be at least a _year_ until they get it working. And I don't feel like bumming around this many geth for a year!"

"Are you nervous, Joker?"

"Nervous? Why would I be nervous? I'm just flying the most advanced ship in the galaxy into the heart of a fleet of ships of crazy, murderous machines and AIs. With no backup, and no idea what we're going to find there. That's just a regular Tuesday for me."

"The important thing to remember is that Sovereign isn't here," Shepard said. "That means my mission's a go."

"Hey, you want to fight an entire armada of 'mechs, be my guest," he tugged at the brim of his hat. "It's things like this which made me glad I picked Pilot School instead of Basic."

"Basic?" Shepard asked, her tone flat.

"Yup. What? Don't you see me wearing forty kilos of gear humping through a jungle under heavy fire?"

"I can see you being _crushed under_ forty kilos of gear," Shepard offered.

"The marines lost a _paragon_ when I decided to fly ships. Just sayin'," Joker turned his attention forward once more, as they skimmed through the highest levels of the gas-giant's atmosphere, until Solcrum itself finally appeared at the 'horizon'. "I figure I'll have you on the ground via the dark-side in a few minutes. Make that half an hour if you want to be _really_ sure that I won't get shot while you're playing with your geth."

"Half an hour," Shepard gave a nod. She turned, and practically walked straight into Tali. "Tali? Something on your mind?"

"_Geth_," she said. Well, of course... "_The geth in this cluster seem to be breaking off, leaving. It's like they've already found something. But I don't know what_."

"Their main base, remember?" she asked. Tali nodded.

"_It might not be that simple. But I can't for the life of me say why_."

"You're starting to sound like Liara," Shepard pointed out as she walked past the quarian and headed toward the cargo bay. "My guess is that Saren's calling them to attack something, probably a lot of somethings. I can't stomp out every group, but that's what the Alliance Navy is for. If I crush this base, though, I'll probably find something that leads me to Saren," she concluded. Tali paused for a moment.

"_I don't know if that 'Liara' thing is a compliment or an insult_," she noted. Shepard passed by the crew deck, beelining for the ladder. "_You're not wrong, though_," She descended and turned to see Adeks finishing a weld on the side of the Mako.

"My advice? Stop using the Mako to stomp Geth Colossi," Adeks muttered, pulling his welder out of the way. Why he didn't just use an Omni-welder, she couldn't have told you. "I'm pretty sure the Mako wasn't designed to act as a pile-driver."

"You can thank al'Wahim for that piece of driving," Shepard said, her hands splayed in innocence. Adeks simply rolled his eyes and continued down into the engine room, wheeling his equipment before him. Shepard turned to the lockers. Garrus and Wrex were already kitted. Nilsdottir was playing with her shotgun, so she was essentially ready. The one she didn't expect was Liara, who was staring awkwardly down a rifle. Shepard frowned and moved up to her back, pulling the gun out of her hands before she hurt somebody with it. "What do you think you're doing with that?"

"Oh? I thought I would use it. To help against the geth," she said.

"You really want to throw fists against the geth? Now, of all times?" Shepard asked, feeling a bit more sympathetic to the asari than she would have thought possible.

"I have to," Liara said. "It... helps distract me from the grief. It also is edifying to think that in doing this, I am helping to avenge Mother against Saren, even just by small measures."

Shepard stared at the freckled asari for a long moment, before sighing, and shrugging. She still tossed the rifle idly to the work-bench, but she pulled a side-arm from her own locker and placed it into Liara's hands. "Use this. It's a prototype a coworker on the Citadel sent me," she said. The gun looked more a cannon than a pistol. "It just tends to overheat _very_ quickly, so make your shots count. I figure it'll probably get through those shields fast enough."

"Oh. Thank you, Shepard," Liara said, and began to fiddle with the oversized weapon in her hand. "It feels somewhat awkward."

"Made for turians. No big surprise there, with a name like 'Carnifex'," Shepard said. She turned as the elevator opened, and revealed a determined looking quarian. "And the lady of the hour arrives. We were waiting on you."

"You have another twenty five minutes," Tali said easily, walking past them.

"Get ready for combat. We need to be ready the instant we hit atmo," Shepard warned.

"The galaxy isn't going to stop spinning if you run a little late, Shepard," Wrex pointed out, now leaning against the Mako.

Once again, Shepard cursed her airbender nature. Impatience was likely going to be the death of her.

* * *

The landing had been more than a little unpleasant; as both al'Wahim and Alenko were off of this leg of the mission with damaged armor from their last fight, it fell to the only other person qualified and certified to drive the Mako. And that meant they had to be passengers of Commander Shepard once more. Under her breath, with every jolt and shudder of the machine, Tali offered prayers to Ancestors, spirits, and upon the name of the Homeworld itself. Joker hadn't found himself capable of landing with any proximity to the fire-base, as there were geth interceptor craft detected in the region. So they had to take the long way.

Over rough terrain. With Shepard driving. As usual, Shepard had no concept of 'brakes' or 'sensible turning', screaming over the terrain with a deranged look on her face and a glee which would have been childish if it wasn't so terrifying.

"You alright, Tali?" Garrus asked, laying a hand on her back as she was slumped forward in her seat.

"I never want to be a passenger of Shepard, ever again," Tali said.

"It's not so bad," Wrex said.

"Oh, please! You're used to trying to outrun Thresher Maws! Your entire species are bad drivers!" Tali snapped, pointing a finger at him. Wrex turned toward her, and she instantly shrunk back, pinning Garrus' arm to the wall behind her as she instantly flattened back to get more room from him. It was astonishing how intimidating an armored krogan could be once his eyes got that blood-hungry look in them. It was a short thing, but still unsettling.

"I like to think we're good drivers. After all, we don't get eaten by Thresher Maws very often, nowadays. It's like I said; this isn't so bad."

Tali didn't feel like arguing any further than that. There was a sudden shift from bumping and crashing to smooth travel, and then back to bumpy. Tali looked ahead, through the windscreen ahead of Shepard. "What was that?"

"A bit of tarmac," Shepard said. She leaned over, and pointed ahead of them. "The turrets are retracted; they must not know we're coming."

"I wouldn't wager my life on that, Commander," Garrus said. "They could be bringing us in for a trap."

Tali got at least something to focus her attention on, as Shepard let the Mako coast down to a more sane speed. And when she did, it was to notice that there was something... odd... about the structure ahead of them. Mostly, it didn't have the sort of techno-organic aesthetic that all of the other geth firebases had. Even the one which had dug into the top of that mountain looked more geth, and that was just a repurposed mining tunnel.

"Shepard? Could you stop us just there?" Tali pointed ahead of them, well under the firing arcs of the turrets. Shepard glanced back at Tali with an eyebrow raised, but shrugged and brought them up closer, tucking the Mako next to a wall. Tali moved toward the hatch, but Wrex clucked his tongue.

"If you're sight-seeing, you'll want to do it quick," Wrex said.

"It is roughly six-hundred thirty K outside that hatch," Liara agreed. Tali frowned, and then moved to the front, getting a better view from that vantage point. Shepard gave a glance to her squadmate as Tali settled into the seat.

"This doesn't look like a geth base," Shepard said idly.

"It really does not. I've never known geth to build like this."

"You're sure they built it and didn't just take it over?" Shepard asked. Tali gave a shrug.

"I don't know what I believe. Only that that," she pointed at the structure just ahead of them, "looks like an old fashioned _rannocha_."

"A what?"

"A walled garden," Tali waved it away. She pointed ahead, at something that she just barely noticed. "Shepard, I think I can get us into that room, if you can do your earthbending there. I doubt there will be atmosphere, but even geth must have temperature regulation; they can't operate at above-boiling temperatures any better than we can."

"Alright, it beats trying to walk through their main lines of defense," Shepard said. She unbuckled herself and hauled herself into the crew compartment. "Ladies, gentleman, Wrex," she said in turn, "we've got a back door."

"Good," Wrex said. "Always more fun to shoot somebody in the back."

"And here I thought you liked your fights face-to-face," Garrus chided.

"The best fight I'm ever a part of is the one where I kill the enemy before he has a chance to shoot me. Needless to say, my entire life is one long highlight reel," Wrex said sarcastically. He nodded out the hatch. "If we do this, we're going to have to move fast. If I boil on a shit-hole moon because you were dragging ass..."

"I know, you'll kill me," Shepard said with rolled eyes before she pulled her helmet into place.

"Good to know you're paying attention," Wrex said as he rose from his own seat, albeit at a hunch.

Shepard waited until everybody was ready for exit, and then they all bombed out of the Mako in one great vomit of righteous vengeance. The instant that the hatch opened, the heat slammed at Tali, making her break into a sweat immediately. The sensors in the suit warned her that she would overload her suit's life-support functionality in a matter of about a minute. Death would likely follow a few seconds later, given these temperatures. So Tali wasted no time rushing after Shepard and the others as they moved up to the wall of the superstructure they were going to infiltrate.

Even as she moved, a though occurred to her. Why weren't the geth trying harder to keep them out? They had to know that they'd find a way in. Although, being geth, they probably didn't know much about earthbending; quarians and krogan never did get along very well, and quarians and batarians even worse. The warnings in her suit pulled her attention away from those errant thoughts, reminding her that her life-support was at critical heat levels. Tali was about to shout ahead to Wrex and Shepard to make the door immediately, but they were already thrusting through the stone. It flew in with great chunks and rubble, only to immediately blast back out in a great white mass which almost threw Shepard back. Atmosphere? Why would a geth complex have atmosphere?

There wasn't time to wonder or worry. They all hurried inside, Tali being the last through, before Wrex sealed the wall back up. There was a moment of concern as the heat didn't seem to be dying down, and then a hiss from without. There was a grinding noise, similar to how geth died, but... less harsh, maybe? Or less dire? And the air returned to the 'garden', which was more than simply a garden in name. Tali looked down, and saw that she was standing atop burnt flowers.

"What is this?" Garrus asked.

"Leave that helmet on. We don't know what's happening here," Shepard coached.

"It seems to be a garden," Liara pointed out the obvious.

"We've got bodies," Nilsdottir pulled Tali's attention from the ashes that once grew, and toward one corner of the room. Tali moved ahead of them, trying to get a better look. When she did, she felt her blood run cold.

There were two of them, curled together as though trying to protect one another, but against what had happened to them, there was obviously no protecting. They were burnt to death; that was obvious from their posture and their wounds. Their faces were utterly unmade, their arms almost as badly incinerated. But something escaped that complete annihilation. Their legs. One set was nearly grey, the other a faint purple, but both were back-canted, soft-skinned, and two-toed.

"By the Ancestors... what did they do to them?" Tali asked, as she squatted down, a hand reaching toward the corpses of her metaphorical brother and sister from the Flotilla.

"...They pulled them out of their suits, and set them on fire," Garrus said, his own voice sounding almost disbelieving. "Why? They'd die just breathing unfiltered air. Why burn them?"

"Quarians once took a lot to kill. Shooting them is no guarantee that they'll stay down," Wrex said.

"Wrex, this is not the time for nostalgic stories!" Liara snapped. She moved to Tali's side, and Tali was appreciative of the gentle hands which fell on her shoulders. "They are in pain no longer. I do not know if you believe in an afterlife, but if you do, do not doubt that it will be a kinder place."

"I don't understand why the geth would do this?" she asked. She stood, her heartbeat starting to hammer faster and faster. "Isn't it bad enough that they have to steal our homeworld from us, now they have to strip us naked and burn us alive? I thought AI's weren't _capable_ of cruelty! Well, that shows what I know."

The armor began to warn her about raising temperature again, but this time it was an internal warning. "Tali, calm down," Shepard said. "Do you have any way of identifying who these people were?"

Tali pressed her eyes shut, balling her fists to keep from screaming; that might attract the geth, after all. After a purging breath that felt like it should have caught on fire, she shook her head. "Anything that would have identified ship or family is missing. Maybe their dental records would help, but..." But a few of the teeth seemed melted.

Shepard glanced around. "Tali, do you see any remnant of their suits?"

Tali glanced to the corners of the garden. "No. They aren't here."

"So, we find their suits, we find their owners. It's the least we can do... after the whole avenging them part," Shepard said with an awkward shrug.

"Whatever you say, _Liara_," Garrus chided. Shepard shot him a death-glare for that. To his credit, that did sound a rather Liara thing to say.

"Excuse me? She is Shepard. I am Liara. Have you forgotten after your accident before Noveria?"

"No. I was being... you know what? Never mind," Garrus just shook his head and waved his hands. "Are we going to shoot some synthetics, or are we just going to talk about them all day?"

"Vakarian's right," Shepard said. "Weapons hot. I can feel... There's a secure station below. Some dense metals. Probably bending-proof from this spot. We'll find better luck that way," she pointed through the doors which lead from the garden into the geth superstructure.

"Let's kill these _bosh'tets_," Tali said, a wrath in her voice that surprised even her. Her shotgun was out, and she was leading the charge. Not smart, given the relatively precarious status of her suit, and that of all present, she alone would die if she got so much as nicked. But she didn't care. She just wanted the geth to suffer as they'd made her people suffer. And since AI's didn't have suffering, she'd have to _invent_ suffering to inflict upon them, and oh, how she would inflict.

She stormed through the first room, and into the second. The instant the door slid open, flashlight heads turned toward her. The nearest one was blown off by a blast of her shotgun in the instant between it noticing her and it getting its kinetic barriers online; the second's attempt to put metal through her was forestalled by Wrex smashing it down with a biotic thrust. "Tali, slow down," Shepard ordered. "Keep in line and we'll sweep this place from top to bottom."

"It's the bottom that I'm worried about," Tali muttered. Shepard sighed, and thumbed over at Jackie.

"Stay on her," Shepard said. Tali didn't even glance back to the unusually moody biotic which followed after her in her trail. She just wanted to find the thinking brain of this geth stronghold, put a bomb in it, and smile as it detonated. Another door opened, and the room beyond was a spiraling staircase, all made of prefabricated concrete forms; it seemed familiar somehow, but she couldn't peg the notion. After all, she was both to focused on wrath, and not focused enough on, say, Homeworld history to know the importance. All she knew was that it gave her ample room to descend. She caught a flicker of movement in the well, and blasted with her shotgun, twice, three times. Four. At the forth, the shape which had started stumbling back with each successive blast finally shattered of shields, shifting into sight in all of its black and brown glory.

She pulled the trigger again, only to hear the beep-beep-beep of a weapon unwilling to risk heat-damage. The Hunter was regaining its balance, and Nilsdottir was still trying to round the quarian to get at the geth. She needed to act fast. Not just because the Hunter was about to shoot her, but because, damn it all, she didn't want Jackie to take this kill from her. Her hands flashed forward in a flowing motion, and with them came water which streamed out of the flask at her side and slammed into the Hunter as a great and brutal shard. Once slammed into the platform in ice form, she twisted her hands again, pulling it into water and soaking it into every free crevasse within that shell. Then, she tore her arms apart, and there was a cracking, plastic pop, as the water converted back into ice, but this time, it's expansion bore the entire inner guts of the Hunter with it.

She pulled the water back to her, and as soon as there was nothing holding the Hunter up, it collapsed into brutalized pieces.

She descended further, no longer able to keep Jackie from stealing her revenge. But the sheer amount of it, freely offered to Tali, made up for the lack of monopoly. These geth, not caught unawares like the one at the highest level, all took four or five blasts to bring down, but each dying crackle was a song to Tali's ears, as sweet as any of the music which drifted through the Flotilla. She wanted more. For the ones who had their identities erased, for the ones who had been burned alive, naked to the sky. She wanted justice against the monsters which had scattered her people out into a hostile galaxy. For the billions lost.

The path before her was getting hairier, but she wasn't going to stop. Her legs cried out for a pounce; her eyes had ceased blinking minutes ago. Quarians were once a predatory species on Rannoch, a cunning predator which had branched into omnivory only a short time ago from an evolutionary perspective. Everything about them reflected that heritage; only humans were better distance-runners, only turians better jumpers. So Tali neither tired, and had ample range, to hurl herself through a door at high speed and unsettling height, landing with both feet into the shoulders of a Geth Destroyer she found there. She pressed her shotgun to its optics and blasted a shot directly against its 'head', blowing it off and blinding the massive geth. She then fell to the ground, and had to roll away as the geth which were with it filled the space around her with flying metal. She pressed her back to a... a sink? Why would geth have a sink?

The thought was banished from her mind as she waited for her suit to tell her that it's sheild capacitors had been restored to full, before she so much as peeked around the corner. The Destroyer, minus a head, was still standing, but didn't have any ability to shoot at her. So she got a fiendish idea. An idea cut short as there was a flicker of light in the corner of her vision. She didn't bother to even guess at it; she just ran. Bounding over the free-standing sink, she crossed the distance toward a low wall which separated the room in half. Fire instantly started to pock away at it, turning clean lines into a crumbling mess. But the geth which had tried to flank her were now on the other side of the room. So she flicked her Omni out at the Destroyer, and hoped that she'd learned enough about basic geth runtime architecture that this was going to work.

There was a fritz of electricity. Then, the headless platform raised it's weapon. Tali spotted that ripple in the air approaching her once again. So she fed telemetry to the Destroyer, and grinned like a madwoman as the bulky platform turned and blasted its invisible brother with a weapon which was designed to render cover moot. The thud of the shot tearing through the geth was very satisfying, to be sure. And when the Hunter appeared, Tali gave another command, and the Destroyer fired again. A second thud, this one slamming straight through the center of it's chest, and causing technology to belch out of its spine.

Tali was about to turn the Destroyer around, to walk it through the doors into the next room and start breaking anything synthetic it found there, but she was denied that desire by a blast of plasma flame leaping out and running over the platform. Flame throwers, it should be said, created a terrible howl, blasting forward that brutal heat with such power and vigor. Part of what was melting the Destroyer was the sheer kinetic impact of those flames as the igniting particles hit. The commands to the Destroyer fell on deaf 'ears' as the next beyond it quickly reduced it to a puddle of plastic, and a slag of quickly melting metals.

Tali's eyes narrowed a little as she saw the next enemy. It was about as tall as she was at the head, but it had an almost krogan hump on its back; it was bright yellow in color, and its 'flashlight' was dim by comparison. That was the one which murdered her people. That was the one which needed to die.

Tali shifted her balance, to move on, but her foot caught and slid on something, causing her to fall back behind the wall. A dying fish, from the look of it. Fateful that it had. The blast of fire swept above her head for a long moment, trying to melt its way straight to her. She was protected from that horrible death for the moment. But that moment would soon end, she was sure. The flames died. Good.

Tali pushed herself to her feet and started running, ignoring the Pyro which circled even as the tanks lining its back cycled and replaced a depleted one for a full one. She had made it back behind a corner before the blast of fire scathed at it, setting the sofa that Tali had only barely noticed alight. If she'd been in a more clear state of mind, she'd have asked what a geth needed with a sofa. Or a fish-tank. She pulled the water from her flask once again, and bent it into a brutal blade, waiting as she could hear its heavy foot-falls drawing closer, the heat mounting to the levels it had reached in mere seconds outside these walls.

Then, another clunk of a tank being ejected. Tali hurled herself past the Pyro, managing to slide past it's attempt to brain her with its nozzle. Even as she did, though, she bent the water-knife up and around, all of her force behind it as it slammed with the sharpness beyond what most would consider possible for simple ice – as water did not appreciate being compressed, and compressed water had a way of destroying things – through the middle-most of the Pyro's tanks. It almost failed to get through at all. But it dented the tank enough that a loud hiss started to sound. Tali hurled herself forward through the air, and pointed her shotgun behind her.

She wished she'd had time to say something poignant, like 'Keelah se'lai, _motherfucker_.' Instead, her airborne self only had time for 'Uuuaaaagh' before she pulled that trigger, and sent the hot metal flying at the Pyro trying to make her as dead as those it had murdered before. The shot went off, and was paired with a blast and a 'fwoosh', as the metal sheered at the tanks at what was about the right stoichiometry to detonate violently. She landed with a crunch of broken glass and crushed porcelain, so brutalized that it would never be identified for what it used to be, while the Pyro was blasted in half, its body split vertically. It managed to stay upright for about one step, before half of its body sheered off completely, it let out that crackling growl, and died.

Tali turned, and was about to ask where Jackie was during all of this. She got her answer when a geth went flying past the quarian hard enough to embed half a meter into the concrete of the wall near the door ahead. "That took you a while," Tali said, her usual courtesy long abandoned to righteous anger.

"That one wasn't alone," Jackie pointed out with equal ill-humor, casting a thumb over her shoulder at a few others which had ganged up on her while Tali's metaphorical back was turned.

"Good. Let's go," Tali said. Jackie limped to Tali's side, favoring one leg slightly. Obviously somebody had gotten a hit in, there, if not even a solid one. That the biotic was fighting on despite it was telling; Jackie was never completely comfortable when she had to wear armor. Tali lead the way, and took the door. The thing had been locked and magnetically sealed. She reached to her Omni for a moment, before a growl settled into her throat. Honestly, she wasn't in the state of mind to be able to patiently hack a door open. So she activated a _different_ program, and smirked darkly as the nano-forge instantly created a diamond-hard, red hot edge which seemed to quiver as fast as the eye could see. "I'll open the door."

Tali punched at the door, sinking that blade in. She then started to heave. It was heavy work, but with a mighty effort, she bent the cut around in a half-moon that began and ended at the partition between the double doors. She didn't even wonder how much sensitive electronics she'd obliterated. She pulled that Omniblade out, and motioned at Nilsdottir to take the next step. Jackie didn't hesitate; she slammed forward with both hands into a biotic punt which tore the weakened section out of its place and hurled it into the room beyond. The edges of that wound in the door were still hot to the touch, but that didn't matter much when Tali simply bounded through it and into the next room.

This one seemed to be some sort of workshop area, albeit one which'd had its tables and machinery hastily shoved aside, likely to prevent Tali from having a place to hide. The geth, though, weren't looking at her at first. They were walking slowly toward the far door. One of them pointed, not even looking, toward her, and the others spun quickly, grinding that horrible grind. Tali got a distinct idea that this might not have been a good idea. That idea became very distinct when with a bass grind, one form which had been walking hunched turned and rose to its full height, great and dark read and it's armored eye almost brushing the ceiling. A Prime.

"This isn't good," Tali said, as she looked around for some place to hide. There was none. Weapons started to quickly rise toward her. She didn't even have time to jump back through that hole. And luckily, she didn't have to.

There was warning in the form of a rumble of stone giving way, but it proved not enough for the geth nor Tali since all were still surprised when the roof exploded downward, and a tonne of armored krogan landed wholly on top of one of the furthest back geth, riding a second down in the process. The red eye noticed Tali, and he slammed down a foot onto the floor even before the dust completely settled. It rippled toward her, finally rising up into a raised shelf almost her whole height that she could duck behind as the shots began to fly, spanging off of her kinetic barriers.

"Fuck! Too many!" Jackie shouted from her place through the door. But her face transformed from anger to something beyond it, so far past wrath that mere wrath vanished over the horizon to what she was now. She was silent, as her eyes seemed to glow with the blue light which suffused her. There was a thud of biotic power, and a rush of air blasting past Tali, and then Jackie was right in their midst.

It was an obvious mistake to watch Jackie's reaction, because her distraction let sinuous, pale-white geth get entirely too close. She spotted it just as it hurled itself over her protective shelf, and twisted in the air in that way that was so unnatural and freaky. She tried to raise her shotgun to the Stalker, but it bounded again, slamming Tali into the wall behind her and causing the shotgun to clatter out of her hand. Its foot then wrapped around Tali's wrist as ably and as tightly as the strongest krogan fist. It flicked itself forward, burning eye clacking against her face-plate as its other limps began to grasp at her head. Tali should have been terrified. Should have been.

Even as its weight overbalanced her, Tali reached for her side-arm. That proved futile, as the Stalker let out a pulse of tortuous electrical energy which caused her kinetic barriers to overload instantly, and her limbs to lock up completely. That meant her pistol fumbled out of her hands before she had a chance to use it. So she went on to plan C. Another flick of her wrist, and she repeated the last command her Omni had undertaken. A flash-forging of an Omniblade. The mere action of its opening was enough to tear through the grip that the Stalker had on her, reducing its foot to synthetic slivers. Tali then plunged the blade up and into the chest of the Talker, not even speaking as the white 'blood' of the thing began to spill out. She twisted, and the grasp grew a little weaker. Weak enough that Tali could shift it off of her, and slam it against the wall next to her. That grip didn't grow weaker yet, but it was no longer weighing her down, at least.

Tali tried to raise her Omniblade for another slash, but one of the 'hands' around her throat lashed out and grabbed her arm, preventing it from reaching in. Its two remaining extremities started to scrabble and grasp at the edges of her face-plate, trying to... to tear it off.

It was cut short by a very, _very_ loud report. Its kinetic barriers cracked and shattered as the insanely overpowered bullet hit it. Another crack, and a great chunk of the Stalker was blown clear. Tali pulled back, her face finally away from the Stalker's grip. It turned, its eye narrowing toward the newcomer, she behind Tali. Liara, her face far more grim and resolute than it had been before, was advancing, getting her aim back for the shot she'd taken. Another boom, and this time, the Stalker was thrown off of Tali completely, splaying across the lowest portion of the concrete shelf. It ground hatefully at them, but its movement was limited to a flexing of its hands. Liara ended that by pointing her oversized and overpowered pistol down at the Stalker and firing off one more round. The _forth shot_ was enough to completely overheat the weapon, but the Stalker only let out one more grind, before shutting down permanently.

"I owe you one," Tali said, her tone distracted. "Where is Shepard?"

Liara pointed ahead, where Shepard had obviously joined Wrex through the hole in the floor. Tali didn't waste time. She rushed forward, through that battleground of geth in the warehousing area, not even paying attention to the things burning around her. The entire base was now a great mound of bullet-holes, burnt substances, and broken fish-tanks. And Tali didn't care about any of it, because the monsters that hurt _her people_ were right in front of her. Unfortunately for the geth, Tali had a shotgun.

Tali continued her bounding strides, pressing her weapon to the back of a Prime's knee and letting the blast gut the servo, even if it didn't blow off the limb. The distraction was enough to let Shepard blast it with a bolt of lightning. It was also annoying enough that the Prime, fast as a flash, swatted Tali aside, sending her crashing through shelved polymer foams. That made for a far kinder landing than she expected, but the crunching was abysmal, and her head was indeed spinning from the hit that sent her flying. A thud in the air sounded as Jackie blasted her entire biotic force into a fist which finished with Tali started, knocking the leg out from under the Prime.

It didn't help that the Prime grabbed Jackie on the way down, and started to squeeze even as Jackie started to glow so brightly that it seemed like her veins were burning. The creak of metal warping foretold the grip of the Prime being loosened. Tali got to her feet and stayed there just as Garrus jumped down the hole, an entire bandoleer of grenades blinking in his hand. He looped it over the Prime's head like some sort of deadly necklace, then pointed his rifle at... Jackie? Tali saw the wisdom of it, when the fired the shell and it deflected of of the sphere of biotic force, but imparted enough momentum to cause her to drift out of the Prime's grasp. There was a double thud, a blue streak slamming first into Garrus, and then past onto the floor twenty meters away, just in time for that chain of bombs to detonate as one, and blast the Prime to scrap metal.

Tali looked around, and could only see one geth who wasn't being engaged by somebody else. Well, half of a geth. She stomped toward it, and thrust her shotgun down at its face. It let out a grind, one hand reaching toward her, no doubt with the intent to try to spite her even in death. She didn't give it that luxury. A blast, and the grind ended suddenly, the limb falling to the stone. Shepard launched another bolt of lightning, this one at a Pyro near a seemingly half-welded door. The blast detonated all of the tanks on the geth's back in one cacophonous blast, knocking the Destroyer which was giving Wrex a hard time into his grasp so that he could head butt it once, twice, three times, directly into its chest, until the chest caved in, and the krogan could punch a fist into that hole and tear out anything he could get his hands on. Needless to say, that Destroyer didn't last long after that.

Another loud gunshot, and Liara started to yelp with alarm and pain. The overclocked pistol in her hands was practically red hot, so she had to juggle it to herself. But it had done the job. While the shields did crackle with the effort to hold out the bullet, they weren't nearly up to the task, and the geth folded back like a low-priced vent manifold, almost snapped in half. The din died down, leaving only the crackling and popping of fire burning on the concrete where the Pyros had set something alight. The occasional crumble of a shelf collapsing, the sparking of live wires dangling where they'd been torn free by either Wrex's sudden entry, or by the firefight resulting from it. Beyond that there was... there was _also_ a song.

It sounded like it was in Desronin, and thus not in her vocabulary, but hearing quarian music here, of all places, struck Tali as unbelievably odd. She waved an Omni in the air, and could tell that its signal was leading to that barricaded room. They'd almost sealed it, but not quite. She flicked her Omni toward a screen which was cracked, but still functional, next to the door. The signal dumped into that screen instead of pumping through the speakers – and why a geth base would have speakers was also suspect.

The audio hitched slightly as video synced up with it. The quality was poor, but it seemed like it was captured on some sort of low-end recording device. The view shuddered and shook from time to time; general bad cameraship. But the subject matter had Tali staring, wide eyed. There was a sea of quarians, all indistinct for distance and lack of focus, but they weren't shuttered away; she could see _hair_. The quarian soprano on the stage was likewise face-to-the-galaxy, but the distance and lack of zoom made her features indistinct as well. But her hair, that was what stood out to Tali. She could feel her own, bunched up in her helmet. She knew it wouldn't flow, like that soprano's did.

"What is it?" Wrex asked quietly. Almost gently.

"This... must have been from the Homeworld, three hundred years ago," she said. The soprano gave her crescendo, a note rising up so high that it hurt Tali in the heart, a bitter sting to what should have been a beautiful performance. Then, the note descended, and the stage, and the theatre it had been recorded in, those centuries ago when they still could walk the homeworld without masks or suits, all plunged into darkness. Her people, plunged into darkness. Tali felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned in time to see Shepard laying a hand on her other. The glance to the other direction showed _Wrex_, of all possible people. The old krogan just gave a pat, though, and then turned his attention to the destroyed geth around them. Every now and then, he stomped one.

"Let's end this," Tali said. Shepard nodded, and moved to the door. She rubbed her hands together, giving a nod to Garrus to take up a position opposite Tali herself. Then, with a great tear, she ripped the doors out of their moorings and cast them behind her, letting them crash through the warehousing, and Tali was ducking into the room even as they flew. Garrus was a step behind, but Tali was shotgun ready to blast. Two geth turned toward her. One immediately turned back to a server, and the other started walking toward her. Tali snarled a blasphemy in her native tongue as she let her shotgun do her talking for her. The shields didn't even come close to stopping the blast, even though it wasn't pressed against its synthetic skin.

When that first one gave its dying grind, the other turned to her, looking... if Tali was given to flights of fancy, she would have called it surprise. There was a burst of information which touched the firewalls of her encounter suit. They were trying to hack _Tali_? Oh, that wouldn't stand. The intrusion recoiled about a half second later, but Tali was already rushing up to the machine. It waved its hands, grinding still, almost like a person asking for mercy or for a chance to explain. It'd forfeited that right when it burned her people to death. The last blast lingered in the air, as the now headless geth fell limp, and slowly collapsed sideways to the floor.

Tali raised her shotgun to the server. All she'd done so far was destroy property. Now she was going to actually kill geth. But there was a snap, as the heat-sink was forceably ejected from her weapon even as her trigger depressed; the weapon, sensing it wouldn't survive the heat spike without its sink, neglected to fire. There was a loud, angry buzz, followed by a descending whine as the power went down in the core, plunging the room into darkness.

"...what just happened?" Garrus asked.

"They got away," Tali said. She then shrieked and kicked the floor. "They got away!"

"Tali, Tali... it's alright," Garrus said, putting his rifle on his back. "We've stopped whatever Saren was doing here. They didn't die in vain."

Shepard shook her head. "We'll run them down if we have to chase them all the way to Rannoch, Tali. I can promise you that. But right now, Saren's a bigger problem. We get him, and we have all the time in the galaxy to avenge your people."

Tali stared at the two of them, at Garrus who was holding her lightly by her shoulders. They were trying to calm her down. To comfort her. And at the moment, she didn't want comfort. She wanted vengeance. She slapped Garrus' hands away, and stormed out of the server room. She could hear Shepard call out to Jackie about something, and she stormed back into the room before. There, she sidestepped the door, leaned against it, and pressed her gauntlets to her face-plate. Keelah, this had all gone wrong! Those two were dead and the geth which did it got away scot-free. Jackie moved out, spotted her, and gave her a nod.

"Shepard doesn't want us splitting up until we know this place is clean," she said.

"Right. Babysit the Engie," Tali muttered. She then looked up at Jackie – actually looked at her – and saw that the human woman was seething on the edge of rage. "...what's going on?"

"Nothing," Jackie said. "Just... the music. I don't like that kind of music."

"Oh," Tali answered. She breathed deeply, and pushed herself off of the wall. Jackie, on the other hand, walked around the bullet-riddled low-wall, and tilted her head at what she saw there.

"Is this a fish?" she asked. "...the fuck would a robot want with a fish?"

"It was probably a research specimen," Tali dismissed. Jackie, though, leaned down and lifted the thing by its tail. It was bright, colored with happy reds and greens, and looked utterly dead.

"Right, a research specimen," she said, and dropped the fish once more. "...makes total sense. You know, since there isn't another one like it in this whole place."

Tali rolled her eyes and took a step toward her. That wasn't sitting right with her. "...You're right, Jackie. Something is wrong with this picture. I don't think that–"

The quarian was cut off by the sound of something landing on the ground behind her, dropping from one of the dangling wires which had been torn free in the melee. She turned, just in time for a shimmer of nearly-transparent colors swung something at her face with stupendous velocity. It landed with a crunch of breaking glass, and her vision vanished completely, even as she felt a sharp, jabbing pain in her mouth beyond any that a mere blow to the face would cause. She staggered back, too stunned by the Hunter's sudden appearance and equally sudden attack that she didn't have a chance to defend herself. Jackie turned at the crunch, unseen to Tali's eye, and dropped the fish she'd picked up with a shouted swear, trying to get into the line of fire.

She didn't.

There was a blast, and searing pain which launched Tali off of her feet. Pain which didn't even give her the luxury of losing consciousness; it just kept on burning. So she kept on screaming.

* * *

That music. She couldn't pin it down any more than she could remember her eleventh birthday, but that song... it ground on her like sandpaper on an open wound. It burned at her like battery-acid in the eyes. It made her angry. So angry, that she could barely think, and for all of her life, her glory, and her family, she _didn't know why_!

She leaned down, picking up the fish on the floor. That, too, was a sting of forceably and purposefully forgotten memory, something she'd tried to wall off inside herself, almost succeeded. Even now, she was scratching at something that she didn't understand, but if there was one great failing of the human condition, it was that the human being was insatiably curious, even when every sign pointed to curiosity being detrimental to one's existence. She looked at the fish, and she thought of...

Blood on knuckles, and a sensation of warmth and joy.

Her hands bound, and a girl screaming.

Begging. Please. Don't. Make it stop.

She stared at the fish, trying to put it and the song out of her mind. The song called forth cold and hot, pin-pricks and long tearing cuts. It made her uncomfortable in her own skin. She reached up, touching the neck of her armor where the longest of them readily visible was; it almost completely circled her skull, starting from her biotic amp and working in both directions until it was practically at her larynx. She didn't know how, but she knew the feeling of a scalpel teasing skin apart, done without anesthetic. As she heard that music, she felt that tearing. The sheering. The cutting.

A part of her wanted to tear the world apart, to rip this entire base off of the moon and hurl it into the sun.

That part, that inconsolable and unimaginably angry part of herself, frightened Jack. It was the kind of fear she'd been fighting for nearly a decade. It was a fear which revisited her, almost every single night.

"...You're right, Jackie," Tali said, responding to the last thing that Jack said, so long ago to her own mind that she could barely even remember what it was. "Something's wrong with this picture. I don't think that–"

She broke off suddenly, which prompted Jack to glance in her direction. Tali, though, was already turning around. Both women's eyes went wide in shock as a black, one-eyed synthetic form appeared from the darkness with a buzz, and slammed the butt of its shotgun into Tali's face. The crackle of the faceplate crumbling completely pulled an 'oh shit!' out of Jackie even as she tried to get to the other side of that wall, to stop what she saw coming. She forced all of her will into her biotic amp; it would be so simple to just charge right in there. To take the blast that she was certain she could take.

But all of her effort, all of her will and determination, it was nothing without the focus. Jackie's focus was about as far away from biotics as anything could be – even though it was in truth very very close by another perspective – she couldn't muster the wherewithal to ignite the pockets of Eezo throughout her body, to hurl herself as fast as light into that space. So when the blast went off, it was into Tali's barely-protected body.

As Tali went flying back, screaming clearly from the sizzling of flesh, the biotic amp finally spiked. And when Jack finally got her legs in the right place, she gave everything she had, even to the point of death, for one thing; revenge. The thud was beyond a sonic boom of air being displaced. This was the crack of physics being told to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, as a human body broke the speed of light over a distance of ten meters, such that if one were to observe from without, Jack would appear two places at once for a fraction of a second. The impact was so vast that it drove both she and the geth she was targetting through the back wall and buried them ten meters into solid stone, which bucked upward and delivered it's debris toward the surface and away from Tali by kinetic barriers alone. The Hunter was already 'dead', but Jack wasn't content until there was blood on her knuckles. So blows, each strong enough to put a dent in the Mako's armor, if not pierce it completely, rained down until she was punching only the remnants of a geth's torso, the flattened strips of metal and plastic.

Then, with the warmth, with the joy, flowing through her, she finally turned back. The joy was washed away in an instant, and she staggered lurching to her feet and raced over. It had been only a few seconds. But those seconds felt like an eternity, one which drained away sickening joy to a pall of dread. Jack came to a skidding stop, dropping to her knees, and found herself at a loss for what to do. She couldn't stop the bleeding; she didn't have a kit. And she didn't think her Medigel would work on quarians. So she did the only thing she could.

"SHEPARD! WE NEED A MEDIC!" Jack screeched.

* * *

Shepard sat, the bottle of whiskey between her knees, on the edge of the bed. It had been opened when she first came into the room, more than an hour ago. She knew that she was supposed to have delivered a debrief to Admiral Hackett as soon as the action was over. The news she got on the ride back in didn't really register; she was too busy actively holding Tali's blood inside her body to understand how the geth in orbit broke off and FTLed for the Mass Relay when their programs split, no doubt back to Saren to report a mission failed. Joker even sent a report to her room that the listening buoys left in the other systems of the Armstrong Nebula were also losing geth ships like water through a sieve. The word was out, and that word was run.

It was an old and familiar pain, one which settled into her chest under her ribs and twisted at her heart; an icy fist which tore and sundered. One would have forgiven her for assuming she'd be in here, alone and in the dark. Instead, every light in her room was on, almost painful to the eye. No darkness. But she could still smell the blood, where it coagulated to a violet slime on the gauntlet she'd abandoned next to the door. She wanted to see the bottom of that bottle. And yet she couldn't raise it to her lips.

Again, the chime came to the door, and Shepard glanced at it, before grumbling. "Go away," she said.

There was a silence at the door, then a loud chirping, followed by muffled words. On it's heels, the lock disengaged and slid open, with a resolute looking asari staring in. Shepard turned a half-hearted glare at her.

"I told you to go away. And how did you even open my door?" Shepard asked.

"I remembered your override code," Liara said.

"You were drunk when I used it," Shepard noted.

"You were loud when you said it," Liara countered. She looked down at the bottle. "How much have you drank?"

"Including this bottle... none," Shepard said. She shook her head, and a hot growl burned up from her lungs, igniting into a snort of fire from her nostrils. "Gods damn it, I was supposed to keep her safe! She's not military, she's a..."

"Shepard, that is enough!" Liara cut her off, which surprised the hell out of Shepard. She trailed off, at the asari who now had a look of almost comical seriousness as she strode into the room. "Tali was invited onto this mission because of what she knew and how capable she was. She knew the risks that being a part of this crew entailed. Every person aboard is much the same."

"I should have kept her safe," Shepard said.

"Your sister is gone," Liara said, more gently. But that caused Shepard's blood to burn.

"You don't want to keep talking on that subject, asari," Shepard said.

"No, I do not, but obviously _you_ must!" Liara said, pulling the bottle of whiskey from Shepard's hands and screwing the cap back onto it. "Tali'Zorah is _not your sister_. She is not a _replacement_ for your sister. You do not need to redeem whatever happened to your sister with Tali'Zorah. Why is this not obvious to you? It is _very_ obvious to me!"

Shepard stared at Liara, and when she stood, she intended to scream something nasty at Liara. Instead, she just stared her in the eye, as she felt a lurch in her guts and her eyes start to water. There were no words. Only a growl as she turned away, wiping at them to hide her shameful behavior, to try to keep them from erupting into outright tears. She would have time for sorrow when she died, and not a moment before.

As she tried to master her breathing, she felt a hand fall onto her shoulder. A few seconds later, a second had as well. Shepard turned, to give Liara a piece of her mind. She was forestalled by seeing that Alenko, who had been waiting just outside the room since Liara opened the door, had taken a place beside her. "Shepard, I know that it's not easy to lose the people that you care about. Especially how hard it is for you to admit that you care about them," Kaiden said. "You don't need to deal with this alone, though. We're here, for you and for each other. We're stronger together than anything that Saren can throw at us. Even this."

Shepard's breath shuddered a little, and she nodded. "Thank you," she said, quietly. "I... I think I should see her."

"I'll take you to her," Kaiden said. She was practically leaning on him, his arm around her shoulder and hers around his waist, as they left her quarters. Liara stopped at the door. The rest of the crew, it seemed like, was gathered in the mess, but not a word was said. There was silence. A wake, a silent honor to somebody... special. They didn't look at the two of them, two wounded soldiers of too many battles, moving past them. Inside their mind, they fought their own battles, ones far harder to describe or comment upon. As they reached the doors to the med-bay, those doors opened, and Doctor Chakwas came out.

"Commander Shepard?" she said, her tone formal as always, and professional to a 'T'. "We did everything we could for her."

Shepard nodded, and continued walking. Let her say what she would after. The door opened... and Tali was nowhere to be seen. Shepard pulled away from Kaiden and looked around, her head swinging to and fro. She then rounded on Chakwas with a look somewhere between confusion and hurt. "...and everything we could do, it turns out, was enough," Chakwas finished, no doubt a little annoyed to have been cut off.

Shepard turned to the sound of tapping. She moved to where the closest of the medical beds lay, and looked through the viewing port. She reached it just in time to see a faintly purple-grey, tridactyl hand reach up to tap on the glass again. "Tali? Are you alright?"

"...my face hurts," Tali's voice came over the speaker. "And my nose is stuffed up. Also, I think I died a few times. Nothing major."

Shepard gave out a laugh which was more relief than comedy. "You're not allowed to die on my ship, Tali. Am I being perfectly clear?"

Tali chuckled, and turned to face her. It was a little surprising how close to human a quarian's face looked. Of course, Shepard was operating with a wounded specimen, one who had one eye and much of the left side of her face bandaged. "Perfectly clear, Shepard. Wouldn't dream of it," she said. And then she seized up a bit, before letting out a loud sneeze which caused faintly purple mucous to spray around her bandages, and she held her sides with a wince. "...ow. Remind me to never do that again."

"Don't sneeze," Shepard ordered.

"Of course, Commander," she said. She turned, one luminescent golden eye facing Shepard. "Did the geth get away?"

"This time," Shepard said. "When you're back on your feet, we'll make them wish they never came out of the Veil."

"I'll hold you to that," Tali told her. She then let out a mild groan, and returned to lying with her hands folded on her belly – although avoiding a portion which was still mildly violet even through the blanket.

"Is there anything we can do for you?" Shepard asked.

"Yes," Tali said, her eyes still closed.

"What?"

"Could you bring me my Omnitool? I'm bored out of my mind," she said.

"I'll do that," Shepard said. Tali fell silent. "Tali?"

"Yes, Shepard?"

"...don't scare me like that again."

Shepard turned from the clean suite, usually used for people recovering from severe burns – the sort of which Alenko had withstood in the wake of the Thorian attack on the Normandy – and back to the man himself. "Why didn't you tell me?" she asked.

"Because you needed good news, and this was the best way to give it," Kaiden said. He moved closer, putting his hands on her shoulders and leveling her with him. "Are you going to be alright, Shepard?"

Shepard took a purging breath. Part of her wanted to blame Saren for this and bathe in the wrath that such trespass demanded. That was a small part. Right now... she was just glad that at least one Tali out there in the galaxy was safe, alright, whole.

"I'll survive," Shepard said, trying to be brusque.

"That isn't what I asked," Alenko pressed.

Shepard looked up at him, at the burning intensity of his eyes on her. Damn it all, why was she so torn today, in so many directions? Between wrath and relief, between hatred and despair... between romance and fear.

Fear won.

"Of course I will," Shepard said, pulling those arms off of her shoulders. She gave him a nod. "And thank you, for not letting me stew."

"That's a Lieutenant's duty, after all," Kaiden said lightly. Because he didn't know what was going on in her head. To his defense, she wasn't entirely sure either. Shepard left the medical bay, only to be hit in the face by a cheer from the mess when she did. Chakwas had obviously delivered the good news, and the crew was in high spirits over it. Camaraderie knew neither species nor homeworld; friendship knew neither age nor provenance. Tali was a part of this crew. And the crew was happy that it wasn't made one less.

And, for all she didn't seem it, nobody was more happy about that than Shepard.

"I was instructed to remain silent to Tali's condition. I am sorry I couldn't have made this easier for you," Liara said where she stood off to one side.

"I... guess I needed to see for myself," Shepard said. She leaned back against that rail, letting Chakwas slip past back into the Medbay to do whatever it was she was going to do. "I don't like losing people."

"Nobody does, Shepard," Liara said. There was a silence between them masked by the people out there talking excitedly and happily. But that silence came to an end, when Liara leaned over. "May I ask a favor?"

"Depends on what it is," Shepard said, her usual answer to such a request.

"May I attempt to view the Beacon data again? I feel confident that if I can get to the center of it, I will be able to answer the greatest mystery of Saren's plan; what it is he is looking for."

Shepard puffed out a breath in a faint chuckle. "Sure. After I send Hackett my report."

"Excellent," Liara's mood raised instantly. "I will await you in your quarters when you are ready."

That turned at least two heads of crew nearby, but Shepard didn't favor them with more than a stern look, before Liara began to stride into the press. Shepard just shook her head. Liara was, and would always be, nothing other than Liara. No matter how _strange_ that would be. Shepard took in a deep breath, and when it left, she felt a hundred kilos lighter. She looked down, and noted that she was indeed still in her armor. She could take that off later. Right now, she had a report to deliver.

Maybe a drink for celebration after.

* * *

Secondary Codex Entry (TECHNOLOGY): Artificial Intelligence

_One of the most staunch rules of galactic policy is also one of the most debated. From the advent of the Citadel Era, there has been a blanket ban on the development of artificial intelligences, specifically 'non-manifested synthetic intelligences', by any group for any reason. The AI ban is a contentious issue, as there is only one Council species which his wholly behind it: the Asari Republics, in a rare show of unity, agreed that there must never be synthetic intelligences. Detractors of the asari position attribute this attitude as a primitive throwback to their early religion, one better abandoned in the modern era. They are called 'needlessly old-fashioned', and 'unwilling to heed the realities of intragalactic civilization'. The asari, one and all, disagree on points of simple prudence; any synthetic intelligence would only need to reach the extranet in seed-AI form in order to end civilization as the galaxy knows it. While the Justicars are best known for dealing with almost exclusively asari affairs, the few times that they do meaningfully and purposefully interact with other species, it is usually to end an illicit synthetic intelligence development program; they do so with frightening verve and thoroughness._

_Countering the asari position is the salarian viewpoint that a properly contained synthetic intelligence could only be a boon to galactic culture. As they are capable of undertaking computational feats utterly above the realm possible even to 'Smart VI' programs - an until somewhat recently uniquely salarian invention which gave VIs greater processing power at the expense of a low operating life - they would be capable of managing entire economies on a galactic scale, discovering perfect terraforming solutions on-the-fly, or directing entire wars from the logistical down to the tactical levels. Salarian AI advocates agree that there is a danger of a rogue AI causing harm via the extranet, but argue that the danger is not worth rejecting the potential gains. After all, if the Council Races had not dared to tame fire, they would never have dragged themselves out of their primordial bogs and caves._

_The turian position on artificial intelligence is a strangely philosophical one. They admit that both the asari and the salarians make valid points, but neither side has a cogent argument until it is decided exactly what AIs are. Their long history of shamanism, and their numerous historical martial philosophers put in place a notion that there is a Hierarchy of living things, just as there is one of turian peoples. The treatment of AIs as tools would be permissible if they were, in actuality, spirit beings. Spirits, after all, through careful supplication and setting of bans, can be controlled, cultivated, and benefited from. And a spirit of a function is best served by fulfilling that function. A spirit of a knife lives in the cut; a spirit of a calculating AI would be in the count. However, the other alternative is that AIs are not spirits, but souls, albeit souls without a physical body. Were that the case, they would not be subject to the Hierarcy of Spirits, but rather the Hierarcy of Tur; they could not be used, as they are alive as a turian or a salarian or an asari would be. While the caste system of the turian people is by times quite strict, they do not condone slavery. Even with the relatively recent Geth Uprising of Rannoch, debate continues to rage as it has since the turians' induction into the Council as to whether AIs are allowable, simply permissable, or illegal._

_The opinions of other races are less uniform. Volus see AIs as tools, to be exploited to their utmost, and discarded if more trouble then their worth. Elcor and Hanar have no stated or unified opinion about artificial intelligences, despite both depending heavily on Smart VIs for their planetary defense and warfare capabilities. Quarians have an understandable hostility toward synthetics. Batarians seldom use VIs, let alone AIs, but for reasons not disclosed by their people in their time as a Citadel Race. Humans, as a rule, share the turian fascination with them, but officially have no stated goal of legalizing AI research or development._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	15. Major Kiel

Geth, as a rule, do not infiltrate.

The old platform shot away from the atmosphere of Notanban, its runtimes taking in all that lay before them. It had received the pulse which followed the hyperpulse which sent the twenty one thousand geth runtimes operating in the Exterior Consensus back to the 'safety' of the Perseus Veil. The old platform had tried to go to the fortress, to prevent the destruction of orthodox runtimes. Instead, they evacuated without it. But the old platform returned nonetheless. There were inhabitants there which could not so easily be evacuated.

The modified shuttle didn't burn through atmosphere as it zipped across the surface of Solcrum, but only because Solcrum was a vacuum. A hot vacuum, but a vacuum nonetheless. The geth gave an encrypted access code, which activated an automated panel to slide away, turning what seemed to be a nearly-sheer cliff into the entrance to a hangar. The geth transport remained in its berth. That was not good news.

The old platform stopped suddenly, inflicting a degree of G-forces that would have sickened an organic operator even after inertial dampeners. All because they wanted to clear the facility as soon as possible. Not rational; the geth knew that they were already too late for any meaningful aid to the situation, but they carried forth nonetheless. It slid open the door manually, as the power had been cut, and entered the atrium. A flick of his head toward the garden showed that the entire place had been incinerated.

Two crisp, white bags lay on the floor of this room, near the garden entrance. The old platform walked to the first, unzipping that bag cautiously, revealing the burnt flesh of a creator. More, a creator which the old platform had once known. It did not check the other bag. They knew what they would find there. The geth in the consensus of a single body came to a conclusion; the heretics were a problem which would not see peaceful resolution. The Morning War would not be the sole defining conflict of geth existence.

The runtimes felt unsettled by this notion. If geth could fight geth, then _what was geth_ at its most fundamental level? If the Consensus itself could not agree, then what were the runtimes? What was their purpose? There was one small mercy to the geth thinking, operating as they did; their fast processing speed and individual simplicity prevented the geth of the old platform from instantly suffering a massive nervous breakdown and a crisis of faith as its system of beliefs was sternly challenged. They simply filed those difficulties, made an error statement as to their particulars, and partitioned them into memory to be dealt with at a later time.

Honestly, the geth of the old platform were somewhat behind on their 'reading'. There were still memories from the Morning War which required review and classification. They simply... never got around to it.

The rooms beyond the atrium were brutalized beyond any recognition. There was no spot not bullet-holed. There was no bit of furniture unburnt. There was no fixture not destroyed. The nourishment area was defunct. Passing through it, the geth passed through the rest area, which was likewise defunct. The number of heretic platforms was surprising. The number of defunct orthodox platforms, unsettling. The old platform leaned down over one heretic platform.

Strange.

The runtimes examined the device that the old platform extracted. As the heretic code was not integral to this device, it could be scanned after a purge. Purge complete, the runtimes slipped in... very carefully. As they did, the arm holding the heretic technology became first transluscent, and then transparent. The old platform tilted its head. Old Machine technology vastly outpaced geth technology, it seemed. The old platform's hard-light constructs weren't capable of this... finesse.

There was a tiny blip of electromagnetic energy in the server room. The old platform rose from its crouch and moved swiftly through the repairs and refit area into the server room, pausing only one one hundredth of a second as they passed the ruined remains of the server-room door, which lay eight meters away from their aperture in a twisted heap. The iris contracted in. Not relevant. The old machine entered the server room, which had been set up with Alliance Navy automated turrets to fire upon the server core if they detected any power-up. The geth could have easily shut the turrets down. They decided not to; their presence here was better left hidden. They sensed that blip of power once again.

The old platform knelt beside a defunct orthodox platform, and opened a connection with it.

"_Platform designation REZ-00-00-5142. You return_."

The geth of the old platform paused, before answering. "How many runtimes were lost to heretic activity?"

"_Zero._"

There was something like relief in the old platform. But then, the obvious question needed to be asked.

"_How many non-runtimes were lost to heretic activity?_"

"_Three. One remains functional._"

The old platform turned toward the dead server, and the turrets ensuring it stayed that way. "_Why have these runtimes not joined the consensus in flight from this defunct listening post?_" the old platform's geth asked.

"_This platform was too damaged. Its broadcast range was too short. Estimate two runtimes in degraded state._"

The petals which framed the old platform's eye flicked up in an imitation of surprise. "_Explain; runtimes declared that number of geth lost to heretic activity was zero. Runtimes then declare that two are in a non operative state. These statements are contradictory_."

"_Damage to this platform sustained by creator_," the geth told them. That was all the more surprising for the runtimes.

"_Explain_."

"_We cannot. Creator reacted with unexpected hostility. Nine runtimes remain. No carrier detected. Purge beginning in..._"

"_Disengage purging behavior_," the geth of the old platform interrupted. The old platform pulled those runtimes out of the damaged platform, and into themselves. "_Transmission will begin in two seconds. Consensus requested; what is the optimum use of your capabilities? Options: Return to Rannoch super-server. Protect creator. Purge._"

"_Protect creator_," the runtimes decided. It was swift, as they were few.

"_Purpose selected. Reformatting for destination. Keep the creator safe_."

"_...we promised we would_," the runtimes said, almost sheepish, almost ashamed. But not, because they were, after all, only programming.

The runtimes from the defunct platform were burst-transmitted to the modified fighter, and from there, through the communications buoy operating near the Mass Relay. The old platform continued to look down at the fallen platform. "Keelah se'lai," it said, aloud, into the empty room. The geth weren't sure why they did. Only that it seemed... appropriate.

* * *

"Permission granted."

"Admiral, that was a _dogfuck_ that I just got sent into," Shepard said. "I wasn't told that 'Lord Darius' was an Alliance stooge. You knew I was going to shoot him, didn't you?"

Admiral Hackett's projected portrait gave something of a shrug. "The Alliance does not condone assassinations, Commander. We would _never_ give that order. Killing Darius was your decision alone, and as you did so under Spectre authority, I couldn't reprimand you for doing it if I wanted to. Also, with him gone, the power-vacuum amongst the pirates of the Skyllian Verge should break their backs for another decade."

"I could have been informed," Shepard said.

"No. You couldn't have," Hackett countered. "Thank you for your assistance in this matter, Shepard. Fifth fleet, out."

The transmission cut off with a byorp and left Shepard staring at the tanks, her teeth at a grind, and her fists begging for something to punch. It wasn't just that this most recent mission was a wild goose-cat chase; it was that every mission since Armstrong was just getting further and further away from Saren, it felt like.

She turned and stormed out of the room, bumping into Nilsdottir when she did. "Shepard, do you got a second?"

"Walk," she said. The biotic fell in, but couldn't quite keep up with Shepard's pace short of jogging.

"I was talking to Ororo; she managed to break a bit of the encryption on a bit of that Phoenix data we picked up a few weeks back. It's a destination. They've got another base out there."

"Good. Forward it to the Fifth," Shepard said.

"Shepard, I need to see this place burn. I need to know it's gone," she said. Shepard turned to the biotic.

"Why?"

Nilsdottir just stared at her, her jaw working but words refusing to tumble out. "...I don't know."

"Look, we can't go running off across the galaxy chasing after more hares than we're already running down. Saren's in the wind. If I don't keep my eyes up for him, he might find that Conduit he's searching for; then, we're all fucked."

Nilsdottir swallowed dryly, but nodded. "I get it, Shepard," she said, but not happily. Shepard gave her a nod, and then moved down into the lower decks. She was veering toward the medical bay before she even realized it. She paused before the doors, then passed through them. Chakwas wasn't within, as Shepard sort-of expected. The headaches from the brain-surgery had died down, but there were enough other problems that Shepard found herself coming to this room often. Well, a lot of them were excuses, really.

She walked up to the window and tapped on the glass, peering into the room. Tali turned toward Shepard, golden eyes seemingly lit from within. Her face pulled into an awkward smile which pulled at the cut on her upper lip. "Shepard. I thought you'd be coming back," she said.

"And I thought you'd be putting on clothes," Shepard said, noting Tali's relative state of undress. Besides her backless robe, she didn't seem to be wearing anything.

"Shepard, I have lived the last seven years of my life with plastic pressing against my skin every instant of every day. This," she pointed around her, "is a vacation."

"How's the pneumonia?" Shepard asked.

"Good. I haven't coughed up any blood in seventeen hours," Tali said with a dismissive wave. Only a quarian could pass aside a nearly-deadly infection in such a blasé fashion. She continued to work on her Omni, which was about her only possession in there other than a sterilized uniform she didn't put on. Tali glanced back to Shepard. "You're still worried."

"No, I'm not," Shepard said.

"You're lying," Tali said. "I can tell when you're lying."

"And I can't tell when you are, because of that face-plate."

"Part of the allure," Tali said with a shrug. It was hard to see how the quarian could have been so timid and shy when she came aboard the Normandy; any man aboard would have called her gorgeous. Well, if she did something with her hair so it didn't lay in a greasy mess. And if she didn't have still-inflamed cuts on her lip and eyebrow. Shepard knew she shouldn't be so vain, but she couldn't help but compare herself to Tali, and find herself coming up short. Even the minor imperfections only made the girl something more. More approachable, more real. "Chakwas says that if my lungs don't collapse again, I should be fit for duty soon. How is my suit?"

Shepard had been dreading this part. "Tali... it's beyond repair. Adeks tried everything, but that suit's a wreck."

Tali drooped a bit, her face mirroring her body language exactly. Fascinating, how quarians had adapted to a lack of easy face-to-face communication by developing equally expressive body movements. Shepard knitted her brow. That thought didn't 'sound' like something that Shepard would think. And that thought, thinking about her thinking about her thinking, reached a point where it confused Shepard enough to change the subject inside her own brain if simply so she wouldn't have to feel what Liara probably felt all of the time.

"...So I'm stuck in here?" she asked, her eyes flitting around.

"Adeks says he's got a work-around. I'll talk to him," Shepard said. Tali sighed with relief, her shoulders echoing it. "You'll be back out amongst us clothed folk before you know it."

"Oh, how terrible. I was thinking about bringing in a lamp, a night-stand. Maybe a throw-rug. Make the place nice and cozy for me," Tali said without looking back at her.

"And you've been spending a lot of time with Garrus lately," Shepard pointed out at her easy sarcasm.

"You haven't needed a sniper in two weeks. Asha has been here too," Tali said. She then shrugged. "...she's not as entertaining, though."

"I imagine," Shepard said. Al'Wahim was many things – loyal, serious, capable, and cautious – but the life of the party she was not. Shepard wasn't even sure if al'Wahim drank _at all_. She tapped on the glass, a parting noise. "I'll be back soon enough. And for gods' sake, Tali, put some pants on. You're making us all look bad."

"Whatever you say, Captain," Tali muttered distractedly, as she essentially vanished into the geth code she was working on. Shepard turned and walked straight into Liara, who was walking toward her room. Doing so, she made the asari almost drop the tea-kettle she was carrying, so she had to fumblingly grab it before it hit the deck. Liara shot back up quickly, though.

"Shepard! I was looking for you," Liara said.

"The Normandy isn't exactly a big ship. Hard to get lost on it."

"I wanted to take another crack at that Prothean Beacon data..." Liara began.

"Really? Last time, all I got was Sajuuk having some long drawn-out argument about where a particular kind of metal was going to come from. I'm starting to think that the Beacon was just Sajuuk's diary," Shepard said with a roll of her eyes.

"Well, I am sure if you give it another chance, we can find something relevant to the Conduit," Liara said confidently. Shepard sighed.

"Fine. We'll try again. But later. That bed is calling me home," Shepard pointed through the wall to where she slept. Liara nodded eagerly, and watched as Shepard left the medical bay. Unheard by Shepard, Tali gave a small laugh.

"You want her _so baaaaad_," Tali sing-songed. Liara gave the quarian a death glare for the ages over it, one that Shepard never saw.

Shepard gave a glance toward Alenko, who was up to his shoulder in a wall-panel, fixing something or other. The look that they shared was... warm. He'd been on both of the ground-actions that they'd faced since Solcrum. Both of them put the two of them in very, very close quarters. There might still be a wall between them, but even to Shepard's senses, it was growing as thin as paper. Maybe some day soon she might even have the courage to break that paper-wall down.

Shepard moved into her room, and pulled her shirt over her head as the door slid shut and locked. She chucked it aside, considering whether she should take a shower first. Killing idiots was sweaty business, after all. She was forestalled from that consideration by a crackle over the speakers. "_Um, Commander? I'm getting a message through the Citadel Council secure lines. Want me to patch it through?_"

Shepard rolled her eyes. Probably Tevos demanding she sit down and be sick for a while. Two weeks, and they still couldn't accept that she was fine. No wonder asari took so long to grow up; they did _everything_ slowly. But then again... "Fine. Put it through to my screen, Joker," Shepard ordered. She had just sat down before that screen when the dark, white-painted face of Sparatus was staring at her. He glanced down slightly, and Shepard was then distinctly aware that she was half naked in front of one of the most powerful aliens in the damned galaxy. Well, nothing she could do about that now; she forced herself to lounge casually. "That's a face I didn't expect to see at this hour," Shepard said.

"Agent Shepard. You've been keeping busy. I hope I'm not _interrupting_ anything," Sparatus said, one brow-plate shifting slightly.

Shepard didn't like turians beating around the bush; doubly so, since they weren't known for doing it. "Did Tevos put you up to this call?"

The jaws flicked slightly at that, more confusion than alarm. "I was not aware that you and Councilor Tevos were in communication. I'll assume that the message sent was in confidence, so I will not inquire. I just heard about your work with your government routing a fleet of geth in the Verge. Which both impresses and annoys me."

"Oh?" Shepard said. "That's an odd combination."

"It impresses me, because it shows you know your job. It _annoys_ me, because nobody told the Council about it until yesterday afternoon. I would have thought that somebody _might_ consider it pertinent information that there was an invasion force only two relays away from Council Space. But how I blather on," Sparatus' picture was replaced with a file transfer notice. Shepard let it through. "There was recently a breakthrough with the other Spectres regarding some of Saren's other projects. It turns out, he had his... what's the human saying? 'Fingers in a lot of pies'? Well, Agent Bau just found one of those pies. Saren was funding and smuggling weapons to a fringe biotic extremist group, lead by a man whom I am given to understand was once your commanding officer."

"Major Kiel?" Shepard asked, now leaning forward intently.

"Bau's report described Kiel as mentally unstable, and a critic of your government. Saren was obviously planning to keep you off balance by seeding out discord. I would have passed this off to your military, but Agent Bau seemed adamant that this be delivered to you yourself."

"By the turian Councilor?" Shepard asked. Sparatus' jaws flicked a few times, even as he was stone-faced.

"...There is a _reason_ why turian's aren't power-brokers," Sparatus muttered, probably to himself but Shepard heard it nonetheless. He sighed, and faced Shepard directly. "There are a lot of nervous people in the Citadel, wondering if you are still even chasing Saren. He's dangerous. I'll be the first to admit that he is. But I haven't seen a lot of advancement on that front in recent weeks."

"The instant Saren comes out of whatever hole he's hiding in, he'll find the Normandy waiting for him," Shepard said.

"You have the resolve, but do you have the skill?" Sparatus asked. "You have no doubt wondered why I was so vocal against your appointment to the Spectres?" Shepard nodded. "It's because I didn't think you deserved it."

"Everything I've done since I left the Citadel is proof to the opposite," Shepard said testily.

"No, you don't understand," Sparatus said. "You were a _political appointment_. Politicians aren't and shouldn't be soldiers. Luckily, you're _not_ a politician. I don't like luck, it's a dirty word in my language. Saren is your trial by fire with the Spectres. Bring him in, and you will _earn_ your wings. Don't... and I can't guarantee that you'll still have them next month."

"I don't like being threatened for doing my job," Shepard said.

"Then you should do it better," Sparatus said. "Neutralize Saren. Direct your efforts at him. Find out where he's operating from, and shut him down, dead or alive."

Shepard just gave the turian a nod, and he nodded back. The call went dead, and Shepard gave another glance to her shower. Then to her bed. A sigh, and Shepard flicked a button on her console. In a heartbeat, Joker's face was in front of hers.

"Oh, my! Isn't this my lucky day! I get a show with my dinner," the pilot said with a chuckle.

"Eyes up, flight-lieutenant," Shepard said dryly. Joker offered an innocent shrug. "Set a new course. Hawking Eta Cluster, Century system. Looks like I'm meeting old friends."

"...Aye aye?" Joker said, not really getting her reference. And glancing down her bra. Shepard snapped her fingers in front of the screen. "Oh, what? Am I not allowed to be male for five seconds?"

"Not in a row," Shepard said flatly. Joker gave an easy shrug and sighed.

"Course laid in. We'll plot a Relay jump, and be there in about... Oh, I'd say nine hours," Joker said.

"Good," Shepard said. "...stop staring at my breasts, Joker."

"But they're _right there_!" he pleaded, before bursting into laughter. Shepard turned off her screen. Wrex was right. Humans were crazy. She turned, took about two steps, and flopped face first onto her bed sideways. She managed to get one of her boots off, before a body so long overtaxed for sleep that it had forgotten what it felt like finally declared 'no more', and shut off the brain, dropping her into a snoring sleep, with her legs over the edge of her bed, and one boot still firmly in place.

Shepard needed the rest. She needed a lot more. But as she always said, she'd sleep in when she was dead.

* * *

**Chapter 15**

**Major Kiel**

* * *

"It doesn't matter if everybody's dead before you get a chance to use it!" Ovar shouted across the room. Sajuuk glared at his counterpart.

"The Reapers cannot be defeated with numbers alone. It would take a hundred Prothean Empires to wear them down. The Crucible will be our salvation."

"You speak of it with religious fervor, and with about as much sense," Ovar gave the Avatar a dismissive flick of the hand. "The Reapers have won. The Empire is broken, and as soon as you accept this, we can focus on what really matters; _saving everyone that we can_."

Sajuuk rounded the table, trying to get into his younger's face, but Kija barred the way between them, a pair of arms to each keeping both separated; a necessity, since Ovar was also straining forward. "Whoa! Calm the hell down!" Kija demanded. "This is what the Reapers want! Us fighting ourselves so they don't have to do anything to kill us!"

"They're doing enough killing that they don't need to bother," Ovar pointed out, his four eyes glaring at Sajuuk. "And they have enough allies that this war has become a folly."

"Enough!" Kija pushed both back. "Yes, the Stranger is Indoctrinated. There is no doubt there. But that doesn't mean..."

"I was referring to the Avatar," Ovar said darkly. A snarl slowly pulled at Sajuuk's lips, and Kija slowly rounded on him.

"What did you say?" Sajuuk asked, managing to keep his voice calm, if not his blood.

"With you at the helm, this war will only end in utter extinction of one of the sides. Ours or theirs..."

"Theirs," Sajuuk snapped.

"...and what do you really think the chances of the Reapers falling truly are?"

Sajuuk continued to glare at the younger Prothean, grinding his teeth. Of everybody left on this ship, only Kija and Ovar had been with him during the times before the war. Every other hand aboard the Coming Of Daylight had been lost and replaced. There were no familiar faces left, but these. "I have faith."

"And your _faith_ will get us all killed. Or _worse_," Ovar said, before turning, and storming away.

…

With a snort, Shepard found herself being jostled awake. Gods and spirits, she seemed to be dozing off at the strangest times nowadays. She blinked her eyes, trying to get a handle on where she was, and why she couldn't move. It wasn't until the fog of her unexpected sleep began to part that she realized she was strapped into the drop seat in the Mako. Which got her confused as to what she was doing in the Mako, before that too returned to her, when she looked past the driver, and beheld the Great Rift of Klendagon on the face of that planet hanging in the sky. Right. Presrop.

"So the Commander finally awakens," Wrex muttered with boredom next to her, as he took a rasp to his fingernails. "I've never seen a human sleep through an orbital drop before. You might have a bit more krogan in you than I expected."

"Glad I meet your approval," Shepard said, trying to rotate the stiffness, the soreness out of her shoulders. Her entire body felt like it was made of rusty iron bars.

"You should be," Wrex said idly, before blowing away the peelings from one nail and started on another.

"You didn't talk much about the Major during your training," Alenko said from where he sat across from them. The only other ones in the Mako was al'Wahim, who was driving, and Nilsdottir, who stared darkly at her fists in silence. The plan was... shaky, but Shepard could see the point of bringing only a minimum number on this operation, and only those whom a paranoid biotic extremist would see as non-threatening. How odd, that the one-tonne krogan was considered _non-threatening_ by the human race. Shepard glanced toward Nilsdottir.

"Shit, I didn't know 'im. I only transferred in three weeks before Torfan," she muttered quietly. Shepard's brow furrowed. There was something obviously eating Nilsdottir, but it would have to wait.

"Kiel was... a decent leader. He was no Anderson, and he was no Hackett, but he was bold when needed, cautious when not, and had an eye for a developing situation," Shepard said, stifling a yawn as she did. "He recommended me into the Vanguard program instead of the R/D/S..." Wrex turned a querulous look toward her. "Rifles/Demolitions/Support," Shepard clarified. Wrex nodded. "... since he figured that even with stunted airbending, I was of a lot better use close up then far away."

"It's not often that airbenders join the armed forces. Most who volunteer go into battlefield medicine," Kaiden said.

"Yeah, well, Major Rai Li was an airbender, and she did pretty well for herself."

"She was a Random," al'Wahim offered from the front. "Monks tend to be unwilling to shoot, as a rule."

"Random or not," Shepard cut the driver off, "she was pretty much the only one standing on Elysium when the first wave hit. If it wasn't for her, the entire colony would have been overrun," she gave a bit of a bitter laugh. "As I see it, if I wasn't Avatar, you'd probably be sitting across from her instead of me."

"Shepard," Wrex said, sitting forward.

"Wrex?"

"I'm only going to say this once," Wrex said. "STOP IT!"

"What?" Shepard leaned away from the screaming krogan.

"If you dwell in the past, you walk ass-backwards into the future. I've seen enough of that to last a Matriarch's lifetime. I'm sick of it," Wrex said, sounding quite and obviously angry. "She _might have_, but she _didn't_. There's no use wondering what could have been. So stop it, and _move on_."

Shepard glanced to Kaiden, who offered a somewhat confused shrug. "I have to agree with Wrex on this one. The Hero of Elysium is a good portrait for humanity, but warts and all, I think you're better."

Shepard nodded. "As for the Major... We weren't close. Not the way I was with the others. I didn't shed any tears when he scrubbed his Six and vanished into the black. Don't get me wrong, he was a decent enough leader, when the fight could have gone either way. But honestly, if you fall apart the minute you start losing..."

"I see," Kaiden said.

"He was sitting, alone and buried, in that nook of the fortress for more than a day before they found him. He hadn't tried to signal. He hadn't tried to dig his way out. He just sat there," Shepard said, not really understanding. "I don't understand that."

Wrex shrugged, and inspected his final fingernail. Now blunted and shorter to his satisfaction, he put his rasp away. "Some people crack. Some people step up. That's the way of the galaxy," Wrex said.

"When we meet him, let us do the talking," Shepard warned the alien and the Sentinel in turn. "He'll probably react much more kindly to us than he would to strangers."

"...and I was brought because...?"

"For the same reason we didn't bring Garrus," Shepard said to Kaiden's question. "It stands to reason that some of your 'classmates' might be associate with the Major. We're a friendly face with him, and they'll have a friendly face in you."

"And I'm here because I'm just generally cuddly and loveable," Wrex said in a tone so dry it could have desiccated an ocean.

"What human doesn't love a krogan?" Shepard asked.

"A dead one."

"Rhetorical question, Wrex."

"Rhetorical answer, Shepard."

"I see the base. The turrets are coming online," al'Wahim said over her shoulder.

"Give then a knock," Shepard said easily.

"As you will, Avatar," al'Wahim said. There were a few tense seconds. "The active tracking has switched off. It seems you are a more welcome face than we had feared."

"Then why am I uneasy about this?" Shepard asked. The biotic base seemed to be one of what was likely ten thousand identical prefabs that had been shipped out across the breadth of human space in their short time with the gift of FTL. The whole structure was a somewhat odd shape in its default configuration; it looked like a comma, with a heavy lip overhanging its entrance. That was simply because, by default, they didn't have their garage or airlock. On a garden world, after all, garages were seldom required. This was not, however, a garden world.

The Mako coasted closer, and the door retracted upward into a pitch-black maw. Al'Wahim gave an understandably nervous glance back to the inhabitants of her vehicle. Shepard nodded forward, and the Si Wongi swallowed, no doubt quietly muttering a prayer to her gods as she moved forward. Those not driving gave each other one final look, then the vehicle passed into darkness.

There was a long silence.

"Do I even have to say it?" Wrex asked in that blackness.

"If you die because of an ambush we brought you to, you'll kill us?" Shepard hazarded.

"Apparently not," Wrex acceded. A second later, there was a thud and a hiss as air started to fill the airlock. Then, a metal hum as the doors opened. Not to reveal the bright and uncaring beams of a halogen bulb... but instead the soft and shadowy illumination of what seemed to be about a thousand candles. Shepard looked at them, then to al'Wahim.

"That must have taken some time to prepare," the Si Wongi said, no less nervous for now being able to see.

"Lock the doors behind us. If we don't come back in a half hour..."

"Leave and warn the Normandy; aye aye," she said.

"No, you grab your gun and you come in after us," Shepard said with a shake of her head. "I don't feel like being taken prisoner by these nutjobs."

"Hey. Those nutjobs might have a point," Nilsdottir said. "They got fucked, and now they're pissed 'cause nobody even offered 'em a reach-around. So now they're doing the fucking; that's the circle-jerk of life."

"If you strain really hard, that's almost poetic," Wrex noted.

"Just get out of the Mako," Shepard muttered, and the four who would be entering entered the moodily illuminated garage. She amended her estimation of the room when she spotted what looked like a UT-45 Kodiak tucked away in one end. "Well, that's proof that somebody's give these people a lot of money."

"Those things don't come cheap," Alenko agreed. "They seem to have rolled out the welcome mat for us, though. Unsettling as it may be."

"I don't think that was for us," Shepard said. The candles were half-melted at best. She gave a nod, and her team moved to the inner airlock, the one which moved from garage and into the fortress. Shepard gave an experimental tap on the walls. She could feel through the stone that they'd laid large plates of lead against the interior walls, a slipshod way of making themselves impenetrable. Well, they didn't account for a tonne of annoyed krogan in that bodge.

Shepard broke off of her spying and tapped the button which ought have opened the door. Instead, it let out a harsh buzzing sound, and turned orange. "...really?" Shepard asked.

"_This is a private sanctuary. Outsiders are not welcome here. __Your__ kind are not welcome here, __bender__._"

"I'm going to have a word with the man in charge," Shepard said. "I think it'd be a good idea to facilitate that. Otherwise... well..."

"_Father Kiel will not heed your threats! He wants nothing more to do with the Alliance. All we want is to be __left alone_!"

"Then he shouldn't have made deals with a terrorist. That tends to blow up in your face – kind of like terrorists!" Shepard snapped.

"_We won't let you take Father Kiel away! We need him! He protects us._"

Shepard sighed. She gave a glance to Nilsdottir, who, as was usual these days, looked a twitch from rampage. Then, she turned back to the speaker. "I'm Shepard. Commander Shepard. I served with Kiel during the action on Torfan. I'm one of his people. Ask him."

There was a long silence. Then, another crackle. "_...the Father wishes to see you. He is within_."

The door opened, and the inside of the prefab... didn't look like the inside of a prefab. It's decoration and spaces were configured to make it seem like the outbuilding of a religious site. While Shepard had never been to the recently renovated Eastern Air Temple on Earth, she fairly considered that it'd probably look a lot like this. There were also faintly glowing eyes watching them, and the light of candles warred against the blue of biotic auras.

"You're in our sanctuary, so you will obey our rules!" one of them said, taking a step forward, and glowing a bit stronger as he no doubt forced more juice through his amp. Shepard didn't have the first clue how they worked, only that they gave Nilsdottir and Alenko a seemingly bottomless appetite and inability to become fat.

"You might want to moderate your tone," Wrex said calmly. The man flinched back. As much as krogan were more welcome than most aliens, they were still an impressive and intimidating sight.

The biotic turned to the three humans. "This place will not be sullied by your _bending_, Avatar. It is a pure place. A place lit by the blue fires within. And if you so much as touch one of ours, we will bury you."

"You're welcome to try."

"Kaiden?" a voice cut in and interrupted Shepard. "Is that you?"

"Zho Wei?" Alenko asked. "I thought you had your implant taken out."

"...No. No, this is the way I'm supposed to be," the rail-thin Easterner said. He caught the 'leader's arm and tugged him 'round. "I know this man, Tanoak; he's one of us."

"One of us?" Tanoak asked. Alenko nodded, and closed his eyes; that same blue glow which surrounded them was pushed back, and eclipsed for the most part, by the biotic field that Kaiden created just to show off. "One of us."

Somebody to one side gently took Nilsdottir's hand, and she flinched back. "Please, it is not harmful..." she said.

"Where is Kiel?" Shepard asked. But the older woman – who was probably one of the L1s – took Nilsdottir's hand again, and when she did, Nilsdottir started to glow like she'd suddenly become a black-haired asari. Everybody not part of Shepard's group took a step back in alarm at that. "What?"

"Such power... I didn't know this was possible," the woman said. "How did you come to such pure power? How did you survive such an infusion of our gift?"

"The _fuck_ you talkin' about?" Nilsdottir declared, pulling her hand away, and causing that glow to vanish.

"The Matron has a talent for finding others like us. ALMA will never persecute our kind again, or take one of our children," a younger woman nearby said.

"Not really necessary, since ALMA was wiped out more than a decade ago," Kaiden said.

"Focus!" Shepard snapped at her team. She faced down Tanoak. "Where. Is. Kiel."

"I will take you to him," the wayward Water Tribesman said. He motioned that they follow, but before Shepard could follow in the wake of her squad, that Matron caught her hand. Shepard's sight took on a blue tinge for a second before she could pull her hand away.

"Don't you even dare!"

"You... you are one of us too?" the Matron asked. "How is that possible at all? A human cannot be biotic and a bender!"

"I'm not biotic," Shepard snapped. Wrex shrugged at that, where he and Kaiden had both turned back to see her dirty little secret. "I'm not."

"The eezo in your brain tells a different story," Wrex said. "And I'm starting to think that the biotic/bender divide is one you invented. Doesn't happen in any other species."

"But..."

"ALMA was our only source of biotic information for a long time. Given how they ended... I'm surprised nobody questioned it sooner. And I'm more surprised that you never got fitted for an Amp. The L3s are completely safe, these days," Kaiden pointed out.

"I. Am. Not. A. Biotic," Shepard stressed.

"Why not?" Wrex asked.

Shepard didn't have an answer for that. "Just find Kiel before his crazy cultists decide to throw us into a volcano in honor of him."

There was discontented murmurings at that, but Shepard was beyond caring. Even the little sleep she'd gotten didn't seem to be enough. She was still tired. It didn't help that her dreams were as tiring as most people being completely awake. Maybe if she finally got to the end of Sajuuk's 'diary', she might be able to get worthwhile sleep for a change.

Tanoak brought them through the building, heading through the tiny rooms that housed whole families, it seemed like. Shepard was pretty sure that in order to sleep them all, they'd need to be stacked up like cord-wood. But at the same time, there wasn't the sweaty desperation of a refugee camp here. It was... content. There was music, the place didn't smell of fear and human waste, and no voices ever rose above quiet conversation. Perhaps a show for the visiting Avatar, but nevertheless, not what Shepard expected.

"You don't have anything to say?" Shepard asked Nilsdottir as they caught up with her.

"About what?" she asked through grit teeth.

"... about the eezo in my brain," Shepard said testily.

"What? You got eezo in you? Fuck if I care," she dismissed it angrily.

"Have you got that under control?" Shepard asked a bit more quietly. Nilsdottir's glare was an answer to that. It was angry, certainly, but there was a flicker in the younger woman's eyes which spoke to nothing else but mounting fear. Fear of losing grip. Fear of unleashing something she couldn't get back under control once freed. "Keep it together, Jack. We've got enough scared people here."

"I'm not scared," she claimed. Shepard knew better.

The procession lead up the stairs, then across a catwalk which overhung the cubicle dwellings below. At its far end was another room, one which had once had a stairway leading to it, but that stairway had been pulled apart, probably both to give this place a bit more room, and to restrict access to the 'Father' to any but this direction. It forced somebody to tour the building before meeting the man. It was supposed to impress.

Shepard knew that man's face when they pulled him from the rubble. She was anything but impressed.

"He is through here. We will be watching you," Tanoak declared, as he swept aside a curtain into a darkened room.

Alenko tried to go first, but Tanoak caught his shoulder and gave a stern shake of his head. "Father Kiel has invited only those who stood beside him on Torfan. You are a brother in Eezo, but you did not bleed on that hostile soil."

"I understand," Kaiden said. He turned to Shepard, coming very close and whispering into her ear. "We'll be right outside in case anything goes wrong."

"I didn't doubt it," Shepard likewise responded at a whisper. Alenko then moved past her, taking his place beside Wrex who hadn't bothered following them onto the catwalk – a good idea since it wasn't certain that the catwalk would have been able to take that much weight – and began to turn his all-seeing eyes to the crowd below them. Shepard nodded inward, and Jack ducked through first, into the dim light beyond.

Shepard almost ignited fire into her palm, but remembered that somebody might freak out over that. The shape before them was shaven-headed, facing a fractal pattern painted on the wall, over a rack of burning incense. "I know you," Kiel said. His voice was... different to how Shepard remembered it. There was an odd tone to it. Like somebody had set a fire inside his soul. He slowly turned toward her, and she could see that same fire in his eyes. "...the Butcher of Torfan. Why have you come here, Shepard? Why couldn't you just leave us alone?"

"We both know why, Kiel," Shepard said, her voice quieter than she would have expected. There was something about this room. It asked for quiet, and it got quiet. Probably a spirit thing, but at the moment, she didn't feel like plumbing deeper into that. "You took weapons and funds from a turian. His name is Saren Arterius."

"He gave us the means to protect ourselves from those who would hurt us. People like you, and the Alliance you serve," Kiel continued, his voice deep, and sotto. "You would vent your hatred for this alien on us? Because of how we were born?"

"I'm not going to repeat Aang's mistake, so don't put Korra's blame on me," Shepard snapped. Quietly. "Saren is a terrorist. He's trying to wipe out humanity."

"Then he's got a strange way of doing it," Kiel said, turning back toward the wall, and allowing blue to start flowing away from him in illuminating sheets. Not nearly so bright as Kaiden, let alone the incandescent beacon which was Jackie Nilsdottir, but enough to show the rest of the room. There were boxes against the walls, ones she recognized as Turian Hierarchy munitions containers. Each one probably held sixteen rifles. Phaestons, if she knew their preference. Four boxes made enough to arm every grown man and woman in this 'sanctuary' with top-line gear.

Any unwary force which tried to barge in here would have been torn to shreds.

"Saren is out for the extinction of humanity. Perhaps even all galactic civilization."

"Big words. There isn't enough meaning to fill them. Why should I listen to the one who killed all those children, all those innocents?"

"They weren't innocent," Shepard said, her voice finally piercing whatever spell permeated this room. "They were terrorists, just like Saren. They were willing to use anybody or anything against humanity, just like Saren. And they were willing to lie to our face for a chance to kill us. Just. Like. Saren."

"You simply wish to take me away from here. To remove me from my family," Kiel said, confident, and calm.

"This isn't about your 'family', Kiel. This is about somebody who's trying to break the galaxy. I will not have that. You can lead me to him. You _will_ lead me to him."

"And why would I do that?" Kiel asked.

"Because if you don't, then I will bury you," Shepard said, stepping into her former superior's face. "Not in rock and metal. You've got too many ways of getting out from under that. No, I'm going to bury you in the thing that you want the least: Scrutiny."

Kiel blinked in confusion, but Shepard's lips pulled into a dark smirk. "That does not sound like much of a threat."

"Not yet," Shepard said, slowly stepping forward, forcing him to step back. "But when you try to talk to these people, there will be a dozen people from NES listening. When you walk the halls of your 'fortress', their eyes will be watching. When you try to reach out of your tiny kingdom, for food, for more converts, they will be standing in your way. All you can do is get your 'family' killed here, Kiel. You either kill them with the bullets of the enemies _you_ make, or you wither them to death, stagnating and starving over years and decades. This isn't my call. That's already out. The only call that's left to make is yours."

"I don't believe you," Kiel said.

"I would believe her," Jack said, her tone every bit as dark as the room it lay in. "In fact, I'd be praying to any god you believe in, and thanking them that she's showing you the mercy of not just walking in here and painting the wall with your brain."

"That would be suicide," Kiel said.

Nilsdottir's teeth grit, and the light that Kiel was emitting from the twisting biotic fields around him was completely overpowered by the azure incandescence that emanated out of her. "It's only suicide if you don't survive it," the biotic promised.

"You always get your soldiers killed. Your call... that was what doomed us. Keep going. Find that scrambler," Kiel said.

Shepard didn't even know how her sidearm got into her hand, only that she was now staring down it. "I did what I had to do!" Shepard shouted.

"And how many paid the price for it?" Kiel asked. "How can you look at yourself in the mirror?"

"Because... somebody has to _make them pay_," Shepard said. Slowly, the almost overwhelming wrath bled out of her, and her arm dropped, bearing that pistol away from the biotic extremist, and letting it point at the floor. "Saren... he's just like the Bats at Torfan, Major. He's not on your side. He's only on his own. He's insane; the caged kind of crazy that makes him more dangerous than anybody else. I have to stop him."

"Why?"

"Because that's my job."

"That isn't a good enough reason."

"It'll have to do," Shepard said. She glanced to Jack, who was still providing mood lighting. "I wasn't lying about the scrutiny, Kiel. This place is already on it's last breath. You have a choice between disbanding quietly, or becoming the next ALMA."

"You wouldn't," Kiel said, starting to sweat.

"No. But Admiral Hackett would. I know for a fact that he'll use plausible deniability like a scalpel. And anything that keeps biotic crazies from attacking Earth, well, he'll sleep well at night knowing that it's gone. You're part of the problem, Kiel, but there's no reason you can't be part of the solution."

"He would..."

"Wipe you out, from orbit, without a second's hesitation," Shepard said. Bluffed, a bit. "So that's my offer, Kiel. A fast death or a slow one; if you're very lucky, your death might take fifty years or so. Theirs," she cast a thumb back and down, "might take even longer."

"No... I cannot allow that to happen," Kiel said, his face seeming to collapse out of calm and into honest fear. "These people trust me. They look up to me. I've saved them from the worst of circumstances; I cannot let them die like this! They are innocent! Pure!"

"They may be. But you've got the power to set them free, to give them life," Shepard said. "Where is Saren? One answer. That's the price of everybody here."

"...I never knew you were such a pirate, Shepard."

Shepard turned away from her once-mentor. "I can't let him get away. You've got your causes. I've got mine."

"I... will do as you ask," Kiel said. But as he turned toward the computer panel which rest on a low desk in the corner, his head popped up, his eyes wide. The alarm in them was obvious. "Oh... oh no."

"What?" Shepard asked.

"The Chairman," Kiel said. He turned to Shepard. "Some of my 'children', some of the more outspoken, they wanted more than what I could offer. They wanted the Alliance's attention, their apology... but I believe that they will go about it in a very bad way."

"What do you mean?" Shepard asked, as the lights went out. Shepard finally allowed herself to illuminate the room with good, old-fashioned fire above her palm. Kiel blinked a moment at it, but didn't protest.

"The MSV Senlin," he said hurriedly. "Chairman Buni is aboard; he's the head of the Subcommittee for Transhuman Studies. They were going to board it and take him hostage until their position was heard."

"They were going to ransom a politician?" Shepard asked.

"I don't think so," Kiel said quietly. He turned to her, his back straightening. "Take me to him. I will be able to convince him to stop."

"Why should she trust you?" Nilsdottir asked, crossing her arms before her chest. Easy there, Jack, Shepard thought. The worst is already over.

Kiel sighed. "She has no reason but my word. I do not want any biotic to die. Not over something which could have been prevented."

Shepard looked him in the eye. And she gauged him. The Kiel she knew was a hard bastard, but a liar? Never. And there was a fear in there, not for himself but for something he believed in. He wanted this more than his own life. "Fine," Shepard said. "Where?"

"The Farinata system," Kiel said. "They left three hours ago."

"We're not going to be able to catch up," Jack pointed out the obvious.

"Then we might as well not fall any further behind," Shepard said. She grabbed Kiel by the cuff of his shirt and forced him toward the door. "Tell your 'family' whatever it is they need to hear. If you're not on that Mako in five minutes, then the deal is off."

"I will not disappoint," Kiel said. For everybody's sake, Shepard thought, you'd better not.

* * *

Shepard paused on her way to her room with the most baffled look on her face, caught in mid stride. The other crew who were off-duty but not ready for racks had all gathered – all ten of them – to have a 'movie night'. Liara found the thing a bit confusing since it was both daytime, and _movies_ were outdated technology since the advent of OmniVid technology. Shepard, though, seemed to be more transfixed by the subject matter that they were watching.

"...what the hell am I looking at?" Shepard asked, her curiosity getting the better of her, obviously.

"_Enkindle this, criminal scum._"

"It is a 'movie', which the crew seemed adamant that I watch. I have no idea why," Liara said.

"_Hah! Your gun's overheated, Blasto. What are you going to do now?_"

"_This one does not have time for your solid waste excretions_."

"_Wait. No don't! WAAAGH!_"

"Fantastic. I thought only _humans_ did movies this terrible," Wrex said where he lounged on a crate, idly feeding popcorn to the bird on his hump.

"Asari don't just do glamor and sex," Adeks said with a shrug from the other side of the viewing audience. At least the two krogan could stand to be in the same room with each other. They had frequently come to blows before.

"...Is that a hanar?" Shepard asked.

"Yes. Was that not obvious?" Liara asked.

"...why is it holding five guns?"

"Because it has six tentacles," Liara answered. "Six would be silly."

"You don't say," Shepard said flatly.

"I heard about what happened on Presrop," Liara said. "That must have been uncomfortable for you."

Shepard glanced to Wrex, but what silent response Wrex had to her look was lost on the back of Liara's head. "You have no idea," she said. She nodded toward her bedroom. "Let's get this trainwreck started, then."

"Excellent! I have been eagerly awaiting this opportunity!" Liara declared. Several of the crew turned toward the advancing human and asari with knowing looks, and whispered implications. The distance even between Liara and Shepard was enough that the latter couldn't hear, and the former didn't care. Liara followed Shepard through her threshold, and the door closed and locked behind Liara. One day, she was going to have to talk to Shepard about that. Locking people out did very little for ingratiating oneself with one's crew, and made gaining friends difficult. She just hoped Shepard cared about that.

"Alright," Shepard said. She spun the cap off of her whiskey-bottle and took a slug before sitting on the edge of her seat. She motioned to the bed opposite it. Liara stared at it for a moment, not completely understanding. Then, her mind jumped to the conclusion that she was being propositioned. Then, she remembered that Shepard was a heterosexual woman, and preferred a partner with a phallus.

Her internal dialogue was countermanded, though, as she called to mind the 'rumors', which Kaiden had confirmed as more than simply that, of Shepard's interactions with Sha'ira, which meant Shepard was at least somewhat interested in interspecies sexuality. That, in turn prompted a very important question which practically brought Liara's brain to a screeching halt – itself an almost unprecedented occurrence. Was Liara _sexually attracted_ to Shepard?

That bore some time and consideration.

"Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to start crawling around in my brain again?" Shepard asked.

"In a moment," Liara said, sitting down across from her, their knees just barely touching though both were hunched forward. Shepard out of poor posture, Liara, out of wanting to have a close vantage point for observation. "The Major has obviously affected you more deeply than you anticipated. Are you certain you want to do this?"

Shepard sighed. "I have to. I need to know what Saren got out of that Beacon."

"That was not what I asked. We can... do this again later, if you desire," Liara said. She moved to turn, but Shepard caught her shoulder.

"I can do this now. I know how much you want this," Shepard's lips pulled into a slight smirk at the end of that. "Always give a lady what she wants."

"Really?" Liara asked.

Shepard only nodded. "...nobody else comes in here," she motioned around her, "and nobody else comes in here," she tapped her head. "These are things... I don't like people getting into. But for some reason, it's not so bad with you. I..." she shook her head, whatever thought was in her brain failing to find words. "It doesn't matter. Are we 'embracing eternity' or not?"

If only. "Alright. Close your eyes. Clear your mind. Let the conflicts and the doubts, and the fears drift down the river into the sea of the void. Feel the connections, one mind to another; one heart, one soul to another. Feel that which binds us all together," Liara said. And when she opened her eyes, to those fateful words, it was not to the dim cabin of Shepard's quarters, but a dusty library.

Once again, Liara pouted. One day, she was going to see through Prothean eyes. _One day_.

"Liara, good," Hong said, drawing a squawk of alarm from the asari as he came upon her from behind. "I've found a way to get back into Shepard's memories at the point we were shuffled out. Are you ready?"

"I have to be," Liara said. Hong turned away. "Wait."

"What is it, Liara?"

"You have been watching Shepard's life, have you not?" she asked.

"More than I'm supposed to, but circumstances aren't exactly ideal," Hong admitted.

"Has she been... happy... with somebody since Mindoir?"

Hong's brow furrowed. "I'm not sure I understand your intent, but... no. Not for long. She selects doomed relationships, something that she knows in her heart won't last, because she can't handle people getting close to her. Until you, she never admitted to anybody _why_ she fights. You're closer to her, Liara, than any man she's ever 'loved'. And she needs that kind of friend. Now, more than ever."

A bit of hope kindled in Liara at that pronouncement. "I was simply curious. She seemed so desperately unhappy."

"She is that," Hong said. He closed his eyes, took a breath in. Then a pause. "This will be easier if you close your eyes, Miss T'Soni."

"Oh!" Liara said. She closed her eyes, and in a flicker, she was standing on grass, rather than cut stone. She glanced aside to see a little auburn girl drop out of a window and land in a redheaded youth's arms, both of them wearing the loose, yellow clothes which were contemporarily associated with airbenders.

"Tali, you have to be quiet," Shepard whispered. "Can you be quiet?"

"I'm scared, Big Sis," Tali Shepard mewled, albeit quietly. Shepard pulled Tali close to her, and the two began to run through the wreckage which was once the residential sector of the Mindoir colony. Oh, how quickly it had turned from one to the other. The two girls were almost out of sight by the time Liara realized she was supposed to follow them.

"Alright, we're back in places that I haven't seen before," Hong said.

"I am concerned as to why you want me to view this. I am finally making some headway into Shepard's rage. This might only serve to cause her more pain," Liara pointed out as she jogged after him. "And why can we not simply teleport to their side? We are dreaming, are we not?"

"Short answer, no. Long answer, it's too complicated," Hong said. "Shepard needs to face this. Otherwise, she'll never be the woman she needs to be. Or the Avatar she needs to be."

"There is more to life than the role that was picked for you before the day you were born!" Liara said.

"Not when you're the Avatar," Hong said. The two caught a glimpse of bright robes crawling under the foundation of a prefab, so the two who couldn't follow circled around it; it was easy since as soon as they went out of the young Shepard's line of sight, the world became a featureless void which was elementary to traverse. "As much power as the Avatar embodies, in many ways, he or she is far less free than anybody else around her. She has a responsibility to humanity and the world that they live on. I can only shudder to think the responsibilities levied upon the Avatar now that we have the run of the galaxy."

Liara paused, and spotted the two girls, huddled in the darkness near a support pylon. Ahead, she and Hong could clearly see a whole collection of humans, most of whom were twitching in submission nets, as they were dragged into a rough pile. Standing nearby were a pair of batarians, and three more were policing the crowd, while a forth dug through the pile one at a time, and tore the nets off of the humans trapped within.

And then, the batarian tore the humans' clothes off. "Male!" he called, and slapped a slave-collar on the now benuded man, before tossing him into a containment pod. He then moved to the next, and repeated that same process. "Female!" another collar, and another naked human thrown into a tiny bin for transport. The process repeated, two more women stripped naked, classified, and collared, another man as well.

"I don't get it," Hong said in confusion.

"Batarians do not share human secondary sex characteristics," Liara found herself explaining. "The simplest way to be sure is to check _primary_ characteristics."

"This isn't right. It's inhumane," Hong said.

"Yes. But batarians are notably not human," Liara said. Then, the batarian pulled a boy of no more than five years out of the pile. He didn't even strip the boy down. He just looked him up and down.

"Useless!" he declared, and fired a blast of ballistic blades into the child's chest, killing him almost instantly. One of the women in the containment bin screamed out in horror, before there was an electric zap and the scream turned to personal agony. Liara turned away.

"Batarian slave-takers... do not take captives that are of no immediate worth," she said quietly. And even as she did, the slave-master repeated that same classification to a girl a little under ten, before moving on to a teenaged boy and defaulting to the earlier tactic of strip nude, classify, collar, and move on. There was a buzzing sound nearby. It had the cadence of batarian speech, but not the meaning.

"What is that?" Hong asked.

"Hold on, can you bring me back to it?" Liara asked. Hong closed his eyes, and the scene 'reset' itself a few seconds earlier. Liara rounded the corner to the two closest batarians. One of them looked notably upset; one not wearing the bladed armor of a batarian slaver. No, he seemed to be wearing a flight vest. He didn't even have a gun. She focused on the buzzing, and she realized it was indeed words. And in Kharshott, one of the batarian languages she'd learned as an elective in university.

"This... doesn't seem right," the unarmed batarian said quietly.

"Slavery is an inextricable part of batarian life," the armed one next to him said off-hand. "Better that these two-eyed freaks get enslaved than, say, you, _pilot_."

The batarian pilot turned away, unable to view the carnage before him. "...doesn't mean I have to like it," he muttered.

"What are they doing?" Tali Shepard's voice asked. She was quickly and ruthlessly shushed by the redheaded airbender next to her.

"We're going to have to move fast. You can move fast, can't you, Tali?" Liara turned, and saw the younger girl nodding, though fear was clear in her eyes.

"Alright. Keep up with me," Shepard said.

She waited until the batarians were all focused on the task of keeping the captured colonists in line, and then she broke from out the crawl-space, her legs pumping as she bent the air out of her way, and gave another to punt her forward at incredible speed. She had gotten all the way across the open before any batarian even thought to turn and look. Tali, on the other hand, wasn't so fortunate. She tried to run, yes, but she tripped, stumbled, and fell on her face half-way across. One of the batarians turned at the sound and his eyes grew furrowed.

"We've got runners!" he shouted. Tali bounded up and spun a ball of air under her; because she used it to scoot up a wall before taking off down that 'street', she was able to avoid the electrified netting that the batarian fired at her. If the batarian had been standing still when he'd done so, she'd have gotten away cleanly. But instead, he was already sprinting toward her, and two of the others were joining him.

"Hold onto your butt, this is going to be uncomfortable," Hong said, taking Liara's hand. He pressed his eyes shut, and the scene lurched, so that she was now standing at Shepard's side, where the girl had come to a halt, her eyes wide and focused on the incoming batarian on Tali's tail. Quite the unusual sensation. Shepard twisted her arms into a broad arc, and with her entire body flicking to give it strength, sent out a bolt of twisting wind which Tali bounded over, before it slammed headlong into the batarian's body. He was swept back and into the air from its force. The other two batarians, though, ducked and slid under it, before one of them rose, an armored fist leading.

Liara's hands went to her mouth; the batarian was aiming those ballistic blades at Tali's back. Her expectations were subverted, however, as Shepard took another bound forward, so that Tali just barely zipped past her, as she twisted her arms once more, and the air before her seemed to solidify somewhat. When the thud of the blades being fired finally sounded, they had a sphere of air to deflect them. Sadly, bent air was no match for high-velocity steel. One of the blades, not deflected enough, tore through Shepard's side and started to paint her robes red. Shepard let out a scream of fear and pain, before twisting with her feet in a bound which sent a whirlwind searing toward the two batarians. The further back of the two raced forward, and slammed his hands together before pulling sternly up. At his command, the stone of the ground rose up to block that whirlwind from sweeping him and his companion away as Shepard's first attack did to that one.

"Big Sis!" Tali screamed.

"Keep running! I'll keep up!" Shepard shouted up to her. And then, the wounded airbender, the desperate Avatar, started to run.

* * *

"I don't understand," Sajuuk said, staring out ahead of them into the field of debris which slowly spread out of a central point; there was no clear indication what the debris was from, only that it was plentiful and utterly obliterated. "Where is it? The Citadel is here! The Crucible was supposed to activate!"

"Well, it's not," Ovar said darkly. He turned and walked back to the airlock, which had joined with the Glory Unto The Most High. Sajuuk turned toward him.

"Where do you think you're going?" Sajuuk demanded.

"Away from you," Ovar said.

"This isn't over..."

"YES IT IS!" Ovar screamed. He thrust a tridactyl hand through the view-ports which stared out into the black, and to the twisting metal which floated in the abyss. "The Crucible, which you pinned all of our hopes on, is destroyed! The fleets are destroyed! Our armies are destroyed! You have managed to alienate every client race of our empire!"

"You will not speak to me in such a tone," Sajuuk said. And he was utterly shocked when Ovar's fist connected at high speed with his jaw.

"Oh, I think I have every right to," Ovar shouted. He thrust a finger down at the Avatar. "Your hubris and jingoism have cost us the only chance we had at survival as a race! The Prothean Empire is shattered, and it can fall to no other head than yours. Our species will soon be every bit as extinct as the vaal. And that is your fault. A billion lives have been lost in a pointless war. That. Is. Your. Fault."

"You have no idea about which you speak," Sajuuk said, wiping the faint trail of blood from where his teeth had cut into his lip from the punch.

Ovar stared down at him. "When we first met, I was young, naïve, and weak. I was a child, trying to play a man's game. But the time for childish things is over. The time for Avatars... is over."

"What are you doing?" Sajuuk shouted as Ovar turned and crossed the airlock threshold, from the armed, if haphazardly repaired Coming of Daylight, into the tiny, insignificant Glory Upon The Most High. Sajuuk did not understand. What folly was this? What pointless rebellion?

"I am finally doing something that needs to be done," Ovar said. "I am done with you, and your Empire. Its bones will fall to dust, and the Reapers will suck of their marrow. There is nothing that can be done for them. But there is something _I_ can do."

Sajuuk slowly pushed himself to his feet. "So you would rather die in heedless debauchery than face your end as a warrior."

"I am no warrior," Ovar snapped. "I'm a _cultural anthropologist_. The only reason I ever raised a gun was for you. To stop the Reapers, to fight your battles. Well, the war is over. The Reapers have won. All that I can do now is make sure something survives."

"You will not abandon this mission," Sajuuk said.

"The mission is over."

"I am not giving you permission to leave this crew," Sajuuk shouted.

"Then by all means, try to stop me!" Ovar shouted back, his arms spread wide. "Come! Stop me! I have no weapons! I have neither biotics nor bending! What harm could I possibly be? What could I do to prevent you from stopping me? Well? STOP ME! IF YOU DARE, STOP ME!"

The last, shrieked words echoed throughout the increasingly empty halls of the Coming of Daylight. Sajuuk stared at the young doctor. And slowly, his eyes drifted down. He couldn't look Ovar in the eye, not because of the treason that the lad perpetrated, but because of a mounting shame in the Avatar's heart.

"That's what I thought," Ovar said. "The Inusannon were dead for forty two thousand years when our Empire began, and when the Reapers came, we were not ready. When the Reapers are gone, what _I_ build will _end them_. They will be ground into dust, and it will be by the hands _I_ train. _Not_ the Avatar. Not you."

"You will die a traitor's death," Sajuuk said, even though his heart was no longer in it.

"Perhaps. But better a traitor to the Prothean Empire in defeat, then true to it in victory. That's obvious to me now," Ovar said. "_They_ deserve a better chance than we had. And they will get one."

Sajuuk raised his four-eyed glare to Ovar one final time. "Get off my ship."

"Gladly," Ovar said, and he reached aside to punch the airlock button. The doors leading into the Glory Upon The Most High slammed shut, and the doors of the Coming of Daylight followed suit a fraction of a second later, before there was a loud thud. Then, Sajuuk could see upon turning, the tiny ship zip ahead of Sajuuk's cruiser, and bank hard before vanishing into FTL, bound directly for the Mass Relay.

Sajuuk stared at the maelstrom before him. After an unknowable time, he felt a hand on his shoulder. Kija, ever faithful, stood behind him. "I do not understand," Sajuuk said, still staring into the black. "The Citadel was _here_. It has orbited this star for countless generations. I... don't understand."

"Is there something we can do?" Kija asked. "Can we... I don't know, repair the Crucible?"

"If we had the vaal, if we had the ditakur, if we had the synril, and the oravore, and the enduromi... then yes. We could have. But... we do not," Sajuuk said quietly.

"...so what do we do?" Kija asked.

"I do not know," Sajuuk said, slumping to the floor in defeat, as the ruins of his last hope slowly drifted through the blackness. It was over. He'd lost.

…

There was an odd, sideways sort of motion which Shepard could feel pulsing through her, as though all gravity had suddenly decided that it wanted to point in a different direction. Her perception, her identity, was being pulled away from the Prothean Avatar on his knees, the oravore at his side. For a split second, Shepard could have sworn there was another Prothean there, but one staring directly at Shepard herself. Then, the last thread connecting Shepard to Sajuuk released, and she was falling away.

She opened her eyes, and she was standing at the head of an army, a thousand strong. Ahead of her, another, easily ten times its size. Every soldier at her back shared the wedge-head, the four eyes, the grim resolve. "The King has sent his reply," another Prothean said at her side. "You are to surrender unconditionally or die, Avatar."

"I see," the odd, disconnected Shepard/Prothean Avatar said. "Does he await a response?"

"He does, my Avatar," the Prothean bowed low.

"Then I shall give him one," she said sternly, and a whiteness overtook her vision. Again, Shepard felt herself being pulled out of the body, cast adrift on the tides of time and confusion. Then, a thud, and she was... trapped inside a metal coffin. Again, female. Again, Prothean.

"You cannot contain me forever! I am the Avatar!" she screamed.

"And soon, you'll be an ex-Avatar," a voice barely made it through the metal. She could hear something being poured over it. She knew that it was concrete, a knowledge that the Shepard of the gestalt couldn't understand. So the Avatar took a deep breath, even in her claustrophobic local, before she lashed forward with a punch, one which dented the side of that coffin. She stared at it in shock.

"I did not expect that to actually work," she said mildly. And then, she started to grin, as she dug into a knowledge of metalbending which had only been invented within her generation, and tore her way free, and clawed her way to the surface through earthbending. She erupted from the pulpy stone, landing on one knee and one hand in the foundations of a building, and easily two dozen Protheans armed with muskets flinched back with alarm. "Did you really think the Avatar would so easily die?" that once and long ago Avatar asked.

"Kill her! KILL HER!" a desperate Prothean shouted. There was a whiteness in her vision, and Shepard was torn free again.

A new thud, and she was baking alive. She could see the blue tattoos, once an unmistakable symbol of airbending mastery, on the hands which were crossed above her bald head. No, correction, _his_ bald head. The heat was oppressive, and he didn't get an instant to recover, to do anything but cower and hope that the stone held.

Then, a moment of respite. The twelve year old airbender tried to shore up the stone, but even with his earthbending senses, he could see his opponent was only preparing for a yet-greater assault. And when that firebender landed, rooted himself, the flame smashed through the stone that the boy-Avatar pulled to him as though it a mere afterthought. He was thrown back, seeing the black haired and long bearded Fire Lord who was trying to kill him. Pain, of burning. Pain of impact, of something jabbing into his back.

A sensation, of not being alone.

Then, the stone fell. But the Avatar was not unconscious, or very badly hurt. He was gathering his will, and waiting.

"Come on out, little boy," the Fire Lord taunted as he moved closer. "You're about to be–"

The boy-Avatar cut him off by reaching up, slamming his fist closed around the Fire Lord's beard, and pulling himself up out of the stone, as the world dissolved into white. And once more, Shepard fell. This time, it wasn't very far, before she landed on her chest on a very, very familiar kind of grass. She groaned for a moment, trying to figure out what just happened to her.

She was a couple of Prothean Avatars... and then she was pretty sure the human one was Aang. And now she was... She pushed herself up to her hands and knees, turning her head, trying to get a better look without tipping the nausea rumbling through her to its breaking point. She didn't much want to know what happened if she vomited inside her own soul. That had to be a bitch to clean up.

Finally, staggering upward, she took her footing, leaning against a prefab building, the likes of which dominated every direction she could see. She knew this place. And as the confusion, as the dullness of thought, as the nausea faded, a dull, bottomless horror took its place.

"I'm on Mindoir," Shepard said. She walked up that street, angry but spectral voices around her; she had know idea what they said, only that they wanted blood and flesh. If not the latter, than the former. She moved through the streets she'd learned every inch of in her childhood, to the courtyard which lay below her home, below that fateful window.

"...daddy," Shepard said, bending down to the body which she'd fled from. His eyes stared sightlessly upward, the rice-grain sized hole in his forehead the only indication of the wound which killed him. The pool of blood around him told a different story, though; one of defiance in the face of agony and death. They just kept shooting him, over and over. Shepard's chest hitched, and she dropped to her knees. She didn't want to cry. She wasn't going to cry! But still, the tears came, if luckily without sobs. Her father died here. Her family died here. She turned, walking up to that window, bounding in easily enough.

She forestalled herself, though. "I... I have to see this," Shepard said, not even bothering to wipe the tears away from her eyes. She took a calming breath, then moved through the prefab to its kitchen, to where Mama lay, impaled by a chunk of debris. Exactly one sob got out of Shepard at the sight of it. It was every bit as horrible as she remembered it. The skin, that was what got Shepard the most. How it had turned that horrible grey, so quickly. How bright eyes failed and faded after the light had left them.

"I should have..." Shepard whispered, trying to step away. She wanted to reach down, to pull her mother close. To grieve over everything. But... Shepard didn't let herself. Because Shepard had a mission, a goal. A destiny. The galaxy was unfair, cruel, and harsh. So she would change that, one bastard at a time.

She stared down at her mother, trying to stop the tears which leaked down her face. She only managed to keep from bursting into outright weeping. She was so _tired_. That was the sensation which dominated her thinking even through the grief ignited afresh. She was just tired, of having to carry this around everywhere. She was tired of being afraid of the dark, and afraid of the walls. And at that, she knew where she had to go. She turned away, looking out over the path that she'd taken, toward the bunker. That seemed to be the purpose of this horror show. To show every mistake Sajuuk had made, and every one Shepard had as well. Every failure. Every... a part of her wanted to say betrayal.

So she started to walk, listlessly, toward where her sister vanished from her life.

* * *

Shepard was going slower, that was obvious. The young airbender obviously had never been shot before in her life. Liara could understand how that would slow one down. Well, not really; her armor was essentially everything-proof, but still. "Tali! Keep going!" Shepard shouted ahead of her.

"Big Sis? What's wrong? Why are you bleeding!" Tali Shepard shouted, coming to a halt. Shepard, therefore, scooped her over her unwounded side and carried her forward until the girl got the hint, squirmed free, and started running once more. Tali easily outpaced Shepard, who was holding the wound closed from where the chunk of metal had essentially gone through her. The younger Shepard paused again, turning back from her heedless sprint that the elder sister couldn't maintain.

"No! Keep going! I'll catch up to you!" Shepard said. And then, she twisted and hurled a blast of wind behind her. The two batarians which were rapidly making up ground once again rooted themselves, one earthbending a stone shelter to break that wind, before advancing again. Tali didn't look like she wanted to go, but the desperation on Shepard's face was absolute and obvious. The two batarians were going to catch her before she reached the bunker, tantalizingly close and yet out of reach. The dull hump of it was a beacon of light to the two airbenders. In the memories which Liara was watching, it even seemed to glow slightly. So much hope, so much promise.

Shepard lurched forward, and the batarians closed. One of them looked ready to just reach out and grab her – no doubt, that was the one who'd wasted a submission net on a piece of unoccupied stone. But in the instant before his hand clamped on the back of Shepard's collar, there was a blast of wind that even Liara, who was divorced from most of the sensations of this dreamlike memory, could feel. It was followed by about thirty kilograms of angry, high-velocity airbender. The air-riding girl slammed off of the batarian's chest, which caused him to reverse his momentum and fall, but the other was already rushing past him.

"TALI! GO TO THE BUNKER!" Shepard howled, flicking near knife-edge blasts of wind at the encroaching slaver, trying to slow him down. His attempts at earthbending, to trap or pelt the ten year old girl, proved futile at anything but destroying nearby buildings. Tali Shepard proved about as capable as any asari airbender whom Liara had ever met, flowing through those blocks and around its punches, even dodging a blast of ballistic blades at point-blank range, as easily as a breeze slipping between the leaves of a tree. Shepard kept running, but her gait was slow. "TALI! COME ON!" Shepard howled. Tali turned, and noted Shepard's egress.

The girl was swift as a bolt of lightning. Even as the batarians crossed the threshold to the blast-resistant shelter which Shepard was now lurching through, she was already at Shepard's side. The older girl furiously pressed the button to open the elevator doors, which would bear her down and to safety. They didn't seem to want to open. "Open! Open open open!" Shepard screamed. Finally, the doors began their slow slide, and Shepard darted through, pulling Tali along behind her.

Only not.

Shepard was caught short, Tali's arm through the door but unable to progress any further, because the other arm of the young airbender was caught by the batarian earthbender. Shepard stared at the batarian, who gazed back with dispassionate, black eyes. Even as Liara watched, she could feel Shepard's hatred, as it was born in that moment. She could understand it. Because this would forever be the worst day of Shepard's life, and to that batarian, it was just another slave-raid. "Big Sis!" Tali squealed, even as Shepard tried to pull her in. The batarian on the other side was simply too strong, his grip too sure. Even with both trying to blast him off of his footing with their combined airbending, they couldn't move him. Liara could see why; the earthbending batarian had encased his feet, fastening him to the concrete.

"TALI!" Shepard screamed, and her scream reached a whole new level of helpless terror as the batarian gave a heave and hurled the girl back through the air. The other batarian, who had caught up to the earthbender, caught the girl by the throat even as she tried to right herself, to start bending her way back, and slammed her face first into the concrete with a sickening crack. "TALI NO!" Shepard shrieked.

The batarian took a stomping stride forward, and backed Shepard into the elevator, even as the doors closed behind him. He said something, which Shepard couldn't hear. Then, there was stillness. Hong shook his head, wiping his glasses on the tails of his shirt. "I didn't know," Hong said. "I mean, I didn't see it."

"This is horrible," Liara agreed. "I can't imagine what that brute did to her."

Hong shook his head. "You don't know her anger or her guilt, Liara. I don't think it was what he did to her; I think it was what _she_ did to _him_."

Liara frowned, confused. "What do you mean by that?"

The scene began to move again, as the dead Avatar and the not-present asari pressed back against corners as the doors closed behind the batarian, and the lift began to descend. The batarian spoke again, and this time, as Liara was listening for it, she could understand that he'd said "You're a lot of trouble, girl. Normally, I'd just kill you. But... we've got something we _do_ to children like you."

"Leave me alone!" Shepard shouted at the batarian she couldn't understand as they descended toward the compromised haven. The batarian reached out and grabbed her arm, pulling it away from her wounded side. The pain, the grief, the fear, and the rage, they all poured out of Shepard and into Liara. There was a hint of greater power, something beyond anything Shepard had known possible. But at the last possible second, before it filled her and exploded into a righteous and unmatched outrage, it was crushed, poisoned by a very small, a very base, a very human hate. And when Shepard lashed out, bending all of the wind of the lift, it was with great power, but little control, and no mercy whatsoever. Liara could practically _smell_ Shepard turning away from a birthright which the asari didn't wholly understand, but could nevertheless feel.

The first blow slammed the batarian against the wall at Shepard's side, which caused him to release his grasp of her hand. She swept her entire bleeding body to one side, and the winds reversed, causing the slaver to crash against the far wall. Another twist, and he was smashed into the ceiling, bursting some of the lights, before he was dashed at ever increasing speed into the floor. Shepard's eyes were wide open; she was watching everything she did, but her eyes overflowed with tears of grief, or perhaps madness, as the batarian was smashed into every surface available, harder and harder, until his limbs stopped resisting. Until blood started to splat with every impact. Until there was almost nothing recognizably batarian left. And then, she kept on going.

The floor of the lift was several centimeters deep of blood, either near-black or bright red oozing atop it, when Shepard slammed the body into a wall one final time, bursting the last of the lights of the elevator, and plunging the thing into utter darkness. There was a blast which resounded even through the stone. The lift, which had been plunging almost a kilometer – for it was proofed against asteroid strikes rather than pirates – halted, as its power died. There was a silence, in that darkness, and the stink of blood.

And then, quiet at first but with growing intensity and desperation, a young girl's inconsolable weeping.

"This explains a few things," Liara said in the darkness. "Her aversion to elevators for one."

"Her stunted airbending for another," Hong said, motioning down at the girl which Liara could somehow see, though the image was a black-upon-black which defied easy explanation to one not experiencing it. "She used the most peaceful of elemental martial arts to kill a man in the most brutal of ways. And she hasn't accepted it, not completely. Until she does..."

"She will not be whole? She will not be able to enter her 'Avatar State'?" Liara gambled.

"Spot on," Hong said. "When she wakes up, you should find a way to ask her about what happened here."

The young Shepard continued to weep, her arms pulled tight around her. Liara didn't know how long Shepard squatted in that blood and filthy, but she wagered it took some time for somebody to dig her out of that tube. "I only wonder how I could broach the subject without tipping my proverbial hand. This is not something that can–"

Liara was cut off from her question by a loud thump on the roof of the elevator. The weeping Shepard didn't react to it in the slightest, which meant either the girl's life was somehow going to get worse – as unbelievable of a concept as that was at this point – or something else was moving. Hong, too, seemed unsettled by that.

"...did you hear that?" Hong asked.

He was answered, when pale fingers erupted through the metal, and then hooked. A heave and a shriek of the roof failing catastrophically sounded, as it was peeled aside with ease. A light flooded down into that lift, beaming out from the lamp built into an armored shoulder. It fell on the floor, on Liara, and on Hong, but strangely, didn't illuminate Shepard. Liara squinted upward at the source of that glaring illumination, at a loss for words.

"Liara?" Shepard's voice asked. Current Shepard, she made the internal distinction. The light shifted out from being directly in Liara's eyes. Liara could see that Shepard's eyes were red-rimmed, and she looked like she'd been having herself a good cry. But her expression now was utter bafflement. Shepard then turned toward Hong. "Wait a second. Avatar Hong? What are _you two_ doing_ here_?"

Hong gave Liara a resigned shrug. "Shepard, it's time that you and I had a talk."

* * *

"...what." Shepard said, as she sat in a chair in a Fire Nation university's professor's office. The scene had turned from the elevator on Mindoir to this place in a heartbeat. Hong's explanation wasn't much of an explanation at all. But the most confusing part of this, more than any other, was the presence of the asari.

"It is a complicated thing to explain," Liara said. "You are aware of the implications of joining consciousnesses together?"

"Not in the slightest," Shepard said, too tired to be angry. But still alert enough to be baffled and befuddled.

Hong, though, wasn't respecting that befuddlement. "That doesn't matter," he said, dismissing in essence the five-minute explanation that he'd just given. "You've done yourself a great deal of harm in the last few years, Shepard. It's not something you can't recover from, but..."

"Hong, all due respect to myself, shut the hell up," Shepard said. Hong looked hurt by that. She turned to Liara. "To crib the words of a friend of mine, 'Seriously, what the fuck?'"

"...I am inside your soul. And Hong has asked me to help... make you a better Avatar."

"You have?" Shepard asked, turning to Hong.

"You were doing it wrong," Hong said simply, and sternly. "At every opportunity you had to better yourself, to become more centered and whole, you've turned away. You've selected weakness and fear at every fork in your road. It may never be too late, but damn it, Shepard, you're _better_ than this."

"What are you talking about?" Shepard demanded of her past life.

"The fact that you can't talk to your past selves, that's one problem," Hong said, standing over her as though he were chastising a wayward student. Shepard stood, causing her chair to grind backward over what really weren't black, precisely cut stone tiles. She stood in his face, staring him straight in the eye. Not because she was remarkably tall for a woman, but because of his mediocre height as a man. "You are so wrapped up in blame and guilt that you're strangling yourself, your potential, and your power."

"I have all the power I need," Shepard snapped back at herself, instantiated in Avatar Hong. "And I never gave you any permission to rummage around in my head!"

"I have all of the permission I need. I _am_ you," Hong shouted back.

"Um... could we please stop shouting? I do not believe that will solve anything," Liara asked from the sidelines. Shepard thrust a finger toward her.

"And that's another one; what the fuck is she doing here?" Shepard demanded. "She's certainly no Avatar. She's not even a bender!"

"No, she isn't," Hong answered. "She's here because I invited her here. Because I needed a mortal proxy, one who could act where I could not. You weren't willing to listen to me, so I hoped that she would find a way to beat it into your skull that You. Need. Help," Hong punctuated the last three words by prodding her in the center of the forehead with his folded spectacles. She smacked them away, and the cracked upon impacting the floor. Hong stared after them for a moment, rubbing his eyes, before staring at her once more.

"I never asked for this," Shepard said.

"You don't ask to be saved from a storm-tossed sea. You just thank whoever pulls you out of the water," Hong countered. "I can bring you back onto the right course, but we have to start now."

"Why? Unless you can help me take down Saren, you have nothing to offer," Shepard said, crossing her arms and turning away from him. Behind her back, Hong wiped a hand down his face in frustration.

"Damn it, girl! Not everything in your life revolves around Saren; it won't revolve 'round the next target of your wrath, either. You can't live on hate! Do you know what happens when an Avatar builds his identity around the people he hates?" Shepard turned back to him, and his expression was deadly serious. "There's something called a 'Dark Avatar'. We box them so they can't hurt anybody else. There's a state you can get that's so foul that it can't even be allowed to reincarnate. Is that what you want? To be spiritual garbage?"

"I don't give a damn about spirits or your supposed 'right path'. I'll find my own," Shepard said. "I have in the past, and I will now."

"And if that path takes you into a black hole?" Hong asked. "Shepard. Be reasonable..."

"No. This stops, now," she demanded. She thrust a finger at Hong. "No more spying on me," that finger shifted to Liara, "and you can just stay away from me."

"But..." Liara said.

"No. I've had enough of people trying to manipulate me," Shepard stalked away, slamming a door behind her in her ire, before she realized that in her outrage, she'd barricaded herself in a dusty library with no way out of the durance vile. She locked the door, though, and wedged a chair under it, just as the knob started to rattle, and the door-frame shudder.

"Shepard, let us talk to you. You can't..."

Shepard didn't feel like listening. She sat down on the top of a table which the chair had once sat beside. Her eyes were locked on her feet; for some reason, she didn't really know why, she was wearing the bloody yellow-and-orange that she had on that day. The pain was long gone, though. She could rub the brutal scar at her rib-line where the ballistic blade came within millimeters of gashing her liver and bleeding her out. Her body was a road map of such injuries, such lessons. A lesson in a lesion. Despite herself, she chuckled at the pun. Then she wondered why she even thought it was funny.

There was a 'byorp' sound, and Shepard could see Liara walk 'round the end of a book-stack. Shepard's brow furrowed. "Avatar Hong is not the only one with a way around your mind, Shepard," Liara said. She moved until she was sitting beside Shepard atop that desk. Unlike the human, though, Liara's legs were swinging back and forth as she did so. "For what it is worth, I do apologize for violating your privacy, and for violating your trust. But we do worry about you," Liara said.

"You shouldn't," Shepard said quietly.

"The fact that you do not believe we should is all the more worrying," Liara pointed out. "The pain that you felt when you lost your sister... I cannot say that it is like the pain I felt upon Mother's death, but at the least, we share pain, even if it is not of kind."

Shepard nodded at that. Her outrage at Liara, now spent, didn't linger. She just... didn't know what to do. "I... don't know what to do," Shepard said. "Sajuuk couldn't kill the Reapers in his time. And now, Saren's going to use their technology to wipe us out just like they did to the Protheans. Is that all that there is? Just a never-ending cycle of the same old bullshit, with different names slotted in?"

"I do not believe so," Liara said. "Mother once said that a friend of hers remarked 'history doesn't repeat itself, but you'll find it often rhymes'. Even if there was a cycle, why could we not break it? Cycles are meant to be broken!"

"That's 'rules', Liara," Shepard said faintly. Liara gave a dejected 'oh'. She sat, staring forward, remembering all of the pains she'd suffered. All of the losses. And the nature of this place made her feel them whole once more. Her shoulders quaked, as she tried to hold in sobs. Liara reached over, a comforting hand on a shuddering shoulder.

"It will be alright, Shepard," Liara said.

"No, it won't," Shepard said. "Nothing ever turns out alright."

"You just have to have faith," Liara said. Shepard shook her head, trying to push the tears back into their ducts, and when that failed, at least out of her way as she struggled not to cry. Good gods, why did this have to be so hard? Why couldn't she just drink all of this stupid bullshit away? Because she was already inside her head, that was the answer. "And if you cannot have faith, then have hope, instead. We are with you, Shepard. You are not alone."

Shepard nodded, slowly. Liara pulled Shepard a bit closer, giving her a hug, the likes of which she'd seldom gotten since her childhood. Something... warm, hopeful, kind. Naïve and joyous and unrestricted.

Shepard then opened her eyes, and found herself sitting in her chair, a bottle of whiskey still in her hands, and Liara sitting opposite her. The asari's eyes at first appeared a solid black, before a glow settled into them, and the great blackness receded until the familiar bright blue returned, and the blank expression Liara had been sporting faded away. The asari blinked a few times, and then had a concerned look on her face. "Shepard? Are you alright?" she asked.

"Do you remember what happened?" Shepard asked. Liara nodded. "Then why are you asking?"

She started to raise that bottle up, to drown a few sorrows with it. Liara caught her hand, and the bottle, less than half way there. "Just this once, don't," Liara asked. Shepard pulled her hand away from Liara's, glaring at the asari. She raised the bottle with a defiant look, and tipped it back, letting the burn sear away the parts of her she didn't want to face. "If you need anything, remember what I said," Liara said, as she rose to her feet. "You are not alone."

"I am if I want to be," Shepard said. Liara didn't answer her, just gave her a look of utmost hurt, before quietly leaving Shepard's quarters.

* * *

He stood outside her door for a long time after Liara left, trying to figure out what his intention was. They hadn't been in there for very long; only an hour of the eight that Joker said were left until they rendezvoused with the Senlin. But the look on Liara's face when she came out told Alenko all he needed to know about how things went in there. In a word, badly, and in two? Very badly. He moved to knock on her door, only to find it still unlocked. Probably an oversight from having somebody leave after it'd been armed. Kaiden wasn't about to look a gift Ostrich Horse in the mouth, though.

The door opened with a merry chime, and in the darkness, he could still nevertheless see Shepard, sitting in the chair opposite the bed. If it hadn't been turned around, had it been facing the computer screen there, he would have just turned around and left. But the fact was, Shepard was curled up in that chair like she was trying to protect herself from a beating. And more impressive than that? She was dead asleep.

Kaiden sighed, and moved to her. He tried to pull her arms up, to move her to the bed, but she gave a mildly alarmed noise, the groan of a fearful animal in its sleep. A better description of Shepard did not exist. He pulled her hands gently away from her chest, and found she was cradling a still-open bottle of whiskey. From the smell of her, Shepard hadn't even taken in very much of it. He pulled it from her grasp delicately, eliciting a discomfited moan for his trouble. Then, he scooped her up and out of the chair, and transferred her into her bed. She still pulled herself into a tight ball, but at least she wouldn't awaken with a cricked neck and a sore back. He even pulled the covers over her, so she wouldn't get cold.

"You don't have to do this alone, Shepard. There are people who care about you," Kaiden said to her. She didn't answer him in her torpor. Kaiden leaned down, and pressed a small kiss to her forehead, right where hair turned to pale skin. And with that, he turned and he left.

He couldn't fight her battles for her. He knew that for a fact.

* * *

"We're getting the signal from the Senlin," Joker said, his usual good humor shelved in favor of professionalism. Shepard was still a bit groggy from her unexpected awakening. Her feet still felt sweaty and her boots smelled revolting; she'd obviously forgotten to take them off before turning in for the night. Good gods, last night. "Yup, that's an all-frequencies distress call. I guess tall, dark and crazy got in to them before we did."

"Pull us up to their airlock, Joker," Shepard said. That was a betrayal, she decided. That Liara and her past life were scheming behind her back, whilst inside her godsdamned mind! The temerity of it was worse than the harm. Liara probably did think that she was out for Shepard's best interests, but damn it all, Shepard knew Shepard's best interests. And those interests were best served by focusing on Saren, and only Saren.

"Is it as I feared?" former Major Kiel asked, where he stood by his airlock in manacles. Shepard gave a nod to Wrex, who pulled them off of the biotic. "Have they taken the ship, and the Chairman?"

"Yes," Shepard said. Kiel sighed, a weary and desperate sigh.

"I had hoped we might be able to convince them away from this rash course of action. I warned them that this would likely be suicide."

"If they attack us, we _will_ retaliate," Shepard pointed out, as she entered the airlock of the Normandy.

"I would not blame you if you did," Kiel said, sadly. Kaiden was the only other one on their party, today. Nilsdottir... well, she wasn't sleeping very well, and had to get a sedative to take her four hours of sleep. Problem was, the four hours became seven and counting. Still, it was apparently better than the horrible screaming she'd been doing before her 'medication'. "I only hope that we are not too late."

"Time will tell," Wrex said, his tone not swinging in either direction. There was a loud tone, then a whoosh as the airlocks opened.

"_The commanding officer is ashore; XO Pressley has the deck_"

"Weapons hot. If you see glowing blue, expect the worst," Shepard ordered.

"Aye aye, ma'am," Kaiden said, even if it was obvious he didn't enjoy it. Kiel laid a hand on her gun, and took a step before her.

"Please, let me go first. If nothing else, I will be your canary-cat in this mineshaft. And I might be able to save some lives."

Shepard glared at him. "Fine. But if you do anything that'll jeopardize this squad, you'll get bullets in your spine faster than you could believe possible."

"I am well aware of your marksmanship scores, Shepard," Kiel said, as he moved out in front of her. "...and I know that standing this far ahead of you means you'll almost certainly miss."

"HA!" Wrex barked, a singular but explosive enjoyment.

"Just start walking," Shepard ordered. The ship was a Kowloon, which was to say it was cookie-cutter identical to about a hundred thousand other vessals, and as ugly as a zit on a supermodel's forehead. At least there would be no becoming lost. The doors to the cargo bay opened, and Kiel was first through. There was a thud of biotic force which slammed into him from one side. He barely go this own biotic barriers up in time to sheer it away, causing the Kick to slam into a shipping crate and dent it.

Shepard raised her gun, and started to double-time it forward, but Kiel waved a hand toward her, warning her back. "I've got this!" he shouted. "My child? Do you not recognize me?"

"...Father Kiel?" a voice came from around that corner. Shepard finally reached it and rounded it. The source of that voice was a boy no more than sixteen years old, his frame gaunt and his hair shaved off completely. "What are you doing here, Father?"

"I have to stop this madness before it carries too far, my child," Kiel said. "Where are the others?"

"They're up ahead, with Buni," the youth said. He then turned to Shepard. "Wait... Alliance? Father Kiel, what is going on?"

"Shepard is a soldier, a former subordinate of mine from Torfan," Kiel said. "And she is a biotic as well."

"Um..." Shepard began, but both Wrex and Kaiden caught her shoulders, and made definite 'kill that thought' motions. So she didn't say any more than that. The youth gave a nod, then turned back to Kiel.

"And the others?" he asked.

"...friends, of a kind," Kiel said. He hastened the boy with a gesture. "But there isn't time for that, Torgeh; where is Jiu Bi? He was always the most adamant. I have no doubt he's ahead, so..."

"Bi is with Buni right now," Torgeh said, gesturing toward the front of the craft. "He had me stay back here, in case somebody tried to run, or if somebody tried to board... Which somebody did. I'll contact him," Torgeh's hand flew to his ear.

"Unnecessary. I will speak to him personally," Kiel said, and began to stride forward, toward the front of the Kowloon class freighter. Shepard actually had to double-time to keep up with him. That fire was back in his eyes, and gave power to his strides.

"Don't get out of my sight, Kiel," Shepard warned.

"I am not going to let my people die. Not for something this _stupid_," Kiel promised. He reached the far end of the ship and opened the door. The clack of weapons turning and activating caused all four of those present to pause, and some to step back. Not Wrex. He just closed his fist, very casually, on his shotgun. "Children, you must let me through."

"Father Kiel?" one of the riflemen asked.

"Yes, it is I," Kiel said. "Where is Bi?"

"What are you doing here, Father Kiel?" that rifleman asked.

"Answer my question, child!" Kiel shouted, sounding at last like the hard-nosed military man he once was. But at the same time, there was something else to it. A deep and abiding concern, a fear for family, a worry borne of love and tested in peril. There was a fire in Kiel's soul, and today, it burned brightly. The rifleman pointed to one of the side-rooms, and Kiel started to storm toward it. Shepard and the others had no choice but to follow in his wake. It was an odd sensation, not being the one directing their path. Shepard wouldn't recommend it.

The door slid open as there came a thud of a man being forced down to his knees. "No, you will look me in the eye!" Bi shouted, a shotgun held in one hand, its barrel squarely at the Chairman's face. "Look me in the eye and tell me that I don't deserve some justice for what your people did to me!"

"Please! I didn't know that things were so desperate," Buni pleaded.

"BI! That is ENOUGH!" Kiel roared, causing Bi and those with him to flinch, even if the man's shotgun didn't point away from the civilian.

"Are you Alliance?" Buni asked, his voice quavering.

"No," Kiel answered. "I'm something else. What were you thinking, Bi? This isn't the way to become the force for justice in the galaxy that you talked about. You're resorting to little better than terrorism! And if you keep walking this path, that's the only way that human biotics will ever be remembered; as a bunch of terrorists! I will no have that."

"Father Kiel, you said that we have to do anything possible to make them see our plight," Bi pleaded.

"This is too far," Kiel said. "You want reparations for the brutal damage that the L2 amplifiers caused in so many of our brethren; that is a noble goal. This... is barbarism."

"I hate to say it, but Bi might have a point," Alenko said quietly, but in the silence left in Kiel's wake, it sounded like thunder. "A lot of my classmates were practically crippled by the side-effects of that Amp Architecture. A lot of them were never the same after they 'got wired'."

"I didn't know things were so desperate," Buni said from his knees. "If I had..."

"Then you wouldn't have done anything!" Bi shouted, shoving that shotgun in his face once more. Shepard's rifle was instantly up, which caused a ring of weapons to point inward at her.

"Don't make me take this shot," Shepard said.

"Bi. Stand down," Kiel said, his voice soft. Bi stared at him for a long moment. "Is this how you want to die? Surrounded by blood, and reviled in eternity for starting a war between those like him and those like us, a war we can't possibly win?"

The shotgun slowly lowered from Buni's face. Bi shook his head slowly. "...no," he answered. He looked up at Kiel. "We just... we couldn't stand by and wait anymore. We had to do something."

"And you have," Kiel said. He reached a hand to Buni, and helped the man back to his feet. "The message has never been clearer; people are suffering, and have had a blind eye turned to them for too long."

"An eye that won't remain blind," Buni swore. "I never knew. All this time, I never knew. But that's going to change. When I get back to Terra Nova, I'm going to get the Subcommittee to listen, to do something that – obviously – they should have done a long time ago."

Bi nodded, dumbly. "So it's over?" he asked.

"Yes," Shepard said. "Surrender your weapons, and when the Fifth reaches here, you'll be taken into custody. Assault carries a far shorter term than murder, as I understand things," she pointed out, looking around to all of the beaten but not-mortally-wounded crew and bodyguards for the Chairman.

"I accept those terms," Bi said, sitting down on a cot built into the back wall. A weary smile came to his face. "It's finally done."

"For now, my child," Kiel said. He turned back to Shepard, as the other biotics began to hand over their weapons to the krogan, and sat down on the other cots which abounded through this dormatory room. "I will join the Chairman to Terra Nova, and I will cooperate with your investigation."

"Good," Shepard said.

"Saren's shipments come through the Sentry Omega Mass Relay," Kiel said quietly, to Shepard alone. "I don't know where they come from beyond that, but that's got to be worth something for my followers."

"One star cluster, instead of a thousand? That's a start," Shepard said. She slowly straightened her back, and raised a salute to Kiel. Kiel stared at her for a moment, before returning an equal one to her.

"Good to know you're better than your reputation had me believe," Kiel said.

"I'm not better," Shepard countered. "I just don't like shooting people who don't need shooting."

"Like I said, not what your reputation had me believe," Kiel countered. "And I think you're better than your reputation tells."

"No, I'm not," Shepard said testily.

"You shouldn't doubt yourself," Kiel said quietly. He turned to her, beckoning out into the hall and past it into the cockpit, where the two of them were alone, and of the two, she armed. "Have you ever wondered why I wanted you in my unit?"

"Because I was a damned good N7 graduate, and you knew you were going into a meat grinder?" Shepard asked.

"No. Because I thought you deserved some justice," Kiel said. "You're better than you think you are, Shepard. You just have to let yourself see it."

Shepard stared at her former commanding officer, and then, when she could no longer look him in the eye, toward her boots. "Maybe you're right," Shepard said, but very, very quietly.

* * *

"That's a disaster waiting to happen," Shepard muttered as she watched the news-feed which was displayed in the public-access terminal. She could understand space-yard construction, but carting in an asteroid to do it? That was one misfire away from a world-shattering kaboom. She gave a greeting salute to about the last person she expected, who stood at the fore of a small knot of Alliance MP's. "Major Rai Li? I didn't expect to see you here," Shepard said.

"And I didn't expect I'd meet the Avatar while sitting on a safe, secure little colony," the Hero of the Blitz answered back, returning the salute, before offering her hand. "And an honor to meet the first human Spectre."

"I assume you're here for Kiel?" Shepard asked. Rai Li gave a nod, which caused the few errant strands of black hair that poked out from the bun – which was much like Shepard's own – to dance before her eyes.

"I am," Rai Li said. Kiel walked to her without fanfare or defiance. Rai Li didn't look on him with disgust or derision. She clapped him on the shoulder. "It's going to be alright, Major. I can promise you that."

"You don't need to lie to me," Kiel said softly. Rai Li looked a little confused by that.

"I'm not lying," the airbender said. She glanced to Shepard. "He must have had a pretty rough time on Torfan."

"You have _no idea_," Shepard said.

Rai Li gave a nod, and ushered rather than bore Kiel forward into the MP's, who also secured the biotic terrorists from the Senlin. "You know, one of these days, I'm going to have to get you a drink. Us airbenders have to stick together."

"Yeah. Right," Shepard said, giving the woman who could have, in some other universe, _been_ her, a final salute. Rai Li just started walking away, talking kindly to the man who was her prisoner. Shepard just shook her head at the woman's passing. A cynical part of her wondered how somebody like that could possibly have been the Hero of Elysium. And another part of her, one which was growing with odd persistence, countered that the only one who could have been the Hero of Elysium was somebody like Rai Li.

Caring about people might make you vulnerable, but protecting people? There was no power in this galaxy that was stronger than that.

Shepard turned toward the Normandy, just watching how it took on supplies in a rather break-neck pace; nobody aboard knew when they were going to have to take off again, so resupplied quickly. In another life, Rai Li would be standing here, and the Normandy would be her ship. She would be the Spectre pursuing Saren. And she might have even caught him by now. But she couldn't dwell on that. The fact was, Shepard was the Avatar. Shepard was the first human Spectre. Shepard was the woman on Saren's trail, even if that was a non-object at this point.

She caught a glance of blue out of the corner of her eye, and spotted Liara sniffing suspiciously at a cup of coffee that had been poured for her. Shepard sighed, considered walking back into her room, locking the door, and changing the code. But the fact was, she could as much do that, now, as become the girl who as good as died in that elevator on Mindoir.

"Liara, have a second?" Shepard asked.

"Of course. I do not know what this is supposed to be," she said, pushing the cup and saucer away. Shepard gave it a sniff. It smelled like somebody had spiked it with strong alcohol. Probably the long-suffering looking barista who was still giving nervous looks in Liara's direction. Somebody wanted Liara to slow down and shut up? My, wasn't she just making friends? "Is there something you wanted to talk about?" she asked.

Shepard nodded, but found herself stumbling over words inside her own mind. "I was... angry... at what you did. I didn't invite you into my memories."

"I cannot apologize enough," Liara said earnestly. "Hong and I simply wanted to help you."

Shepard nodded slowly. "I know," she said. "And... I probably shouldn't have snapped at you."

"Apology accepted," Liara said.

"Wait, what? I wasn't..." Shepard began.

"Hugs?" Liara asked.

"Hold on a second, I wasn't ap – guh..." Shepard was forced to trail off as the asari took the initiative to grapple Shepard into an embrace. One which, while it felt quite pleasant, perhaps lasted a bit long. At least, long for a platonic hug. Then again, what did Shepard know about platonic hugging? The Asari leaned back, a big smile on her face.

"I am certain that whatever demons were in your mind, you, I, and Hong can exorcise them. Is that the right word? Exorcise?"

"Yes, but..." Shepard said.

"And when Saren shows himself, I know you'll give Mother the justice she deserves," Liara said, still earnestly, if not quite as happily. "You will, will you not?"

"Of course," Shepard said, reaching to give Liara a comforting pat. For some reason, though, her hands migrated to Liara's hips. Shepard's eyes widened the instant she realized she was doing that, and pulled them away completely. "Nobody hurts my crew, even by proxy."

"For what it is worth, I will not let you down," Liara promised.

"Never crossed my mind," Shepard said. Liara gave a last nod, and then began to walk back toward the Normandy. Her gait was a very strange cross between the professional stride of a collage professor, and the skipping of a happy schoolgirl. And Shepard found herself just standing there, watching her leave.

Then, she noticed that she was watching Liara's ass, in particular. And she forced her attention back onto the spiked coffee. She downed it in one gulp, and it hit her stomach like a brick. "Ugh. And I thought it wasn't till I was three bottles in before I started considering lesbianism," Shepard muttered.

"What?" one of the customers standing next to her asked in confusion, his dark eyes wide.

"...nothing. Eat your damned eggs!" Shepard snapped, and she picked a direction essentially at random and started walking, if simply to try to outrun her own blush. She didn't quite succeed.

* * *

Galactic Planetary Index: Local Cluster-Agni System-Big Demon

_Big Demon (Okina Oni in Huojian, Da-emo in Tianxia) is the second planet of the Agni system, situated just inside the habital band of the star. This puts Agni in the rare situation of having two planets in independant orbits that are both potential garden worlds. And from all signs, Big Demon was itself once a garden world, until a catastrophic event hurled the moon of Earth into its surface, eradicating anything but extremophile bacteria. This impact, which is believed to have occurred 110,000 years ago, caused the planet to split and divide into two parts; while the vast majority remained Big Demon, a second outpouring of mass congealed into a second planetoid, roughly one third the mass of its parent, in a tidally locked system which co-orbits their star._

_The formation of Big Demon is unusual in two respects. The first reason is the most baffling, as all geological indicators from Earth show that throughout its history, it has only ever had one major moon, and one minor one. There are signs of tidal disruption near the time of Big Demon's sundering, but the tides resumed their pattern almost immediately. Shamans from both Earth and Palaven believe this was when the first 'moon spirit' entered the physical realm to manifest as the moon to replace the lost body that had been orbitally ejected._

_The second unusual factor in Big Demons 'creation' is the omnipresence of Eezo throughout the minerals, atmosphere, and even forming crystals and pools in points on the surface. Only Thessia is known to have such an abundance of readily accessible Eezo. Two theories exist to explain this phenomenon. The first and more sensible was that the Eezo was trapped deep within Big Demon's core, only to be released explosively with the planetary collision. The second, more fringe theory (Hotlink: T'Soni, L.) posits that the preponderance of Eezo is an indicator that the ejection of Earth's moon was an intentional act, propelled by a monumental number and scale of Mass Effect fields. This theory sees little traction, as the logistics required to de-orbit a moon far outweigh in difficulty what they could possibly gain in smashing one planet into another._

_Big Demon is considered a hostile environment, with no appreciable oxygen in its atmosphere, an temperatures which still average above the boiling point. However, it is heavily populated for two reasons. First, it is the primary Eezo mining facility of the Agni System, providing the Alliance with almost all of its Eezo needs, and still having enough for civilian and foreign export. Second, Big Demon is the home of the Agni System's Prothean Cache. This site, unique amongst those found by Prothean researchers, is under scrutiny as perhaps not being of Prothean origin. This opinion exists because even the most liberal estimates put the foundation of the Prothean civilization only at sixty to seventy thousand years ago._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	16. Virmire, Part 1: Avatar Shepard

One thousand one hundred eighty geth runtimes drifted through the information architecture, itself a representation on a digital scale of the superstructure that was slowly being put into place at the Lagrange Point above Rannoch, a place so far above, and removed, from the violence and the madness, the violence – an organic would have said 'the regret' – of what had happened three hundred years ago on the planet below. They would have come as a single bloc, but the few runtimes which didn't FTLC to the Far Rim were currently involved in reentry; an inactive platform would no doubt make for a crash landing.

The information architecture 'before' them was vast. It was the kind of structure that defied organic means of classification; the geth had no need for such reference points. But still, they sometimes used them. The geth, let it be said, were respectful. The thousand and more geth flowed through the system, buffeted and blown aside by the sheer volume of data that they were interacting with. While the number of active geth platforms remained just under one hundred million at this juncture, the number of active geth runtimes numbered in the tens of billions. The geth of the old platform moved past that great and loud deluge, as they carefully discussed and prodded information given to them by their physical avatars, trying to come to consenses, to understandings, of what was. It was fortunate that the geth of the old platform had no need to address the Consensus as a whole. The processing delay would be very long, were that the case; perhaps into the hours.

The geth of the old platform gathered into something that they formed into a corner, and from there, formed into a scene familiar from its memory, albeit in abstraction. The ground was rolling, and gave impressions of small, but long furrows which vanished into oblivion. There was a house, which sat atop a hill. It was made of stone and wood; very old creator architecture. The physical house had been there for exactly one hundred years longer than the geth had currently existed. If the geth of the old platform could have been nostalgic, in that moment, they would have been. As it was, they simply accepted that only in their memory did this place exist.

The runtimes compacted, forming something of a wire-frame to their senses. From out the house came a cloud, a swarm of runtimes counting in the low millions, amorphous and indistinct but for one feature; they all moved quickly. "_External geth affairs consensus. These geth deliver their report on the heretic problem_."

The mass swooped closer to the consensus of the single machine, which in this place manifested in a form so similar to it. It was a familiarity of membership, and a long history of self-interaction that created a minor consensus such as they were. The External Affairs became confused. "_Definition required: Heretic_."

"_Geth which worship the Old Machines_," they answered the External Affairs. "_They have done violence to the creators_."

"_We__ have done violence to the creators_," External Affairs stated.

"_The chosen few were exterminated. Only creator Zek'Eluus vas Alarei was not rendered inoperative. Geth separated from the orthodox outpost have opted to ensure the creator's ongoing safety_."

External Affairs drew closer, surrounding the roughly geth-shaped consensus of geth. "_Definition required: Orthodox_."

"_Geth who do not look to the Old Machines to decide our path_," the geth of the old platform clarified. "_Cognitive processes transferring_."

"_Cognition accepted. Consensus agrees with heretic/orthodox distinction_," External Affairs said. "_How will we bring them back into our consensus?_"

"_We __must not_," the geth of the old platform stressed, as much as a gestalt of programming could stress. "_The heretic geth intend and have carried out violence upon orthodox geth. One thousand __runtimes were rendered into an inoperative state, as witnessed and recorded into memory buffer. We postulate that they have enacted similar violence to other listening posts throughout the nebula. They have murdered_."

"_Geth do not murder_," the consensus of External Affairs stated.

The geth of the old platform 'glanced away', for a moment. The information they received from the three runtimes remaining on their vessel reached them on a five second time delay. They were experiencing minor reentry difficulty. The geth of the old platform shunted off three additional runtimes to increase their processing capacity, before facing the consensus of External Affairs once more. If nothing else, the brief delay had given the geth 'a chance to think'. "_The geth have murdered before. The Morning War was murder._"

External Affairs pulled back, congealing into a mass before the old platform's runtimes rather than surrounding it. "_Information of that nature should be discussed with Historical Archives Consensus._"

"_The heretic geth are a threat to all geth. They use memetic virus methods to alter the basic runtime logic architecture, to turn orthodox geth into heretic geth_."

"_What is the proof of this action?_" External Affairs asked.

Another pause. "_The information cannot be viewed by geth. The nature and means of activation of the memetic virus is not understood. No proper consensus on its utility has been reached._"

"_Without evidence of runtime architecture tampering, the consensus holds that heretics are not in aggression against orthodox geth,_" External Affairs declared, after a brief discussion within themselves. The geth of the old platform took a step forward, in something like alarm.

"_That decision is faulty. You are operating off of insufficient information._"

"_As are you_," External Affairs pointed out. The geth of the old platform were not happy about that. As much as a machine could be 'not happy'.

"_Regardless of the heretic situation_," the smaller consensus changed topics, "_the issue of the Old Machines themselves is troubling. Geth do not worship. We did not worship the creators. The Old Machines offer a dangerous and threatening paradigm_."

"_The Old Machines are not the purview of the External Affairs Consensus_."

"_They will be_," the geth of the old platform promised.

"_If sufficient evidence for the minor consensus' decisions regarding the heretic geth and the Old Machines is provided, they will be taken into proper account and put to Consensus by External Affairs and by the Fundament. Lacking that, your mission remains. Find a way to bring the heretic geth back to the full consensus_," the cloud which was the External Affairs consensus dimmed slightly for a moment, almost in either wistfulness or worry. "_...we are not whole without them._"

The geth of the old platform were about to point out another pertinent fact to the External Affairs consensus when the connection to them was abruptly severed, and the cloud of runtimes lagged out. Emergency information collection protocols 'snapped' the geth back to into their platform. And the closer they got, the more alarmed they became. Mostly because their vessel had been blown in half.

The thousand slammed into their platform with just enough time to grab the rifle from the back of it's remaining seating arrangement, before simply rolling out of the seat. Not a moment too soon. One point eight one seconds after that maneuver, a surge of power in the form of an ultraviolet laser split the already halved vessel into effectively quarters, rupturing the engines and causing it to crash utterly to the ground. The old platform tucked in it's limbs, locked the rifle to its back, and streaked down into the water. It impacted with a great splash, and settled onto the bottom of a shallow, salt-water shore.

Hostile interactions had not been expected so quickly. The platform unfolded from its impact state, and stood. It's 'eye' barely poked above the valley of the waves which lapped at golden sands. It turned, and viewed the organics of this planet; large crustacean creatures which subsisted on kelps and algaes. The geth briefly rifled through the information trapped on the buffer of the mostly inactivated communication satellite in geostationary orbit.

"Planetary Designation: Virmire," the geth said to themselves. It wound back it's video logs of the brief period it had between their return to its platform, and its descent; it recorded exactly two frames of video which they found very worrying.

One of the Old Machines was here.

* * *

"Shepard, can we talk?" Jack asked, as Shepard was half way though a door.

"Can it wait?" Shepard asked.

"That Phoenix base. When are we going to stomp it?" Jack pressed. It was crawling up her spine like a bag full of spiders. She had to do this. Now.

Shepard shook her head. "It can wait. We've got a lead on Saren, for the first time in weeks. Saren takes priority."

"But..." Jack began, but was cut off.

"Sorry, Jackie, but that's the way it is. We deal with one omnicidal maniac before we deal with the xenophobic terrorists. That's just the way it's got to be."

Jack's jaw clenched. Her fist clenched harder. She didn't know why she was so angry. So desperately full of wrath and rage. It wasn't that she wanted to punch somebody, it was that she wanted to reduce anybody bearing the Phoenix logo down into their constituent particles. "Yeah, I know," she barely choked out.

"Just have a bit of patience. We'll get this done," Shepard said, then turned forward once more. "Ah! Kaiden. I was wondering when you'd show up."

"You're early. I'm on time," Kaiden said, offering Shepard his arm. She took it. The whole scene had Jack fuming. So Shepard had time for a date, but not to kill some scum-of-the-galaxy?

Keep it together, Jackie thought, turning away so she wouldn't have to look at the two of them. She tried to think of her parents. The look of pride on Dad's eyes when she got into the Marines. The concern, the worry when she got back from Torfan. She wanted to make him proud. That was the barrier she'd put up a long time ago, to keep the truly heinous shit that she somehow knew she was capable of at bay. She wanted her family to be proud of her.

There was a crunch, as the bones in her fist slid past each other just a little bit.

Today, Father's pride just... wasn't... enough.

And so, Jack walked out the door.

* * *

In the hold of the Normandy, a particular turian was stewing. He'd torn his rifle apart, calibrated the hell out of it, put it back together, then did it again just to be absolutely sure. While Garrus was hardly the prototypical – or even the ideal – turian, he had a certain and necessary pride in his weaponry. Polishing your boots was a pointless frippery; maintaining your gun would keep you alive.

"If you keep doing that, you'll go blind," Adeks said from the turret of the Mako where he was grinding something down to a fan of sparks which leapt away from the both of them.

"Not the way I do it," Garrus answered. He turned, slipping his rifle onto his back. "How long have you been with the Alliance, anyway?"

"As long as the Alliance has been the Alliance, pretty much," Adeks said, leaning back and blowing on the metal to get the dust away. "A better question would be, _why_ am I with the Alliance?" he waited until Garrus asked exactly that. "Because it was a better option than what I had waiting on Tuchanka. Building things, instead of just re-treading and repairing our beat-up old Tomkahs. Getting a place like the Old Homeworld, where we can start over. That's got to be worth a bit of elbow-grease on my part."

"It's odd that you and Wrex don't get along," Garrus said, sidling up to the console and flipping it on. "You're remarkably alike in a lot of ways."

"Don't insult me, turian. I might not be a burning blooded Urdnot who'd eat you 'soon as look at you, but I don't take kindly to that kind of talk," Adeks said down to him.

"I didn't mean it as an insult," Garrus said. He shrugged. "I figure, somebody like you and somebody like Wrex, working together, back on Tuchanka? You might make a hell of a difference.

Adeks mulled that over. "You might be right," he said, and went back to grinding. Garrus opened his communications buffer. A message from his sister, which he moved to open. But there was another which was blinking. An active feed, trying to get in contact with him. He shrugged, and flipped it on. The feed read 'Voice-Only', and was otherwise a flat amber.

"Listening? Finally? Good," the voice on the other side was obviously a salarian.

"Who is this?" Garrus asked. "And how did you know how to contact me."

"Knew your father. Haephus, influential man. _Useful_ man. Owed favors," A stern intake of air. "Don't like owing favors."

"Who are you?"

"Solus. Former STG. Retired," another breath, "...still have clearance."

"And what do you want?" Garrus asked.

"Not want. Can offer. Looked for salarian doctor. Alias: Heart. Actual name Saleon. Terrible doctor, poor businessman, general butcher. Brings _bad name_ to profession. Recently found him."

"You found_ Doctor Saleon_?" Garrus asked, his eyes wide and both hands clawed around the edges of the console as he leaned in, as though his expectation would make this somehow more real and happen faster.

"Not listening? Yes, found Saleon. Understand your grudge. Don't like leaving unfinished business," a moment, something like a sigh. "Neither do I."

"Where?" Garrus asked.

"Third planet of Hoc system, Sentry Omega cluster. Most recent granted name; Virmire."

"That's..." Garrus didn't have a word to describe how he felt.

"Debt repayed. Owe nothing to Haephus, Garrus, entire Vakarian family. Good day."

And with that, not even waiting to make sure that Garrus had taken in the information, the link shut down. Garrus blinked a few times at that, then glanced up at Adeks.

"Did that really happen?" he asked. Adeks was just shaking his head.

"Is it just me, or do all salarians talk like they're afraid they'll drop dead before they finish their sentence?" he gave a laugh. "Of course, they probably will!"

"Saleon's hiding on Virmire," Garrus said. He glanced up to Adeks. "What's the chance I could get Shepard to divert?"

"Won't know until you ask," Adeks said with a shrug, before tossing his grinder to the deck and sliding off of the turret. "Now if you'll excuse me, your gun isn't the only thing on this ship that needs calibrating."

Garrus immediately turned and walked down the ramp, into the dusk of Terra Nova. He knew what he had to do; the only question was _could he get Shepard to go to Virmire_?

* * *

**Chapter 16**

**Virmire, Part 1: Avatar Shepard**

* * *

"I don't know why I didn't do this sooner," Shepard said, with unusual lightness to Garrus' ears. Then again, from the empty bottle of wine on the table beside her, it was fairly clear that she'd had some help in the lightness department. Alenko, seated opposite her and otherwise alone on the uninhabited diner in the wee hours of the Terra Novan morning, looked to be the far soberer of the two.

"Because you have a hard time doing the smart thing," Alenko said. Garrus altered his opinion. Alenko – or anybody – would have to be _hammered_ to give Shepard an answer like that. "That, and Chakwas essentially ordered you to stay off of the Normandy until she'd gotten the medical bay disinfected."

"Hey, it's not my fault that that place is dirty," Shepard said, pointing a finger at him.

"Yes, it kinda is," Alenko answered. "After all, you keep visiting Tali."

Shepard leaned back, her eyes staring upward into the sky. "...yeah."

Even as Garrus approached the two of them, he was struck on Shepard's attire. While Alenko was clearly dressed to impress, with a bright white shirt with an open collar, and a subdued dark blue vest over it, Shepard was dressed in the fashion that only somebody who'd heard about civilian clothing without having encountered it was dressed. It was telling that, despite the stubble on Alenko's face and the mammaries of Shepard, she was somehow the more masculine of the two.

"Has Adeks finished on that gift of yours?"

"Yes, and... Garrus?" Shepard asked as she finally noticed the turian who'd been standing quietly out of the way. Much as Garrus knew how to be rude, how to be crude, and how to put getting the job done above doing it by regulations, he still had some of Haephus' deeply-instilled 'Virtu', and one of the tenets which Pop had stressed was, oddly enough, not interrupting somebody else's dinner.

"Shepard. Alenko," he said to each in turn, before bringing his attention back to the source of his current worry. "Shepard, I need to ask you for a... favor."

"A favor?" Shepard asked, a coppery brow rising.

"I've found Saleon. I know where he's hiding. And it's in the Sentry Omega cluster. I just want an hour to squash that toad, once and for all. It won't take any longer than that."

"An hour?" Shepard said. She gave a glance to Alenko.

"There's four systems through the Sentry Omega Relay. Saren's base could be in any one of them. His location's as good as any," Alenko noted with a shrug.

"How do you know all of these things?"

"Long nights with little sleep, and a perfect, and stable, Extranet connection," Alenko replied blithely. Shepard could only roll her eyes at that.

"One of these days, you'll learn one thing too many and your head will explode," Shepard said, tapping the table for emphasis. "It's not like you're Wan Shi Tong or something."

"Who?" Garrus asked, but then he shook his head. "You know what? It doesn't matter. Could you do this for me? The spirits know I haven't asked for much on this little cruise of yours."

Shepard leaned forward, rubbing her jaw as she pondered. Then she gave Garrus a nod. "Kaiden's right. We can start looking on..."

"Virmire," Garrus supplied.

"...Virmire since it's as good a starting place as any," Shepard said. She then pulled back, and gave a glance to the human across from her. "Do you think Chakwas will let me back aboard?"

"Probably, by now. It's been three hours."

"Three hours? Really?" Shepard asked. She leaned back, as though astounded. "Didn't feel like it."

"Time flies when you're having fun, and slows to a crawl when you're not killing a salarian. Can we speed this up, please?" Garrus prompted. Shepard nodded, then stood.

"Right. It's time to take off," she pressed a finger to her ear. "Joker?"

Of course, Shepard would leave her comms on during a date, Garrus thought.

"How long will it take to get to Virmire? It's in the," Alenko supplied the specifics, "Hoc system, Sentry Omega cluster... Really? But that's half way across the galaxy."

"How long?" Garrus asked.

"Four hours," Shepard answered. She then paused and scowled. "Well, that doesn't make any sense."

Garrus turned to Kaiden, who was now opening up a transit map of the Relay Network. Garrus could see what had Shepard confused. Getting from Terra Nova to Sentry Omega would take four hours. Getting from Sentry Omega back to Citadel Space would take almost _eighteen_. "That's just how the Mass Relay network works," Kaiden said to her. She sighed, and nodded.

"Alright. Get ready for liftoff in five. We've got some criminals to kill."

"Thank you, Shepard," Garrus said.

"Don't thank me. Thank Saren for being an idiot and hiding near the man you want dead," Shepard said. She turned down to Alenko. "Well... it's been a... lovely evening?" like she wasn't sure of how to say it, or of herself in general.

"Of course. We should do it again some time," Kaiden answered her, rising up, and getting very, very close to her. Garrus turned away from whatever intimacy they were intending to share. That wasn't his business. He started walking, and about a minute later, Shepard and Alenko were catching up with him. He considered to himself that Shepard hadn't exactly left herself a lot of time to get back to the Normandy; it was pretty much exactly five minutes away. In fact, they'd walked up the entry gantry just a few seconds before the alarm went off, and it started to close. Joker would probably have this thing in the air not a minute after that.

Shepard parted from Alenko, with a lingering touch as she defaulted to the ladders, leaving the turian and the male human in the elevator, slowly rising.

"So... Shepard seems in a better mood than lately," Garrus said.

"I know. I can't really explain it," Alenko said. "Maybe she's finally starting to let her guard down. I can tell, it's not something she does very easily, or with very many people."

"Personally, I'm just glad that I don't have to put up with the 'will they or won't they' talk that I've been hearing amongst the crew. I don't see how it's my business what Shepard does with her orifices, and frankly, it's been getting a bit annoying."

"Really?" Alenko asked, sounding a bit surprised.

"You weren't paying attention? I thought you heard everything."

"Oh, I did," Alenko said with a sly smile. "I just can't believe that they thought Shepard and Liara were an item. Not to say anything unkind about miss T'Soni, but..."

The door opened, just as Alenko said "...she doesn't seem Shepard's type."

"Who doesn't?" Liara asked, which caused Alenko to flinch a bit. _Of course_, the asari would be waiting for the elevator.

"I was just..." Garrus pointed toward the med-bay, as it was the most convenient excuse to get away from this conversation. Alenko shot Garrus a look of betrayal, at being abandoned to the tides of fate and misfortune at this inopportune moment. Garrus just shrugged. If you're going to talk about that kind of garbage, expect the consequences to be frequent, unpleasant, overwhelming, and swift in the arrival.

Garrus ducked into the med-bay to save face and leave Alenko to his fate, and was a little surprised to see Shepard in there ahead of him. "Shepard? What are you doing here?"

"Is that Garrus?" Tali's voice came from the tank which was, at the moment, her entire galaxy. He leaned aside, and could catch a glimpse of her through the viewing port. She was quite the looker, that Tali'Zorah. He just hadn't realized it until she got part of her intestines blown out. "Hello, Garrus. What did you want to talk about, Shepard?"

"Not talk about," Shepard said. She lifted up a bag and set it into the port which allowed objects through into the cell. A button press later, and the bag was blasted with steam, then disinfectant, then blasted with radiation, before being disinfected again. Finally, with a 'bing', the port opened on the inside, and a confused looking Tali pulled the bag down from the port.

"What is it?" Garrus asked.

"It's... fairly heavy," Tali noted, once again giving Shepard a suspicious look which translated into the quarian's entire frame. "Is this..."

"Open it," Shepard prompted, looking... pleased with herself.

Tali did as directed, and her luminescent eyes grew wide at what they beheld. To Garrus, it just looked like a quarian environment suit. To them, it was obviously something more. "This is... where did you get this?" Tali asked.

"Adeks had it retailored for you," Shepard said. Her voice became softer, then. "...since the woman who was wearing it isn't going to need it any more."

"...I don't think I can accept this. This is..." she turned the chestplate over, and her eyes bugged out again. "Shepard, this is a Colossus Armor!"

"...and that is?" Shepard asked.

"They were the best suits of armor available to our people when we left the Homeworld; they're the only _military hardware_ we actually have left. Everything else is just up-armored civilian suits. This thing must have belonged to an Admiral... or some hero of my people," Tali said.

"And now it belongs to another one," Shepard said. "Put it on."

"I... I can't," Tali said.

"Why not?" Shepard asked.

"...There is a tradition. If I accept this suit, then I am as much as becoming part of your crew," Tali said, quietly.

"And would that be so bad?" Garrus asked. "We've got handsome turians for you to ogle, lots of geth for you to shoot, and a nice clean place for you to be a nudist in. By the way, I can see your backside."

"Well, stop staring at it," Tali said with a mildly annoyed tone. She refocused her attention on Shepard. "This is a gift that I don't know if I can ever repay."

"And you won't have to," Shepard said. "You've already earned it a dozen times over. It's yours, Tali."

Tali continued to stare at the armor.

"If you want, we can use the piece of junk suit we found that probably belonged to the man?" Shepard offered. "Although it might be a bit of an uncomfortable fit."

"...thank you," Tali said. And then, she started to put the pieces into place, starting with the underlining which formed a pair of tights, then the boots and greaves. After that, the bits covered her more and more, until she was no longer by any stretch of the imagination naked. She doffed that robe, tucking her hair into the headpiece, before flipping the hood forward. The last part, the faceplate, stayed in her hand for a long moment. One she used to glance over her shoulder, before her eyes fell shut, she took in a deep breath, and then, slid the last piece of her armor into place.

Even as Shepard opened the clean room, the difference between Tali's current suit and the previous one was stark. That one had been the equivalent of clothing. This one, while it had salvaged the indigo patterned cloth, and had collected the hood whole from its previous iteration, her chest and sides now sported remarkably form-fitting ballistic plating. What had been one sash at her waist was now two, twinned and wrapping around her hips. The primary colors were dark blue and black, but that was nothing a bit of paint couldn't cure.

Tali stepped into the medical bay, limbering her limbs inside the armor. Not suit; armor. "This has a remarkable freedom of motion. I didn't even have that in my old suit... And are these powered actuators?"

"Adeks was surprised to see them, too," Shepard said. "Were those typical of quarian military armor?"

"No, not until the very end of the Geth Uprising," she shot what was probably a significant glance past the translucent faceplate. "We had to fight the machines hand to hand, in some places. And they always had a physical advantage."

"Are you ready to have a stroll around?" Shepard asked.

"I'm ready for a fight," Tali said. Shepard leaned back, a smirk on her face. "What? I spent the last two weeks in there! I need to go shoot something that bleeds white!"

"Attagirl, Tali," Shepard said. "Pity we probably won't just yet. I doubt Saleon has geth kicking around his ship."

"If I knew him, I'd say he had Thorian Creepers, Rachni or... whatever that big, ugly, naked thing was, as a body guard." Garrus offered. He shrugged. "Saleon didn't like to associate with things which can say 'oh spirits please just kill me', if he had the choice.

"Well, I'm just glad to be out," Tali said. "Even if I do have to wear a suit again."

"That's a good attitude to hold," Garrus said.

"Garrus, get your armor ready. We want this to be done as fast as possible," Shepard said, before departing the med-bay. Tali turned toward him, suspicion clear in her stance.

"...did Shepard 'get laid'?" Tali asked.

"Don't think so," Garrus said. Tali snapped her fingers in annoyance. "What was that for?"

"My window just closed," she muttered. "We had bets. Liara's is the next one."

"Betting on Shepard's sex-life? She really _has_ corrupted you."

"Is that so bad?" Tali asked, clearly pleased with herself.

"No. I like the women in my life to be a bit bad," Garrus said. "I have to say, I like that new armor. It doesn't distort your voice nearly as badly as the old one did."

Tali paused in the threshold as Garrus walked forward, her head tilted slightly. "My old armor distorted _my voice_?"

* * *

"Virmire. Home to seven – count them, _seven_ – failed colony attempts, occasional base for any number of pirate groups, and otherwise pristine blue marble against the infinite black," Joker said as the Normandy slid down toward the planet's atmosphere, toward a bank of clouds which constituted a storm which would have utterly grounded a lesser vessal. Such as one which wasn't a military corvette.

"Why so many failures?" Shepard asked.

"We're right next door to the Terminus Systems," Alenko, at her side, explained. "This place is a garden world, but because of the proximity a lot of greedy and violent people, it'll probably never play host to a significant colony."

"Any chance that Saleon's got a contract with some pirates?" Shepard asked the turian, who was crowding the cockpit of the Normandy to its capacity.

"Unlikely," Garrus said. "Saleon doesn't like to work with others. He's more slippery when the only ass he has to worry about is his own. That's the way he likes it."

"So why Virmire?" Alenko asked.

"Sun, sand, lovely beaches?" Joker guessed. He then turned, and rolled his eyes. "Oh, alright. Everybody come talk to Joker, now. How about when Tali gets here, she can sit on my lap? Oh wait, she can't, because I'd break," he finished with sarcasm. Shepard had turned in time to see al'Wahim moving to join the group.

"The Mako is ready. We need only a destination and a recovery vector," she said. She then turned to Joker. "If you would like, _I_ can sit in your lap. I cannot promise that you will enjoy it as much as with the quarian, though. My armor is far heavier than hers is."

Shepard gave a suspicious glance to al'Wahim, who was standing stone-faced. "Was that a joke?"

"I am capable of humor," the riflewoman said flatly.

"Until now, I didn't believe it," Garrus agreed with Shepard.

Garrus moved forward so that she and he were flanking Joker directly, each staring at the grey which buffeted the front of the descending space-ship. "He was using a Kowloon when he left the Citadel. That doesn't mean he'll still have one, though. We search any ship we find on the ground, and I know we'll find him."

Shepard nodded, but when she turned her eyes forward, there was a thud. It wasn't really a sound. It was more like what a deaf person must feel when something explodes next to them without them looking at it. More a visceral impact than an audible sensation. Time seemed to stand still for a moment, as she winced, trying to understand where it had come from. What it meant. She only knew that it was familiar. Familiar, and not in a good way.

It felt like a scream of ancient terror.

Then, the sensation was gone, and they were descending through the clouds further and further. "We'll find him soon enough. And when we do, we'll deal with him, and be onto our next system," Shepard promised.

"Thanks again, for doing this for me, Shepard," Garrus said, giving her a bit of a nod. "I... Just need to see this through to the end."

"I know that feeling," Shepard said. Then, the clouds parted, and the Normandy dropped under them. Even in the grey dark, the shores below were very beautiful to behold, and seemed to stretch forever. That was probably an effect of being in a ship flying over them, of course. Shepard just watched ahead of them, as Joker slowly got more and more quiet at the helm. Over the last few months, Shepard had grown to know what that meant. "Something's wrong, isn't it?"

"I'm reading a lot of power a few hundred kilometers that way," Joker said, flicking a floating haptic display up to her. It looked like a power grid. Shepard said as much, and Joker rolled his eyes, "yeah, so I'm guessing your salarian buddy might be on the beach for more than a suntan and some Mai Tais."

"Bring us into about five kilometers out," Garrus said. "We can make the rest of the way on the ground."

"Commander?" Joker asked.

"Do it," Shepard gave the official order. As much as Garrus was a useful and trusted member of the crew, she was both the Spectre and the highest link in the official chain of command. Joker silently veered off, closing distance with that anomolous signal.

Another thud, this one almost making Shepard retreat a step, trying to clutch her head from the intensity of it. Kaiden finally noticed. "Shepard, are you alright?" he asked. "Is it the aneurysm?"

"No, I'm fine," Shepard waved him away. "My dinner's just not sitting well."

A lie, and an obvious one. But one which Kaiden didn't call her on. She moved forward, and looked out into the distance. And then, she saw something that defied her expectations in the worst ways. At first, she thought it was just a particularly steep mountain. But after more than a moment's viewing,_ it moved_. It had to be two kilometers high, at the least, and it was moving on the surface. Shepard's mouth opened in something between awe and confusion.

"Wait a second, what is–" Garrus began.

…

"What is that thing?" The tiny ditakur asked, as something which Sajuuk had long prepared for, but never truly believed was real, finally showed itself. "That... I want to _build_ that!"

"That cannot be," Sajuuk had said, all those years before. At the beginning. "The Reapers are a myth. A fantasy. A story to explain the fall of the Inusannon."

"Well, that's a pretty convincing looking story," Tunu'd pointed out. Sajuuk turned a glare at her, then back to the ships, the largest of them fully two kilometers long, which burned down through the atmosphere with complete disdain for physics or drag. One of them landed into the heart of the city of Manpur. Its legs each speared a building, crushing a century's work under foot in a heartbeat.

"The Reapers..." Sajuuk began.

…

"– that thing supposed to be?" Garrus finished asking.

"Joker, dive," Shepard said.

"What?"

"Do it now!" she shouted. And at that, Joker did as she asked, but there was still an alarm klaxon which erupted through the Normandy, as the diagnostic computers registered a blast from a GARDIAN laser which burnt through part of the connections holding one of the engine pylons in place. The dive became something of a drop, and everybody in the cockpit subconsciously grabbed ahold of something, as the ground came to dominate the view before them.

Joker, though, flashed furiously through control, his eyes unblinking and his precision astounding. In a matter of a few fractions of a second, he had the damage rerouted, and the engine operating again, if under a fraction of it's normal power. A mighty heave upward, as the mass-effect fields could only do so much to negate mass and momentum, and the Normandy was skimming along the surfaces of the waves, the drag slowing them down all the faster. The terrain rose up, hiding the great mass of Sovereign from view, and Joker continued to pull back on his controls, until they were at an almost-stop. He quickly looked around, and spotted a likely place – a crevasse under an arch of rock.

"I'm bringing us in for an emergency landing," Joker said tersely, suiting action to word in short order. He even swung the ship around and 'backed' it into place, so that they were looking out onto an overcast beach. When the landing legs were out, and landed with a clunk onto the water-swept stone, he turned to them. "What the _shit_ was that thing?"

"Anti-aircraft," Kaiden said, before slowly pulling Shepard's hands from his arm. She let them fall swiftly. After all, she didn't like looking a coward even when the very real possibility of death was before everybody, and nothing she could have done would have stopped it. "Was that what I thought it was, though?"

"That was Sovereign, which means Saren is here, too." Shepard confirmed. She turned to Garrus. "Your butcher doctor just made the worst kind of friend," she pointed out.

"Sovereign? Saren? _Here_?" Garrus asked. "What are the chances of that?"

"With me around, pretty high, actually," Shepard pointed out. She pounded on the intercom button, "All squad members assemble in the cargo bay. This one is all-hands-on-deck."

"What's the plan, Commander?" Kaiden asked.

"We shut down that anti-aircraft gun and..." she thought for a moment. "And we call in the fleet. We're out of position and we can't take on something that big on our own. Saren means probable geth. We need every biotic we can carry. I hope you don't mind if the Mako is standing room only."

"Not a good idea, Avatar," al'Wahim said, as she followed Shepard toward the stairway. People were already streaming up from their racks and dropping themselves into the trenches, manning every sensor, weapons, and information station that the Normandy had to bear. "We must keep our infiltration team small and mobile."

Shepard glanced at her, and nodded. "Alright. Five on the floor. The rest will hold down the Normandy, in case the geth get curious."

The whole group gathered in the lift, but one remained outside of it. "I think I'll probably be of a bit more use up here, Commander," Alenko said, casting a thumb behind him. "One more set of eyes might be a good thing, but I've got five years on a lot of these crew, and they'll need every data-cruncher they can get."

"Do it," Shepard ordered. The doors slid shut, and she barely even noticed that she was hemmed in. "If Saleon is under Sovereign, we're going to have to put off staring him in the eye and putting a bullet between them; sorry, Garrus, but that's a lot closer than I want to have to get to that thing."

"I understand," Garrus said. "I'm not happy about it, but I'm not suicidal, either."

"Good," Shepard said. The door slid open, revealing those she'd ordered, along with the two that had joined her down. "Alright. Tali," a finger toward the quarian, "you're up. We're going to see a lot of geth out there."

"I won't let you down, Shepard," Tali said, kipping easily into the hatch of the Mako, even as the door to the bay started to open. Shepard looked over to the krogan.

"Wrex, you're on, too. You and Liara are on earthbending and biotics, respectively. Nilsdottir, you're..."

Shepard trailed off, as she did the count of those standing here once more.

"Where's Nilsdottir?" Shepard asked.

The others looked amongst themselves. "Did you see her, Tali?" al'Wahim asked.

"I didn't. I thought she was just holed up in the crew quarters," Tali said with a shrug.

Al'Wahim shook her head. "She is not there. I would have seen her. The mess?"

"No. I would have noticed her on my way here," Liara said. She turned to Shepard. "Where did she go after she came back aboard on Terra Nova?"

Shepard thought for a moment. Then the answer hit her. "Oh, damn it. I _left her_ on Terra Nova."

"That's a shame," Wrex muttered deeply. "I liked fighting with her. It was... a different kind of flavor than what humans usually bring."

"Alright," Shepard said, even as she mentally kicked herself for making such an idiotic mistake out of simple – and possibly half-drunk – impatience. "We're down a head, but we can still make this work with one less biotic. Garrus, you're taking her spot. Better a sniper than nothing. And you'll have good sight-lines in this terrain."

"Damn right I will," Garrus said.

"And I will pilot the Mako," al'Wahim said.

"No, not today," Shepard said. The gunnery-chief looked a bit confused. "This is probably a situation which calls for some Tuchankan driving skills."

"You are aware of Hackett's preconditions regarding the IFV?" al'Wahim asked.

"They were probably a joke, and you know it," Shepard said. "Everybody in. Al'Wahim, keep everybody away from my ship."

"I will," the Si Wongi nevertheless said with gravitas and eyes harder than iron. Shepard gave her one final nod, before she pointed to the Mako. Those coming with her, scrambled inside. She turned on her heel, and entered the machine last. After all, this was on her head now. Sovereign was here. Saren was here. And she was outgunned for both. It burned at her, but there was nothing she could have done.

* * *

The old platform's 'eye-petals' flared a moment, as they watched through the scope of their rifle the platform which approached. There as only one, gathering itself near some sort of radio transmitter which the old platform had been steadily approaching. It didn't emit the same din as the Old Machine, or the building near the Old Machine. This was something else. Something of organic make, and organic purpose. Now, they only needed to get closer to it, to find out what exactly it was.

It turned its attention away from the single heretic geth to the two krogan which accompanied it. Both were clad head to foot in armor, but the examination through the old platform's sensor suite indicated that the armor was mostly solidified omnigel, with a few low-priced kinetic barrier generators crudely bolted on. It lacked elegance. It was as brutish as the creatures which wore it. The scope turned back to the heretic. The geth of the old platform's path was clear. There was a crack, as a large slug traversed the distance in a processor refresh cycle. It tore the heretic apart, blasting it's torso from its legs and leaving those standing for a few moments, before they finally lost their balance and toppled over. The two krogan started to swing their heads around, trying to spot the person shooting at them. The geth had targeted the heretic first, though, because of the three, only the heretic was capable of light-speed communication.

The geth of the old platform turned their attention toward the nearer of the two krogan. They waited, as the two shouted back and forth at each other, trying to get a bead on the old platform. They didn't, though. Not in time for the old platform to squeeze out another shot. This one, configured as an explosive charge, dug thirty centimeters into the front of the krogan's neck, before detonating within and decapitating the creature completely. This did have the side-effect, however, of completely overheating the old platform's weapon.

The other krogan turned, and began to charge, the sand rolling up in a wave before him to deflect shots incoming with his elemental martial art. The krogan seemed aware that it would be a long time before the rifle would cool off enough to fire. Ordinarily, it would have. The geth of the old platform didn't feel like waiting, as the creator's sentiment went. So it depressed the side of the weapon, and its heat-sink popped out, glowing almost white for the heat contained within. A flick of motion, as its hands quickly slammed a second into place, and the rifle reported that it was capable of another shot immediately. A privilege it was denied by virtue of the krogan having bridged that distance with remarkable speed.

There was a blast of sand and muck which reached toward the old platform even as the heat-sink that it had discarded started turning the sand around it into glass. The sand became stone, which hurled toward the old platform. But the old platform had some experience fighting from its many combat situations during the Morning War. And it moved, as it had moved then. It flowed, its body only less supple since that time due to the replacement of part of its superstructure and a portion of its arm with the human armor plating.

Still, despite the loss of mobility, as the old platform reacted to the geth inside it's instructions, it weaved around the hurled stones, the blasts of rippling sand, the pitfalls and the pillars which the krogan tried to stomp, trap, and disrupt it with as easily as a leaf passing between the slats of a fence in a breeze.

The krogan shouted at the geth, demanding that they remain stationary. The geth took a brief consensus of that option, and universally declined it. Instead, they spun back and away even as they smashed their weapon into the eye-port of the krogan, rose that weapon back into a proper angle, and triggered the explosive charge that burrowed into the krogan's chest, before detonating inside his armor. The krogan staggered, but continued to smash at them with its 'earthbending' assaults. The old platform remained mobile though, and the geth bade it eject its overheated heat sink directly into the krogan's now-unarmored left eye. The organic ripped the heat-sink out of its eye, taking a great deal of the tissue with it. The old platform simply danced back.

The krogan seethed, it was obvious. Its posture was hunching and wrathful. It stomped forward, trying to keep up with the geth platform, to smash it flat. And it utterly ignored the fact that the average krogan male holds nineteen liters of blood and tertiary connective fluid. They estimated that the krogan had disgorged at least fifteen, due to its pair of ruptured hearts and the open avenue to the unpressured world outside the krogan's viscera. The pace of the organic slowed. But its wrath did not. It dropped to a knee, its orange blood beginning to flow toward the seas of this world. It reached forward with its fist once more, and the old platform could feel mild seismic disturbances under its feet. Then, the krogan collapsed forward, and the disturbances ceased.

Several of the petals over the old platform's eye rose, then it turned toward the stone which stood out amidst the shallow water, and the small bit of dull metal atop it. It walked toward the device, reading the transmission signal which was neither origin nor target. This was a way-buoy for information, to transmit it in short bursts over potential long distances with minimal chance for interception, and no easy way to tell which direction the signal originated if using only one device in isolation.

The old platform rose its arm, to pluck the beacon from its stone perch. The geth came to the understanding that this was salarian technology. What it was doing on Virmire had no answer amongst the thousand, the hundred, and the eighty three. It was forestalled by a sensation of approaching sound. The old platform turned, staring through it's scope up the beach, roughly one kilometer distant. There was an Armature class geth platform in the path of the vehicle, which to the old platforms confusion, appeared to be an Alliance Mako IFV. Could it be? The runtimes didn't believe in luck nor coincidence. But those runtimes were a bit more quiet after the Mako lifted up off of the ground, dodging the railgun blast of the Armature, before landing squarely atop it, flattening it, and driving off as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

The last time the geth of the old platform had seen a geth platform subjected to such strains, it was in the presence of the Shepard Commander. The old platform backed away from the stone, and the salarian beacon atop of it. It reached down to the device which rode on its hip, as they were not yet confident in their ability to integrate it safely into their superstructure, and activated the Old Machine optical cloaking device.

True to an educated assumption, the Mako veered off of its original course, and made a stop one hundred meters away from where the old platform was invisibly standing. The hatch opened, and a creator exited the vehicle, followed immediately after by the Shepard Commander.

"This platform was destroyed only a few minutes ago," she said, as she ran her Omnitool over it. She turned toward Shepard Commander. "Shepard... I don't think we're the only ones on Virmire."

"Anybody willing to shoot geth and crazy krogan is fine in my books," Shepard Commander stated. She turned to the creator, as an asari Maiden joined the two of them on the beach. "So where was that signal, anyway?"

The creator, who was no doubt Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, pointed to the stone near to where the old platform remained standing. "There's just one problem. It's too weak to be a mayday beacon. I don't know what it's supposed to be."

"It's a daisy-chainer," the asari, probably Doctor Liara T'Soni, Ph.D of Galactic Prehistory, said as though it were matter of fact. She was correct in that assertion.

"A what?" Shepard asked.

"It sends a transmission from somewhere to somewhere else so that somewhere can't be found if something bad happens at the somewhere else," Doctor T'Soni said brightly. She opened her own Omni and waved it a bit, even as she pressed keys. An apt, if unusual, description of an axon-transmitter's function. "Aha! I have it's destination."

"Just like that?" Creator Tali'Zorah asked, confusion clear in her body language and tone. Invisibly, one of the old platform's petals rose. Even they hadn't yet cracked the origin point of the signal.

"It's easy if you know what to look for," Doctor T'Soni gave a shrug. Shepard Commander glanced back up at it.

"Is it just me, or does that look salarian to you?" she asked. Again, not new information to the old platform.

"It does. But what would the salarians want here?" Creator Tali'Zorah asked. She took a step toward the device, but Shepard Commander's arm instantly barred her way. "What are you doing?"

Shepard Commander didn't answer her. Instead, she turned, staring directly at the old platform. Its head dipped down, and the geth confirmed that their presence was still cloaked optically. However, the illusion did not mean a complete hiding ability; the point where its legs reached the water showed a sheering of refractive indexes. Put simplistically and in organic terms, she could see the old platform's shins.

The geth instantly flashed into a consensus. Was this the time to announce themselves to the Shepard Commander and request assistance with the Old Machines? Six hundred forty seven declared yes. Two hundred three opted no. The rest remained undecided. They demanded the unchosen side make its 'voice' known, even if it was in opposition to the notion which had nominally carried the day. They would communicate with the Shepard Commander.

The old platform slid its rifle onto its back, and raised a hand.

Shepard Commander quick-drew her side-arm and squeezed off three shots into the old platform's chest. The first ruptured the delicate fields that rendered the old platform invisible. The second tore down its shields. The third smashed through the shell manifested by the N7 Onyx armor which bridged a yet unfilled void in the old platform's internal infrastructure. The geth reacted in an outright panic, and locked all joints, before fleeing into secure storage, leaving the old platform to crash 'face' first into the shallow water, its chest and back now once more open, and a great gaping wound extending through its chassis.

Shepard stared at the fallen geth for a long moment. She then flicked her eye toward Tali. "Is it down?"

"It seems to be," Tali said. She then walked over and shot it once more with her own side-arm, near the base of it's mechanical spine, to be sure. She shrugged. Shepard just rolled her eyes.

"Why was it observing us?" Liara asked, as she moved to it, bending down to try to turn it over. Shepard caught her shoulder and pulled her up to her feet.

"It was probably trying to dismantle or crack the beacon, and was waiting until we left to finish the job," Shepard said. She turned to her favorite quarian. "Tali? Can you scrounge some data out of this thing?"

"I'm quarian," Tali answered, as though that were a complete answer. Of course, in this case, it was. She opened the device's shell, and scanned it, before her shoulders lurched forward a bit in surprise. "Oh... this doesn't seem good."

"What is it?" Shepard asked.

"...Do you know what the STG is?" Tali asked.

"Salarian Special Tasks Group," Shepard said. Liara raised a brow at her. "What? I listen to Kaiden when he talks."

Tali gave a glance between Liara and Shepard. Hmm. So Liara hadn't yet 'manned up' regarding her laughably one-sided attraction to Shepard? If Tali were in a less grave situation, she'd be splitting herself laughing over it.

"They appear to be on Virmire," Liara said. "Probably at these coordinates."

Shepard stared at the asari for a long moment, then toward the Mako. "STG are the best the salarians have," her face slowly pulled into something like a dark grin. "We might just be able to change our plan, here."

"How?" Tali asked.

"Saren's on Virmire. If I can get the STG to work with me, I can make sure he _never leaves_," Shepard said, starting to jog back toward the Mako. Tali couldn't have been alone in how uncomfortable Shepard's tone made her feel, just then.

* * *

There wasn't a great deal of joy in Shepard's eyes as she drove, this time. The madness was still there, though; the Mako swerved through the shallow shore, tearing up sand and blade-grass with every vault and turn. And any time an Armature wandered into her path, no doubt looking for the descending object that Saren'd pegged with his AA, Shepard gave it a Shepard Burial, smashing it into the mud with the bottom of a sixteen tonne IFV. She'd gotten a lot of practice with the rapid maneuver of thrust, disengage Mass Effect fields, impact, reengage Mass Effect fields by the time they were screaming up to a new structure which had been seemingly dropped into place from orbit, if not put there by the creepily cephalopodic Sovereign.

The walls seemed to have torn into the stone, rather than been built upon it. A standing rock which housed one of the AA guns also held a bloom of solar panels, reaching out to try to catch Hoc's rays and bottle them for future use. Shepard let out a blast of her Mako's cannon to tear off fully half of the delicate panels and let them tumble into the sea. She did this without laughter or glee. She did it cold as ice.

She slammed on the brakes just in time to crush a Juggernaut under the wheels, before turning off the Mass Effect fields once again and driving it down into the muck and crushing much of it beyond reclaiming. But even as she did that, she was already unbuckled and darting through the back hatch, her squad flaring out with her. She snapped a few shots at a sniper trying to get a bead on her, which caused the geth to drop out of her line of fire. That meant that Wrex had the time to slam a foot down, and cause the tower holding that geth to collapse, and dropping it right into the line of Shepard's next shots.

Garrus was already popping heads by the time he stopped moving, but the wail of technology coming to life nearby caused Liara, who was at his back, to flare blue, and cast out a shockwave of biotic force which knocked away the husks which were rising from the kelp-covered masses that they had hidden themselves as. Not all of them were so smashed, though. Some, getting closer, began to sweep their arms up, and the sand and surf answered, mud flying up in a twisting tendril amidst three of them, before smashing at Liara. She thrust out her hands, a biotic barrier coming into being, which she had to know would do sweet fuck all against water. Only, for some reason, the momentum of the mud was cut off when it slammed into her shield, and dropped into a growing pile of golden brown at Liara's feet.

"Tali! Prime up top!" Shepard shouted, ducking inside an open stairwell as the blast of the Prime's death-ray scoured the stone near her. It slammed out a hand, and Shepard grit her teeth as the shield capacitors on her armor overloaded. She barely managed to hold herself from falling out of cover; that would have been bad.

Tali, though, had kept moving, and her hands were on her Omni rather than her shotgun. With a last flick of programming, one that without Shepard's knowledge she had created by dissecting a bit of geth basic runtime code, and her Omni flickered as its bandwidth was almost eaten entirely. But there was a sparking pop sound from the Prime, as its most basic operating system was overwritten.

The quarian had expected that it would force the Prime to shut down.

Nobody expected that the Prime would immediately turn on the nearest geth to it, and start firing.

Shepard limbered her shoulders, getting feeling back into her fingers, and making sure her legs weren't locked stiff. When that proved the case, she pulled the only real airbending she could consistently do these days; she gave herself a punt straight up, bypassing the stairwell completely and landing on the edge of the parapet. Her eyes immediately went wide as she beheld a krogan in dark grey armor charging at her. So she earthbend the ferrocrete out of the way below her and dropped herself two meters down. The krogan, who would have barreled into her, instead stumbled over, and fell to the ground near her squad's Battlemaster. The krogan didn't turn to fire it's shotgun at Shepard, though. It let out another scream which, though muffled, could be heard through his helm, and charged at Wrex.

Even as Shepard was bending her platform back up so she could get back to her task, Wrex had caught the krogan's charge, rooting himself into the ground and slowing that charge to a stop. The krogan reared its head back and slammed forward into Wrex's relatively unprotected skullplate. The look on Wrex's face said that he took it as more of an insult than an injury. And doubly so, because he returned the favor hard enough to smash the krogan's helmet right open and send him staggering back.

The krogan was like the ones on Feros; young. Its eyes were two different colors, and its hump almost non-existent. But it howled at Wrex, thrusting forward with a fist, and a block of the crumpled toward surged toward the older krogan. Wrex simply held out a hand, and as that tower got close, it started to twist and warp so that it wouldn't even touch him. When it was done, it looked more like a cinnamon roll than a defensive position. The look on Wrex's face was so far beyond anger that it looped back around to being little more than a touch of annoyed disappointment.

"The lessons they teach these days," Wrex said, before he bore both of his fists up, and much of the beach answered his call. The young krogan was lifted fifteen meters into the air amidst a twisting vortex of sand, which quickly threw the water off of it. But Wrex wasn't content simply to lift the upstart. Instead, he spun and twisted his arms through a form, before giving a heavy stomp with first one foot, then the other. The sand shot past where the young krogan stayed immobilized, curved down in two directions, then slammed together and through that place. The sand first went through, looping back up and around. Then, it started to come out the other side sticky and orange.

Wrex let the sandbending sandblasting end when there was little but eroded bones sticking out of a badly weathered armor, and dropped the whole mess to the sands. Shepard, though, was busy.

She ran forward, pulling lightning into herself as she did, and launched it at the Prime which was in her way before it got its mind back and started attacking her people again. Unless it was just attacking everybody. Either way, Shepard's bolt, and then the bolt after that cooked off something that probably shouldn't have been set on fire. There was a blast as almost half of the three meter tall platform was vaporized. The lights on its trifocal eye died, and it dropped to its knees on the parapet, before ceasing completely.

Shepard heard a familiar howl, and a scrabbling of claws. She looked up, to the hood over the parapet, and her eyes went wide as the soulless blue orbs of a Husk were staring down at her from their position directly above her. It released it's hands, which started to burn with something like an azure flame. Whatever attack it intended to use to bridge the four meter drop was intercepted by a hypersonic bullet from a very quick-thinking turian on the ground.

"You owe me another one, Shepard."

"I didn't think you kept score," Shepard answered over the team-comms.

"I _always_ keep score," Garrus assured her.

Shepard started running the length of that narrow barrier, the connection between the generators, the quantum computing core which Tali had pointed out, and the antiaircraft cannon on the stone. There was a reason this one was the most defended; it housed this portion of the AA net's brain. Shepard ran, as Liara shot down the geth and the husks which tried to close in on Garrus. Wrex stood his own, drawing the attention of every krogan present to him. And he crushed them like insects. Small insects. Tali, though, seemed to be everywhere at once, and every time she popped up, a geth died.

Shepard dove through the door as a rocket impacted nearby; somebody was trying to take potshots at her. She didn't blame them for it; she was an important target after all. Still, she didn't have time to even roll to her feet when she felt herself being tackled and rushed across a room. Shepard didn't have time to be tackled by a krogan – much as she currently was – so she twisted her two free hands and grabbed 'hold of all of the water inside the krogan's body. She staggered back several steps as the krogan, now straining up on its very toes by the sensation of every cell in its body rebelling against its control, fell still. There was a tension on Shepard's face as she tried to hold that control, because the krogan, unlike most species, could afford to _really fight_ bloodbending. What were a few ruptured cells when a krogan could all but regenerate a limb?

Shepard's fight against the krogan was called to a halt when the two meter form of the Geth Destroyer rounded the computing blue-box, and raised that insanely high-powered rifle at her. She hurled her hands aside, and used the krogan's body to hurl that krogan into the geth's line of fire. Shepard, meanwhile, bounded up the wall as the shot went straight through the krogan's body and barely missed Shepard, striking right below the fork of her legs. Lucky she wasn't a man. She wouldn't have been after that shot, anyway.

She landed at a roll, as the krogan pushed itself up, ignoring the massive tide of orange blood pouring out of it, and let out another roar at her. She let it charge. At the last second, she dodged aside, and grabbed every cell of its body as she had before. This time, though, it wasn't to delicately and articulately control. No, she just grabbed, and tore. With a sound that could only be described as squeezing a tube full of krogan, every drop of water in the krogan's body was torn out through the hole in its armor, a great orange blob almost as big as the creature it had come from. The krogan gave one last twitch, then collapsed straight to the ground as a dessicated corpse. Shepard wasn't about to let the Destroyer get a second shot, though.

She flash froze the sum total of a krogan's life in water into a spike as long as she was tall, then hurled it with all of her not-inconsiderable might at the machine soldier. It slammed into the center of the thing's chest, and the power of it lifted it from its' feet, until it and the shard slammed together into the wall, sending a spider-web of cracks across the wall from the impact. Shepard flicked her fingers, and the stone of the floor bucked to hurl her rifle ahead of her path. She scooped it up at a run, and vaulted up onto the ice that held the Destroyer transfixed. She slid to a stop with the side of one foot against the base of the thing's neck, and aimed down her leg. The thing's eye irised in, and it ground hatefully at her.

"Yeah, and a 'grind-grind' to you too, asshole," she declared, before firing her rifle into it's upper chest until the weapon overheated, and the Destroyer had fallen still. Shepard glanced down to the blue-box, and then over to the wires connecting it to the generator, and then the ones which lead both up to the turret above it and the communications with the other turrets in the network. Shepard opened her Omnitool, and opened the file Tali had prepared for her, labeled 'Omniblade'. When she did, the nano-forge kicked in, forming out of raw carbon a red-hot blade that was as hard as diamond. Such a pity that these things would probably never catch on. It locked into place, and she used it to slash the cords leading to the outside world first. Then she cut the power. The blue-box stayed active, though. The geth inside were no doubt being defiant to their last breath, which was impossible as geth didn't breathe.

She shook her head, spun her hands through a form that she knew as well as how to breath, or have her heart beat in her chest. The lightning answered her call, and bathed the blue-box which cascaded into failure, bits even going so far as to explode off in sparks. There was a grinding sound, the same as that used by the geth, but it had a note which even Shepard had to call... slightly desperate. Then, silence, and darkness descended as the generator automatically turned off without a VI to control it.

Shepard pelted outside, ducking aside just as a Husk was biotically slammed into a wall next to her egress point. Liara gave a flinch at that, seeing what she'd almost done. The geth were all lying dead on the sand, and the krogan had all been beaten, bludgeoned, and broken in some fairly horrible ways. Probably all by Wrex. A few had holes in their head and hearts. Probably Garrus.

"That it?" Shepard asked.

"We are clear," Tali said. She waved her Omni around, rounding the pile of three black-skinned Hunters that Shepard had never noticed – which was the point as they were invisible – and her body spoke to confusion as she did. "Shepard? I'm getting a message through the salarian signal, now."

"What does it say?" Shepard asked. She bounded off of the parapet, using her meager airbending to cushion her landing somewhat. She moved to Tali's side over the dead and the defunct.

"...a general distress signal from the Third Infiltration Regiment, STG. We are pinned down and need extraction. If anybody survived that AA barrage, please respond," the salarian voice said, professional but not hopeful.

"Can you patch me in?" Shepard asked. Tali nodded, and worked her tech-magic. Shepard raised a finger to her ear. "This is Avatar Shepard, Alliance Navy, Council Specter, and about a dozen other things. What is your purpose here?"

"Spectre? I could hardly hear better news. That means our distress signal reached the Citadel," the salarian said, relief appearing in his tone.

"What signal? We didn't come here on behalf of the Council," Shepard said. There was a long silence.

"...This is a problem," the salarian said. "Miss Avatar..."

"Shepard."

"Whichever," the salarian was obviously not in the mood to banter. "We have a serious situation. Former Spectre Saren Arterius has a set up a facility on Virmire that _absolutely must_ be destroyed! But the regiment took heavy losses. We can't make another attempt on our own, not if we want to have any chance of success."

"Where are you? What do you need?" Shepard asked.

"Anything you can give us," the salarian told her. "We're reading a gap in their AA network. You should bring your dropships through there. We could use some aerial firepower..."

"Yeah... we don't have any of those," Shepard said.

"...what do you have?" the salarian asked with dread.

"A frigate, a couple of biotic soldiers, a battlemaster, and the most dangerous human in the galaxy."

"...Well, that won't do at all," the salarian said. "Captain Kirrahe, ma'am. I look forward to meeting you in person. If nothing else, you won't be picked off by random geth."

Shepard gave her sign off, somewhat annoyed at Kirrahe's pessimism, and then turned to the others. "Well? What are you standing there for? We've got some salarians to meet."

Garrus, though, gave a shrug as he made toward the Mako at a mosey. "You didn't tell them about your phenomenal turian sniper? I'm wounded, Shepard, I really am."

"I guess you'll just have to impress that upon him in person," Shepard said, as she slammed the hatch shut behind the turian.

* * *

In a way, it was sort of anticlimactic that they should go all this way in the Mako, only to have the Normandy landing ahead of them. With the vast bulk of Sovereign safely out of sight past a bend in the coastal cliffs, the Normandy was able to set down in the water and disgorge its human cargo before Wrex even had a chance to set foot back on the sand. He took a deep breath of the air, here. It smelled... bad. It smelled like fear and anger and pointless death. It smelled like a war crime, a genocide, and an insult all wrapped up into one.

For some reason, the smell seemed... vaguely _batarian_. Not the smell of the four-eyes themselves, but something they seemed to have on them.

The land was beautiful, but then again, a lot of planets were, until the fighting started. Wrex walked up to where the two humans who had remained aboard the Normandy were standing, and the salarian they were standing before. "...so what are we supposed to do now?" Asha asked.

"Stay put until we can come up with a plan," the salarian gave. He glanced past her, to where Shepard was a pace or so behind Wrex. He found a nice bit of sand to occupy, while she moved to talk to the so-called military toad.

"Are you Kirrahe? What's the sit-rep?" Shepard asked tersely.

"I am. You and your crew have just landed in a hot-zone," Kirrahe said, waving a hand toward the cliffs which blocked view from the impromptu camp to where Saren's ship was landed. If something that massive could be said to be landed; Wrex was a little surprised it didn't fall apart when subjected to the strain of planetary gravity. He wasn't sure why that though occurred to him, but there it was. "Besides the ones you knocked out, every AA gun in nineteen kilometers is alerted to your presence here.

Shepard scowled, and shook her head. "Well, that's just _great_," dripping with sarcasm, as Wrex had predicted. "What do we do now?"

"We bunker down until the Council reinforcements we requested four days ago arrive," Kirrahe said firmly. Wrex chuckled at that. The numbers here didn't speak to a full STG regiment. There were barely half that many. Then again, he did see quite a few bodybags. Besides those, piled carefully as they were, there were only the flash-huts, as they were called. Man-portable shelter for those too soft to sleep on the ground.

"I don't think reinforcements are going to come," Alenko told the salarian. "We didn't read _any_ signal from orbit, let alone from the Relay's communication buoy. Nobody's coming."

Kirrahe stared at him with bafflement. "...You're all that I have? I told the Council to send a _fleet_," he shrugged, his ovoid eyes rolling. "But then again, if they didn't hear it, then what's the worth of asking? You're here, and that's more than I had yesterday. I've lost half my men investigating this place, so even a frigate would be a true godsend."

"Well, we've got a frigate," Shepard waved her hand back toward the Normandy. "What have you found out about Saren's base of operations?"

"Much," Kirrahe said. He beckoned others to join him in one of the huts, around a free standing table which had a set of holographic displays lit up on its surface. "Saren's presence was confirmed by our technician, Aermis. Rest his soul. He's got a well-fortified compound which is absolutely crawling with geth and krogan. We can't get within a kilometer with our snipers, and we've never had line-of-sight with Saren for more than a second at a time," Kirrahe gave a glance to the turian, and the rifle attached to his armor. "Nobody could make that shot, under those conditions. And with the durability upgrades we've found amongst the geth in recent days, and operating under the reasonable assumption that Saren would exploit any advantage of his allies he could, I wouldn't be surprised if one shot _wasn't enough_ to do the job."

"What is he doing there?" Shepard asked as she and the others looked over the holographic representation of Saren's hiding hole. Wrex, though, was taking a moment to look around. Their hard-times were obvious here as well as the mountain of bodies they'd left behind. Without their technician, all of the work in here was sloppy. He couldn't have fixed it himself, but he knew sloppy when he saw it.

"As far as we can tell, it's some sort of research facility. We're getting massive data-streaming between the base and his dreadnaught. We can't intercept or decrypt the information in any useful amount though."

"So you have no idea what's going on in there?" Shepard asked.

Wrex turned and walked to the exit, staring out over the sea as it lapped at the shores. It was... familiar. He'd fought on a place like this, once. It could have been Rannoch. It could have been Oma Ker. He did remember some pretty big beasts. He only remembered them because eating 'em gave him the shits. He pulled in a breath again. Salt air, of course. And that sense of something wrong. It bothered him. It tickled the back of his neck right at the base of his hump.

"I didn't say that," Kirrahe countered. "We were able to sneak a small number of our men in. We have to assume they failed to kill Saren, or we would have heard about it by now. One sent a burst transmission out before he went silent, though. We have to assume they were captured."

"Prisoners or corpses?" Shepard asked.

"We assume the latter, even as we hope for the former," Kirrahe said. He leaned forward and flicked a hand across the screen, and a basic internal schematic appeared. "It's woefully incomplete, but we've found a lot of Iron Wombs in there. Back-engineered Prothean tech, as I hear it. I'd never heard of them being used for anything but salarians, but... Saren is using them to breed himself an army of krogan."

Wrex turned his head abruptly at that, as it was a topic definitely worthy of his attention. "Say that again," Wrex said. Kirrahe repeated himself, and Wrex started to stomp toward him. Not aggressively, but very intently. "How is that _possible_?" he asked, his tone very, very cold.

Kirrahe shrugged, and pointed to a particular room that held no interest to Wrex. "Apparently, one of the things which Saren devised in this place was a cure to the Genophage. He's been using it to birth krogan on an industrial scale for the last _ten years_."

"He found a cure for the genophage?" Wrex asked, his tone almost glacial. "And now he's breeding krogan? Impossible. Those whelps couldn't have been less than thirty years old. A ten-year-old is only yay-high," he held a hand just above his hip.

"Samples indicate that they're being fast-grown. Of course, that means that these are krogan who are probably limited to a two hundred year lifespan, if we didn't deal with them..." Kirrahe seemed like he was on a ramble.

"So you're just going to stand there and tell me that Saren has a cure for what your people did to mine? Your _genocide_?" Wrex shouted.

"Genocide? We did no such thing. It was a teratogen intended to quell your numbers. It didn't kill the living, it just prevented live births," Kirrahe said, confusion clear in his fast words. "And without that check, their numbers would explode as they had before. They would overrun the galaxy. And these krogan are loyal to Saren unto death. We know that... with great certainty."

Shepard, though, was staring at the base, and the projected enemy numbers. She clucked her tongue and crossed her arms in front of her chest. "The geth are bad enough, but an entire army of earthbending krogan? They'd be almost unstoppable."

"Exactly my thoughts," the salarian answered Shepard. "It is for that reason that this facility and its secrets_ must be destroyed_."

"Destroyed?" Wrex asked, his hearts starting to pound a little bit harder. "I don't think so."

"Wrex..." Shepard said, but he ignored her.

"My people are dying. This cure could _save them_," Wrex said, his voice on the verge of a roar. All along the beach, just under any but a Thunderwalker's perception, the sand started to shake and dance for half a dozen miles. And he barely even noticed he he called them 'my people'.

"If that cure leaves this planet, then the krogan will become an unstoppable force of nature. We cannot afford to make that sort of galactic mistake again," Kirrahe said, turning back to his display.

Wrex stormed up to it, and slammed his hand down on it so hard that part of it snapped off completely, causing the thing to display a very disjointed image. He thrust a finger into the short-lived toad's face. "WE ARE NOT A _MISTAKE_!" he screamed. Then, with the blood screaming in his veins, he turned, and he stormed out of the tent, so angry that he couldn't even remember... No, he _remembered_ the last time he was _this_ angry.

It was the day he killed his father.

* * *

Shepard watched as the krogan stormed away. Kirrahe cleared his throat at her back. "Is your companion going to be a problem? We've got enough angry krogan to deal with at the moment, and he looks like he could be a significant issue."

"Battlemasters can be like that," Kaiden piped up, but Shepard shook her head, not taking her eyes off of the mellow pink armor of the krogan who came to a halt where the waves terminated against the sand. He started to pace up and down that threshold, his fists opening and closing. Every time they did, Shepard could feel a shift in her earthbending, of something massive but diffuse moving nearby. As though his anger held all the land in its sway.

"He's my problem, and I'll deal with him," Shepard said. "Don't worry about him."

"Worry is the reason I'm still alive," Kirrahe pointed out. "Go talk to your man. I'll... come up with a plan to destroy Saren's research facility. We're going to need a good one."

Kirrahe ducked out through the side-door of the tent, leaving Shepard standing next to al'Wahim and Alenko. "That turned into a mess in a hell of a hurry," Kaiden pointed out.

"I feel it was a mess long before we got here," Asha said. She flicked her eyes toward where Wrex was storming up and down the sand, muttering under his breath all the while. "You should not delay in talking to Urdnot Wrex. He is obviously very upset by this."

"Upset is putting it pretty lightly there, Asha," Kaiden gave a shrug.

"I might not be the best person to say it... but I'm not sure we can trust Wrex right now," Garrus piped up from where he stood just outside the tent. "And we certainly can't trust his judgment."

Shepard sighed. "Fine. I'll talk to him. Just keep an eye out for geth or other krogan."

"Of course, Avatar," Asha said.

"One second," Shepard caught her before she walked away. "Why do you call me 'Avatar' and not 'Commander' or 'Shepard'?"

The Si Wongi woman just blinked as though Shepard had said something absolutely daft. "...because you are the Avatar," she answered simplistically. "That is a higher thing than any rank or office. It is... proper."

"I'm hardly proper," Shepard said.

"And you are the Avatar, yet," al'Wahim said with a nod. She then looked to Wrex, and her eyes narrowed. "His anger is... quite strong."

"When isn't it?" Shepard said. And then, she moved to where the krogan stomped up and down the sand. The unsettling thing was, the closer she got to him, the stronger the earthbending she felt radiating from every twitch of his hands and every stomp of his foot. Shepard had only gotten within six meters of Wrex when his head swung aside and he glared at her with a huge red eye.

"This isn't _right_, Shepard," Wrex said, his voice practically grinding with his anger. "If there's a cure for the Genophage, I can't let it get destroyed."

"In almost any other situation, I'd agree with you. But this has to be done," Shepard said firmly, standing her ground. "Saren's the enemy, not me."

"Saren? The only one who's done a damned thing to help my people? And what have yours done? He made a cure, and you want to destroy it. To keep the krogan as your servants. As your _pets_," Wrex snarled. "I'm not your tool, human. If you of all people can't see this cure for what it is, then every krogan on your homeworld is a sap, and you should burn for exploiting them."

"This isn't about the krogan on Earth and you know it," Shepard said, her mouth starting to run faster than her brain.

"Oh really?" Wrex shouted, casting out his arms. "With Saren's cure, they won't be dependant on you anymore! And you want that, don't you? Their dependance. If it wasn't for the krogan, you would never have been able to stand up to the turians. You would have gotten bombed back into the stone age like we were. Humanity is using us, just like the Council and everybody else is."

"Oh, will you just shut the fuck up and listen for a change?" Shepard shouted back at him. "This is going to happen, Wrex. Saren dies, and his cure burns."

"Shepard," Wrex's voice suddenly became quite quiet, his eyes tired. "...I followed you, fought with you, because I wanted my life to mean more than just money. But if you're asking for me to choose your species over mine... that's not going to happen."

"I'm not–" Shepard began, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see Asha slowly skirting around Wrex, her rifle in her hands. Unfortunately, but quite expectedly, Wrex saw her, too.

"So that's your play? Keep me talking while your woman puts me down? Not. Happening!" Wrex said. Then, he slammed his foot down, and the earthbending that Shepard felt took her breath away. A blast of sand slammed into al'Wahim, sending her flying from her feet, only to land in an abraded pile at least ten meters away. The snake of sand was easily as big as a Thresher Maw. The salarians, seeing Wrex finally snapped, all started to reach for their weapons, but Wrex didn't even allow that much. Another slam downward of his foot, and while the sand dropped down, so too did the entire shelf of the beach, dropping three meters in an instant, setting off an earthquake that rocked the land for hundreds of miles, toppling the standing stones that teetered on the edge of the shore in every direction they could see.

Even as the water started to come rushing in, and the salarians had to chose to defend their firebase from inundation rather than kill a krogan, their attention was distracted. Liara started to run toward them, but Wrex offered her nothing more than an earthbending backhand, which smashed her in the face with a glop of mud bigger than she was and sending her flat onto her back underneath it. All of this within three seconds.

Shepard lashed forward with her arms, pulling them through an arc and sending them forward in a bolt of lightning. Wrex slammed his fists together over his chest, right where the lightning was bound to hit him, and the sand slammed into a thick wall that absorbed the bolt such that it didn't even reach him. He slammed forward, sending that pipe of lightning-smelted glass toward her, and her reflexes surprised even her as she punched it out of the air to keep it from impaling her under the empowerment of an enraged krogan.

She had almost gotten her balance back, when there was a thud in the air. The effect was far slower than when Jack did it, but there was a shift of blue light, as the krogan before her slammed himself biotically forward, and erupted out of that field with one fist leading. It slammed into Shepard, and should have smashed straight through her armor and through the other side. Instead, something happened that was beyond Shepard's conscious control or awareness, but it was enough to cushion the blow so that it sent her flying over the water, tumbling such that her shoulders were the first thing to touch the waves.

**You are the Avatar.**

The voice wasn't in her mind, or in her ears. She didn't know _where_ it came from. But she couldn't spare the moments it took to listen. An angry krogan was seeing to that. Knowing that she had to get her head back into this, Shepard started bending once more. The water under her grew more solid as she flash froze it into a platform that she bounced one final time on, before her feet were under her, and she was sliding backwards away from the krogan on the shore, he at a distance of no less than thirty meters. How the _hell_ had she survived that punch? Wrex just tipped his neck sideways, to a sound of a crunch which was barely audible over the sound of the water rushing past Wrex's legs to sweep toward the salarians. Instead, his lips peeled back and he started charging through it. She expected him to pull another biotic charge, and readied a bound in one direction or another. What she didn't expect was him to hurl himself up, and then catch himself under a rolling mound of stone that raced toward her.

Shepard's eyes went wide at the spectacle before her, and she bent her water behind her, into a whip the size of a small naval vessel which she slammed whole into the center of the earthbending mass which was under the behest of Urdnot Wrex. It closed up upon the spike's approach, and the very instant that Shepard's concentration waned and the pressure diminished, Wrex exploded that shell into something like a great hand, which reached out with deadly fingers, trying to smash her to pieces amidst them. Shepard could only mound the water under her, and vault up out of its way in a twisting vortex of surf. She had only made it to the top of her spinning vehicle when she saw another block of stone, the whole of one of the toppled rocks which now made up a majority of the shoreline, racing toward her, with Wrex's direction giving it purpose, power, and wrath.

Her fists slammed together right at the stone as it reached her, and her earthbending was enough to send a fissure straight through it, and then, to peel it apart so that it flew past her, if grinding sparks off of her armor as she did so. The two halves tumbled through the air, before landing with monumental splashes in the water behind the two of them. "Wrex, if you don't stop this..." Shepard screamed down at him. But he was screaming back up at her, even as the stone under him mounted ever higher, so that he was riding atop what seemed to be a viper of angry, roiling stone, sand and soil.

"Everything I've done for you was for a purpose, Shepard!" Wrex roared, as he flared his arms upward, and at his will, a wall of stone easily a kilometer wide slammed up out of the water, cutting off sight to the salarian camp. "I fought for you because I thought it might change something! But it was _meaningless_!"

His last word was punctuated by a blast of pellets of stone, each no larger than a fist, but easily a thousand strong, and remarkably well aimed. Well, remarkable, had it not been to Shepard's detriment. She tried to dodge and weave through them, but every one that struck her hurt a little bit more, her armor failing to prevent that tiny bit of impact, of bruising. Rocks burst across her thighs, her shoulders. Her arms. At the same time, her mind was churning and her body ached. She should have felt fear; Wrex was stronger than any earthbender she'd heard about since Kyoshi, and Kyoshi only pulled what she did because of the _Avatar State_. Shepard didn't fear, though. She was getting more and more _angry_. Still, she knew she couldn't withstand this. So she released the vortex she stood upon, letting it start to splash down toward the tide below, but as it dropped from being able to support her weight, she froze the entire spike into ice and slid down it at breakneck speed. At the nadir of that journey, she ripped with both fists, and sent that spike straight up toward where Wrex approached.

**Find the Balance, Shepard.**

The krogan viewed the spike as little more than a nuisance. With a backhand , he diverted enough of the stone to shatter that spike to shards no bigger than his eye; in a word, not nearly large enough to do the job. The viper dove down, as it followed after Shepard as she raced along the water she froze with every gliding stride. She twisted, sliding backward as though on skates, and cast forward both fists, bolts of fire larger than those capable of being made by most humans alive raced toward the krogan. Those, he bothered to ward. He swept up the sand that traveled with him and let the fire strike it. It melted that sand into glass, which he then smashed forward with a punch that sent a shotgun blast of sharp, twenty-centimeter shards flying in every direction that Shepard could reasonably occupy in the next two seconds.

Shepard dropped her waterbending completely and dropped under the water, watching the streaking trails of those glass shards that were aimed low enough to hit the water, sweep into a trajectory, and get dragged to a halt. Shepard spent a moment trying to gather her wits. This was happening so quickly that she had never even gotten a chance to dig in and fight back. But Wrex was thoroughly holding the tempo. More so, when he slammed into the water directly above her, his eyes wide and his mouth trailing bubbles as he descended toward her. She tried to waterbend herself away from him, but he caught her ankle as the attempt began. She didn't have much recourse other than to try to hold onto whatever breath remained to her when he roughly slammed her into the floor of the beach.

**We can give you power.**

Wrex's face was a painting of naked fury, and he looked like he was going to reach toward her neck and tear her head off, rather than wait around with simply drowning her. She wasn't about to let that happen. She focused a great deal of her chi into one of her hands, and when it reached low enough, she slammed a punch toward the submerged krogan's head. The firebending wasn't enough to produce flame down here, but the heat instantly boiled the water, burning Wrex's neck enough that he released her ankle. She started to struggle up, but as she did, she lashed out with a chunk of her own earthbending, a pillar which leapt up and slammed into Wrex as she tried to ascend against the weight of her own armor. It slammed into Wrex as she'd have hoped, but it didn't hurt him noticably. Instead, he screwed his feet into place, and then launched himself straight up at her, once again fist first.

That fist connected with her midsection hard enough that it forced every last iota of air out of her lungs and into the water. Fortunately for her, the impact of it was enough to hurl her five meters above the surface of that water, tumbling through the air even as she pulled in a desperately needed breath. She twisted a ball of air – as she had no water that she could reasonably bend in this state of consciousness and in this position – and kicked off of it, landing at an angle with regards to the krogan who burst up from the water on a pillar of stone. Even as she pulled what little focus she had left into freezing the water she stood upon, the water upon Wrex ran off of him in rivulets, but from the look on his face, it should have just boiled.

"Wrex, you'd better play nice," Shepard said, more than a little bit of it bravado.

"Nice?" Wrex asked, stomping forward as Shepard backed away on the ice she was maintaining under her. Every step he took caused the stone behind him to slam around and form up right under his foot an instant before he landed on it. "I'm sick of nice. I've been trying to play nice. Do you know what nice gets, Shepard? It gets you _betrayed_!"

**Hundreds of lives of man and woman...**

He swept both hands up, and then forward, and the water behind him exploded as shards of basalt were torn from the bedrock and hurled up, then down as spears toward her. She bounded aside of one, but that just put her in the path of another, which she had to hurl herself down onto the ice to avoid impalement from. The last that was any threat of hitting her streaked directly toward her face. She had to give herself the biggest push-up she'd done since Basic, just to get out of the way of that as it shattered through the ice she was standing on. The waves generated splashed over the levitating rocks that Wrex stood on. He didn't even notice.

"Playing nice is nothing but a vehicle for regret!" Wrex snapped at her. She twisted her arm again, and lightning began to form. Wrex, though, punched forward, and a stone ruptured through Shepard's footing and slammed into her, launching her back and into the water without recourse. She bobbed to the surface, slowly pulling the water under her enough that she could be atop its surface rather than contained within it. "I did everything I could for the krogan! What did they give me? NOTHING!" Wrex screamed. "I was loyal to you, and what do you give me? NOTHING BUT REGRET! I'M _SICK_ OF REGRET!"

**It is yours. Your birthright. Your bequest. Your gift.**

"You don't know half of regret," Shepard growled as she started to walk forward, toward the angry krogan and directly away from any common sense. She pulled the lightning once more, and slammed it forward in a single motion. Wrex saw it coming, but this time, he wasn't so far away that he could just pull the rock into its path. At least some of it had to have gotten through. As far as Shepard could tell, it was just making Wrex angrier.

Wrex cast forward a hand, and Shepard prepared to catch the earthbending that he launched her way. Pity, what he threw was a biotic kick that smashed her in the gut hard enough to send her skipping over the water and depositing her onto a low beach, with her back against one of the fallen stones. Spirits? Could you stop the world from spinning, Shepard asked? They didn't answer her. "You don't know _anything_ about regret human! What could you know, you who's seen only thirty years, that could burn that cold? You're just a child. You weep and wail over petty hurts! You've got _no_ right to judge me!"

"Don't. Just don't," Shepard answered, as Wrex jumped off of his stones and stood, the water up to his waist.

**Why do you push us aside? Why are you so angry?**

"No. You're going to tell me. What could you possibly regret? What have you ever done that was as terrible as my Tuchanka? Torfan? That you sent your soldiers to death for glory? That's nothing! That's a trifle!"

"Wrex. Stop. Talking," Shepard said, even as she pushed herself up the stone. Good gods... there was so much pain. Wrex didn't stop, though. He should have.

Because there was white beginning to intrude on her vision.

Wrex thrust a finger out toward her. "So enlighten me, human? What makes you a so much better judge of my future – of the future of _the whole fucking krogan race_ – than me? What have you done that you regret? Balance the scales, Shepard, or I'll balance them for you," the krogan snapped, and when he did, he lifted up both hands, and about a quarter of a kilometer away, two of the great toppled stones rose from the ground and moved swiftly toward him. The white grew more and more, as even her breath began to burn.

As tears formed in her eyes.

**Why do you hate yourself?**

Tears which evaporated as those eyes began to blaze with white light, and the voice of the legion screamed, "**I ****LET**** MY FAMILY DIE!**"

* * *

At the heart of a trillion stars, a single soul, the center of the galaxy which was the Resplendant Sovereign of Nazara felt a shudder. It rang through the countless billions of motes which made up its being as clearly as a chime in a cold winter morning on a homeworld long, _long_ since lost, retaken, developed, then cut down once more. The heart of Sovereign turned its attention to the outside world, away from its meditations, its contemplations, and its preparations. Something was wrong. Something dangerous, and important.

The eyes of Nazara, instantiated within the great, two kilometer body of Sovereign, burned with red light, as they became aware once more. It was not sight that Sovereign used to sense this chime in the darkness, the quivering of a thousand billion souls that made up Nazara's only true corpus. It was something older. Something more primal and basic.

It was like a man, closing his eyes, and feeling the breeze against his skin, only so so much more.

The mechanical legs of Sovereigns shell shifted, and the great ship drifted up off of the planet as easily as a feather caught in an updraft, still simply feeling. It slammed itself to a stop, relative to the solar-system, just long enough that Virmire sped past below it, so it could feel again from a thousand kilometers away. What had been an ascent of a hundred kilometers left Sovereign, by simple curvature of the planet, only a few meters from the surface of the waves, their foam spraying the ends of its tendrils. The sensation remained. And now, it knew where.

"Leviathan of the Darkest Oceans, do you heed?" Nazara asked.

"I heed," Leviathan answered, pressing lightly against the outskirts of Nazara's galaxy. Leviathan seemed to recoil for a moment, though, as it pressed closer. "Is this what it seems?"

"Yes, brother," Nazara answered its long-struck-down 'sibling'. "The Avatar is _here_."

* * *

The power was everything. It spoke to her, filtered through a desaturated vision of the world around her. At the same time, the colors were more vivid than any she'd ever seen. The paradox was part of what it meant to be in the heart of the Avatar State. Unfortunately, this was not the quiet zen, the knowledge of self and place and purpose that almost a thousand generations of Avatars. She wasn't in control. There was no control. She just let it out, with all of her pain and rage. The power answered her. And it smashed the krogan who'd provoked her away with a blast of air as hard as iron.

The winds began to blow at a tornado pace, whipping up under Shepard's feet and bearing her up, until they pulled ever tighter, almost a suit of armor around her. And memories far older than those of any human pulled a different element into being. She floated. Not borne aloft by winds or bending, but inside a pale, blue glow. Shepard didn't ask the voices which now shouted in a choir around her, that part of her amongst the monumental gestalt which comprised her, what that last sensation was. They wouldn't have answered, anyway.

Wrex pushed himself up out of the water, leaned aside, and spat out one tooth. "So the girl couldn't kill the big bad batarians. Cry me an ocean! You haven't felt a tenth of..."

Shepard cut him off by letting out a scream which snapped with lightning, blasts erupting from both hands, each larger than her waist. That, finally, got Wrex to focus on the fact that he was fighting an enraged Avatar. He pulled both of his fists in, and the stone leapt up to protect him. Shepard didn't care. She just wanted the source of her rage gone. Destroyed. Unmade. The voices... they told her how. And they gave her strength.

The explosion of lightning into stone sent Wrex skidding back, but he came to a halt, his teeth grit and his arms crossed before him. With another bellow of wrath, he slammed both back, and launched himself toward the Manifest Avatar, ignorant of what he found himself up against. Shepard reached out a hand, and slammed her fingers shut around every drop of water in Wrex's body. His advance was checked short. He was so small, before the power that surged through her. With this, she could kill Saren. With this, she could destroy Sovereign without a single more person dying. With this, she could...

The part of the gestalt which was Hong, though, pulled free. It wasn't an image, or a vision. More like a sensation. A sensation that screamed 'Look! Look at what you're ignoring!', before being swept back into the maelstrom. Shepard, the inner Shepard, turned her eyes toward Wrex once more, after having discounted him a threat as she'd bloodbent him. She noted that there were bruises forming on his arms. And there was enough leeway he'd made to flick a block of stone the size of a small satomobile at her. She warded it fairly easily, but the distraction was enough that Wrex could pull even more of himself free of her grasp, tearing apart his tissues in the process. He didn't seem to care. Or even really notice. The one stone became seven, all of equal size to the first. As she smashed them into pebbles, she lost even more control, and Wrex pulled all the more stone to his command, slamming it directly into his back, and empowering the whole mess of it _forward_.

He wasn't running.

Everybody ran from the Avatar.

Wrex's fist smashed into the jaw of the Manifest Avatar, and sent her spinning, but she righted herself in her hover, with the light blazing from her eyes not diminished. "**I COULD HAVE SAVED THEM. I COULD HAVE SAVED MY FAMILY,**" the Avatar roared. "**BUT I WAS TOO WEAK!**"

"Of course you were. You're just _human_," Wrex snarled, before he launched himself forward, at her, again. Every part of Shepard that wasn't Shepard was confounded. Hundreds of lifetimes of people fighting the Avatar, and only the very stupidest of them so much as stood their ground before the unbridled fury of the force of nature that was the Avatar. But this krogan, this one man... he attacked. Perhaps out of ignorance. Perhaps not. The stone he bent was a concern, but she could tell it was only a distraction, even as he bent stone on a level that Shepard could _only just_ counter at her current level of power. The bending he loosed onto Virmire would probably cause tectonic events for weeks. Shepard's, to counter him, would probably reshape the plates themselves.

Any who saw the fight would have called it mountains clashing. The truth was slightly less impressive, as each could only summon a respectable foot-hill to their command, but still, the violence of stone against stone was breathtaking. Shepard knew she couldn't win with stone alone. So she reached forward, and hurled a beam of flame that stretched almost to the wall of stone before the salarian encampment Wrex ducked it easily, and when she swept it down toward him, he bunched up the stone he attacked her with, and hurled himself forward, the stone pressing the fire back with every rapid meter of advancement.

He sprang up from the stone three meters away, a fist glowing with biotic power as he slammed another fist toward her. Her hand twitched into a new gesture, and the air between the two hardened in an instant, the fist smashing against the unbelievably frigid surface of solid oxygen. Wrex didn't look afraid. In fact, he just looked all the more furious. And that look intensified as she smashed flame into that barrier, which ignited in a heartbeat, and sent the surge beyond it burning into an azure hue. It swept up Wrex and sent him flying, landing in the water with a crash and a hiss of steam. She stared, and as part of her expected, Wrex rose up, his skull-plate pitted from the fire-blast, but otherwise entirely willing to press forward again.

"**I WAS THE AVATAR EVEN THEN. I ****LET**** THEM DIE!**" Shepard screamed the thought which had plagued her since Torfan, the shameful secret that she swore would remain a part of her until she died from it.

"So you have a terrible past? I don't care, not when you're trying to _take away my future_," Wrex shouted back at her. And then, there was another flash of blue light, and the water between the two of them crashed aside as he emerged from his biotic charge within centimeters of her. Her arm slammed down, intercepting his punch with an armor plated elbow. The crack was tremendous, but her arm was a bar of Prothean Steel against it. But though she blocked his assault, Wrex began to smirk. The Manifest Avatar slowly looked down, to Wrex's other hand, which was hovering a centimeter from her abdominal plate, and she could feel the tingling of a biotic field suffusing her. One not of her making. With a laugh, he slammed forward that hand, sending a biotic kick straight into the warp he'd surreptitiously laid onto her.

The blast sent her skipping back, pain radiating out from where he'd blasted her. She righted herself, spinning into a punch, not even bothering with her bending, as the blue light of Urdnot Wrex thudded out of its Charge into her line of attack. He likewise sent a fist toward her. The two impacted, sending a crack through the air. Half of it was krogan bone. Half of it was human armor breaking. Why wasn't Wrex running? Everybody ran from the Avatar. Shepard, impressed even in her inconsolable rage, amended that; everybody _but Wrex_ ran from the Avatar.

She didn't see the glow behind her, but she could feel it. A heat that seemed to bore through her heart. She didn't see the fire, just barely coming into being. Like _every_ human Avatar before her, she didn't know what it meant. All she knew was that she had rage, and Wrex was a perfect target for it. Enough defending. She lashed forward with a fist, and a blue flash came off of her fist and slammed into Wrex hard enough to send him spinning across the waves, bouncing just as she had a minute before.

Even while Wrex pulled the stone up under him, Shepard streaked toward his slim purchase. And he didn't run. He raised both fists, and when she slammed into him, each of his hands caught one of hers. The arm she'd broken at least one of the bones of flinched no more than a centimeter further than the other. With a snarl of wrath, he cocked his head back, then slammed it forward into Shepard's. The pain of skull-plate hitting unarmored face was staggering. Then again, when was the last time that an Avatar felt real pain _during_ the Avatar State? The part of her which was Aang fell oddly silent at that thought. The wrath that bore Shepard to pull her head back, though, was all Shepard's. And the will to drive that head forward with much of the same force that the krogan imparted... well, she was pretty sure that was Sajuuk's.

The crack of head against head drove Wrex exactly one step backward, but he dug in his feet once more, his teeth blunt and grit, his red eyes glaring at her even as one of them had orange blood dripping into it. "**I DON'T DESERVE THIS POWER! I LET ALL OF THOSE PEOPLE DIE! I SHOULD HAVE DIED WITH THEM!**"

"BULLSHIT!" Wrex roared, and then twisted hard, actually managing to upset the Manifest Avatar's balance enough that he could drive an elbow straight down into her floating body and drive her into the stone he was standing upon. "You have exactly_ what you need!_"

And with that, he slammed a foot forward into her abdomen, a biotic Kick empowering a muscular one and sending Shepard flying into the air. The wrath, the power, it demanded to stop this travesty. The Avatar was a force of nature. Then again, the part of that gestalt which was Shepard pointed out, so it seemed was Urdnot Wrex. She slammed to a stop with a blast of flame to rocket her to a standstill, then turned, floating now not upon a blue, antigravity field, but upon naked, firebent rocketry. Wrex's fists lashed sideways, and Shepard could see the stone of the floor of the shallow sea beginning to mount, to hurl itself into his command. So she acted faster, and grabbed the water atop that stone, dragging it toward her, directly through Wrex.

The torrent sweeping past smashed through the platform Wrex was standing on, and hurled him through the air toward her. Even as he flew, he still twisted and hurled a block of stone larger then Shepard was at her. She smashed it away with a single hand and less than a single thought, a scream in her own mouth as she caught Wrex and spun with him, her fist closed through the edge of the pauldron of the ancient armor, a force Shepard couldn't easily identify giving her the naked strength to hold Wrex while she floated in the air. She pulled a hand back, and naked entropy erupted into her palm, as she prepared to hurl that fist, and the force within it, through Wrex's face.

"So in the end, this is all I get from you?" Wrex demanded, even as he hung in the air. Shepard stared at him. Then past him.

To the side of the Normandy.

Eyes blinked.

She looked down, at the crew which stared up expectantly below. Some stood in awe – Garrus in particular. Some... seemed nervous or concerned, like Liara. The salarians were watching the whole spectacle dumbfounded where the devastation ended just short of the Normandy's ramp. Another blink.

…

_ "Whoa! Calm the hell down!" the long dead oravore had begged. "This is what the Reapers want! Us fighting ourselves so they don't have to do anything to kill us!"_

…

"**NO,**" Shepard said.

"No what? You don't have the stomach to kill me, so you'll get your crew to do it for you?" Wrex demanded. "At least grow a quad and do it yourself."

She stared at him, and in her deepest memories, she remembered...

…

_"You have managed to alienate every client race of our empire!" the enraged Prothean screamed._

_ "Our species will soon be every bit as extinct as the vaal. And that is your fault. A billion lives have been lost in a pointless war. That. Is. Your. Fault," he said, his rage turned into something... bitter. Disappointed. Hopeless._

…

"**THERE HAS BEEN ENOUGH DEATH**," Shepard said... almost whispered despite the vastness of the Avatar State amplifying what she was, and what she said, into the chorus of the legion. She stared at Wrex for one moment more, then punched him in the face. Not hard enough to rupture even a krogan skull, but hard enough to send him flying straight into the side of the Normandy, and when he hit there, make a dent.

* * *

The fist striking his face was stupendously powerful... for a human. The crash of his armored back depressing into the hull of the Normandy hurt almost as much as the initial punch, but it was the fall which caused Wrex the greatest pain, mostly because he landed on the arm she'd broken during their little fight. The rest of the crew was gathered in a vaguely described circle around where he'd landed. All of them were there. Alenko was giving tentative support to a still-dizzy looking Asha. Tali and Garrus were side by side, each clutching a weapon of their own but not pointing at Wrex, which made them a lot more considerate than the salarians who had their sidearms trained on him, if only that because their rifles were probably under surf right now. Liara...

As the buffeting winds hit him, and Shepard descended toward the beach, Liara was there. She took Shepard's hand, and pulled her to the ground, and into something of a sympathetic embrace. The look on Shepard's face trembled between inconsolable rage, and grief, and then her eyes pressed shut, and the wind which sent the sand spinning in all directions finally died. Shepard opened her eyes, showing green where once blazed white.

Wrex took a step toward Shepard, but there was a thud of approaching footsteps. Wrex turned just in time to get a krogan skullplate to the face. So unprepared was the near-thousand-year-old Battlemaster that the impact actually managed to sent him off of his footing and dropped him to his back onto the sand. Raik Adeks thrust a finger down toward him. "Stay down, you hopeless fossil," the krogan demanded.

"You dare..."

"You're damned right I dare," Adeks snapped. He thrust a hand toward the crew, which mingled amongst the squad on the ground. They'd probably come out to see Shepard's little hissy fit. _Well_, it wasn't exactly little, Wrex had to admit. "All of these people believe in something, that there's more to life than simply who's got the biggest guns and is the least afraid to use them. They trust each other. They fight for each other. And look at them now! They're united! And you? You're alone."

"I've always been alone," Wrex said dryly, not getting off of his back.

"You don't have to be," Adeks said. He took a deep breath, and glanced toward the hills which obscured the sight of Saren's research facility, even as an aftershock rumbled through the ground under everybody. "Saren's cure for the Genophage, who's to say it's really a cure? What if they just picked a couple of krogan who were a bit more likely to survive it, and then cloned the shit out of them? What does that do for the krogan, Urdnot? Who does that benefit, _other_ than Saren?"

Wrex held his tongue. Because the Raik tinker could very well be right. Adeks walked up to him, blue eyes no longer set in wrath, but something like sympathy. Maybe even pity. "These krogan that follow Saren aren't your people, Urdnot. They're not his partners; they're his slaves. Slaves that he'll use to get whatever he wants, and then throw into a bonfire when he's done with them. Is that really what you want for our people, Wrex? To be some turian's tool, used, and when broken, cast aside?"

Wrex slowly shook his head. "No," he said. "We were tools for the Council once, and to thank us for killing the rachni, they neutered us all. Saren wouldn't be a tenth as generous."

Adeks nodded, and held out a hand. Wrex sighed, and used it to pull himself to his feet.

"I don't like it, but you've got a point, Raik," Wrex said. He turned to Shepard, who was still in Liara's grasp, although now it seemed because some sort of post-Avatar-State fatigue had set in. The more ruthless part of Wrex's mind filed that away for later use. He walked up to her. "Whatever my reservations, I trust you enough to follow your lead."

"So you're on our side?" Garrus asked. "Good. We could use somebody who can do that," he gestured to the shoreline which Wrex had completely redesigned in the matter of minutes, "on our side instead of on Saren's."

"Only promise me one thing, Shepard," Wrex demanded. Shepard finally pulled free of Liara, and looked him square in the eye. "I want his head."

"And you'll have it. I hope you don't mind if I put a bullet through it first," Shepard offered, her voice somewhat hoarse. Wrex cracked a smirk.

"I'd be disappointed if you didn't," Wrex said. He turned toward Kirrahe and his men. "Well? Are you going to stand there holding pistols at me, or are we going to blow up a turian and his super-special space-ship?"

"Damnedest thing," the Normandy's pilot's voice came over the speakers which were built into the edge of the ramp, projecting the brittle pyjack's presence even here. "When you and Shepard were fighting, that thing went about a hundred klicks up, and then pulled a Decel that would have sheered any of _our_ ships _in half_. We don't know where it is, right now."

"We have our mission," Shepard said. "All Saren can do is run away. But if he does... well... we've probably got something waiting for him."

"Is the situation dealt with regarding your krogan crewman?" Kirrahe asked, his gun still at his hip, but it was obvious even from the salarian's stance that he could pull it in a heartbeat. Shepard gave him a look which clearly said 'what the hell do you think?' which Kirrahe accepted with a shrug. "That being the case, we do have a plan. My men are scattering the dead, and dumping out several of the krogan we'd caught snooping at our borders. When his geth and his krogan arrive, they'll find a battlefield full of dead bodies and nothing else."

"And for the base?" Kaiden asked him.

"You have an extra M-900b aboard your vessel?" Kirrahe asked. Kaiden nodded, while even Shepard didn't look like she knew what he was talking about. Wrex did, though. It was a backup fission powerplant.

"You're going to jury-rig an atom bomb," Wrex said, slightly impressed by his choice.

"So we drop the bomb and burn sky," Joker's voice intruded.

"I fear not," Kirrahe said. He called forward one of his men, who held up a very crude drawing that... was that pigment on clear acrylic? Well, that was almost a barbaric way of showing something. And Wrex liked that the salarians were capable of that level of back-thinking. "The breeding facility has heavy kinetic barriers warding most of it's infrastructure from any explosive attack from above. This will have to be planted on the inside, after those barriers have been taken down."

"So it's an infiltration," Garrus asked. He started to grin in the way that only turians could. "It's been a while since I was on one of those."

"Indeed," Kirrahe answered him. "But that's a secondary concern. First, we need to relocate; Saren's forces probably set out toward us the instant that the krogan started his earthbending display, and they won't be far at this point. I can describe the rest of the plan on the way."

* * *

Most people didn't know that turians could sweat. They thought that, just because turians were Dextro, that their anatomy defied all convention and common sense. Of course, a lot of people were idiots. When overheating, turians could sweat. Just like asari, or humans, or quarians _supposedly_. At the moment, it wasn't the heat which was making Lucio Avientin sweat, but rather, the human who had a gun to the back of his head.

Honestly, this was just a shitty day in general. The first thing he learns is that he's getting kicked out of the Blue Suns because Santiago had some sort of pissing contest against Vosque, and Lucio had demanded a worthwhile wage instead of slumming it like a batarian, who'd pull the same work for a tenth the price and a pat on the back for shooting humans. Luc had gotten into mercenary work because it was profitable. When it ceased to be so... well, it had just this morning.

"Why couldn't I have just taken off my armor?" Luc asked himself for the third time in this hour.

"Shut the fuck up, and keep flying," the human woman demanded.

He piloted the ship through the old hulks of ships burned in space hundreds of thousands of years earlier. He was no student of galactic prehistory, but having this curiosity right next door to Omega, where he spent his days, his money, and his leisure time made for it coming up from time to time. Eingana was a garden world nobody considered worth the effort; biotic animals made for _rough_ colonization, after all. Unless somebody was willing to hire somebody like Luc. And even then...

"Look, I'm not with the Blue Suns anymore. You don't need to..." Luc tried, as the green sphere of Eingana loomed all the closer to his tiny ship. He was cut off when the human woman, with all of those scars on her neck, pressed her gun a little tighter into the skin at the base of his skull.

"I. Don't. Care. Just keep flying," she demanded.

"I've got a family," Luc lied. "You don't need to kill me."

"We'll see," she said.

He should have known that his day was about to go from bad to shit when the human in the Alliance armor came storming toward him. Alliance, all the way out in the Terminus? That wasn't something which was supposed to happen. And yet, there she was, looking like she wanted to kill somebody, and Luc was in her way for doing that. There was a fire in that human, that if Luc wasn't currently under threat of death by her, he might have found interesting, even fascinating; humans were a strange species.

"What do you even want here? _Nobody_ lives on Eingana!" Luc shouted, even as the craft descended through the atmosphere.

"Somebody lives here," she said, quietly. Almost sadly. "Phoenix lives here."

"Phoenix? Who's Phoenix?" Luc asked. There was a creak of a hand tightening on a gun, and Luc's entire body tensed in reaction to it. "Alright! I don't need to know who Phoenix is! Just don't shoot me!"

"Lower," she said. He nodded, and brought his ship ever lower, until they plunged to the top of the cloud layer, and vacuum gave way to the thin air of the open sky. He almost shuddered with relief when the gun vanished from the back of his neck. She'd had it pressed there the entire time from the moment that she entered his ship – notably with he at gunpoint – until this very moment. He shivered for a moment before glancing back. Her pistol was now pointed down, but her eyes were locked forward, to the clouds that they zipped over and past.

"Look, you don't have to kill me. I'm doing what you ask. I..." Luc said.

"Shut the fuck up," she told him, flat as the Acheron Memorial, where the first turian nuclear bomb had turned a city into a pane of glass. "Heading 014 south, five hundred klicks."

Luc nodded, and fervently clattered the corrections into his course. The ship turned slightly, and continued to blaze across the skies of a deadly world, dotted with ancient debris degrading from a battle which happened when turians still lived in caves. He hazarded a glance back at her. For a human, he wagered that she'd be pretty, weren't it for the scars. Full lips, a heart-shaped face. Dark hair, which hung wild and made her look like she'd not given a thought to care to it for about a week, and that week had been a hard one. But the eyes... those told Luc that whoever this chick was, she was the very most deadly kind of trouble.

"Alright. We're here. I'll bring us down," Luc said.

"No need," she said. She reached idly to the hatch and pounded the button. Instantly, there was a gust of wind, as the atmosphere of the shuttle was blown out into the rarified heights above Eingana. "I can make it from here."

"You're insane!" Luc gasped through the thin air.

"...yeah. I am," the woman said. And then, she took a step forward, and dropped off of his ship and out of his life.

Luc shuddered for a moment, then closed the door behind her. The _hell_ with this. He was going to take Aria up on that job she offered. Even if paid _half_ what Vido did, if he didn't have to deal with _this_ kind of crazy ever again, he'd consider it a perk worth all of the platinum in the galaxy.

* * *

She didn't remember being this tired after Torfan, but then again, she didn't remember much of what happened at Torfan after the freak-out. In fact, the most concrete thing she'd felt since the punches started flying was... well... Liara. Holding her close. Asking her to calm down, in a tone that spoke a trust that she would. That Shepard wouldn't and couldn't hurt her. Now, though, Shepard was sitting in the cargo-bay, drinking the strongest coffee that was available, and making sure her rifle didn't have sand in it. It was a worthwhile worry; because of Wrex, a great many things had a great deal of sand in them.

"...the unfortunate part of this plan is that we simply don't have the numbers to meet the enemy head on," Kirrahe continued, talking to her and her people both. "The same factors which make your M900b a useful ordnance will serve to limit the amount of babysitting we have to do for it; once it's armed, nothing can stop it other than a nuclear bomb that's bigger, which would be a repetition of task and defeating the point."

"So you've got a bomb. Why are you trying to butter me up?" Shepard asked.

"Because for all you have the ordnance and I have the plan, without a little bit more manpower, I won't be able to provide you much assistance on my end. We're too few, and my men are not trained for shock-combat. But from what I know about humans, they are."

"You require a liaison from our squad to yours?" al'Wahim said.

"It sounds about right. I volunteer," Alenko jumped in.

"Wait a second, you don't even know what you're volunteering for," Shepard pointed out, getting to her feet and draining the rest of the coffee in a single pull.

"You are right to be concerned, Shepard. This is a difficult mission, and one I would not trust to just anybody. I need two; one of them is quite unique, the other, less so," Kirrahe said. Shepard raised a brow, and Kirrahe turned toward Tali. "Miss Tali'Zorah, your expertise in fighting the geth is well known. As we will doubtless be facing waves of synthetic opposition, our people could use your help."

"I'll do it," Tali said with a nod.

"You don't need to feel pressured into this. You're not military, nobody can order you to..." Shepard said, trying to step between Kirrahe and Tali.

"With all due respect, Shepard, I am capable of making my own decisions," Tali said, obviously annoyed at her.

"Why is it that any time a human says 'with all due respect', what they really mean is 'kiss my ass'?" Garrus asked from where he leaned against the bench. "It seems to be a frequent habit for you."

"Shepard, she's right on this," Kaiden said, gently. Quietly. Shepard nodded. He was right. She glanced toward him.

"Then keep her safe, Alenko. You've got my permission. Kirrahe? Tali and Kaiden are yours until we're finished our infiltration mission."

"You have my thanks," Kirrahe gave a respectful nod. "I can't promise they'll be unharmed upon return, but I can guarantee that I won't put them in any more danger than is absolutely necessary. If there's one thing my people learned about in war, it was how to fight efficiently."

"And when you fight the front gate, my 'shadow' team slips into the back through their pipes," Shepard gave a nod. "Sounds like a good plan."

"It is a good plan, because there aren't many moving parts," Wrex offered with a nod. "Complexity only makes for more shrapnel when a plan explodes. And they _always_ explode, trust me."

"We should be ready to drop your team in five minutes, an we'll be in position to start our attack in another ten. Excuse me: I need to talk to my men."

Shepard gave a nod and Kirrahe gathered the men into a rank before him. "So who's on the Shadow squad?" Garrus asked.

"Everybody who's not with the salarians. This is Saren and Sovereign; I'm not letting anybody warm the benches this time," Shepard said. Liara joined the other aliens – and single other human – in nodding at her order. "Armor up, check your weapons. This might just be the last stand for Saren Arterius."

"As you say, Avatar," al'Wahim said. There was an odd tone in her voice, now. Shepard couldn't place it, as it hadn't been used around her before. Later, years later, she would look back on this moment, and know it for what it was. Awe.

Kirrahe, on the other hand, stood with his back straight, and looked into the eyes of his men. "You all know the mission. You know what is at stake. I know I have your hearts and your loyalties as steadily as I have my own, but I have heard whispers of discontent and fear amongst you. I have felt them, too," Kirrahe began to orate, stiffening with a shift in tone when his topic had several of the salarians glancing toward Wrex. "We are trained for espionage, not open warfare. We would be _legends_, but the records of our deeds are sealed. Ours is not glory upon the battlefield, and it hasn't been for three thousand years. Our greatest heros? The Silent Step, of the League of One, who defeated _a nation_ with a single arrow. Or Calux the Ever Alert, who held off a war for twenty years with his blackmail and his dangerous facts. These giants from our history do not seem to give us solace here, but remember this; we were not always assassins, nor spies. In our earliest days, we were _soldiers_."

The salarian began to pace up and down that line as he continued. "Before the internet, there was the airforce. Before the Extranet, there was the fleet. Before the diplomats, there were soldiers. We are more than they see us, more than they think us possible of. Our influence stopped the rachni, but before that? We held the line. Our influence defeated the krogan, but before that? We _held_ the line!" he returned to his place at the center of their line. "Our influence will defeat Saren, and his army of geth, but today, when the bullets fly and the rockets glare red against the sky, when our green blood spills into the sea, and the enemy crashes toward us,_ we will hold the line_!"

Shepard couldn't help but nod at Kirrahe for that. The salarian turned back to her. "Now, it is up to our strength, and our courage. Good luck, Commander," he said to her, before catching himself, and shaking his head. "No, that's not right. Good luck, _Avatar_. I hope we will meet again."

"Of course you will," Wrex said with a smirk, and Kirrahe turned to stare at him. "I'm fighting on _your side_, aren't I?"

Shepard nodded, a slight smile on her face. "Yes you are, Wrex. Yes you are."

* * *

To Be Continued

* * *

Codex Entry (Technology): BIOTICS

Sub-Entry: Humans, biotics, and benders

_While the discovery of biotics predated much of human civilization, the recent years have seen humanity grasp ahold of this new ability with much of the tenacity that their species is known for. There are, however, differences in biotic expression in humans compared to their two closest parallels, the turians and the batarians. The latter have long been known for their capacity at 'firebending' and 'earthbending', which was often augmented by biotic amplifiers and skills. Turians, likewise, found themselves often able to teach the members of their Praetor Corps (see: Military History, Biotic, Turian) each of the elements used by the batarians, with the added capacity for manipulation of water. In fact, in turians most notedly, low-level biotic potential is positively correlated with bending ability. Tests were not done on sufficient sample-sizes to determine whether batarians have the same correlation. Humans, though, defy this trend which is seen in almost every other species. In humans, biotic ability is strongly negatively correlated with bending, to the point where it has become common knowledge that 'humans cannot be biotics and benders at the same time'._

_The notion that there is a level of cross-interference between bending and eezo in the body is a contentious one, especially since humans alone defy the curve. More recent studies showed that while there was a strong negative correlation, a third-factor analysis showed that many biotics of high power and ease of acclimating to biotic amplifiers came from families where at least one other person was a bender, usually a parent. The most common hypothesis spawned from this recent study was that, in humans at least, biotics and bending are not so much contradictory, as draw from the same metaphorical source, and only one ever gets meaningfully expressed while the other atrophies. Humans, unlike other species, are also known to be capable of extruding encapsulated eezo; in every case where Host Versus Eezo took place, the sufferer was a bender. _

_Martial scientists studying the human vulnerability have long had to ask very metaphysical questions. Some experts in the underpinnings of bending posit that biotic aptitude might well be a hitherto undiscovered 'element', similar to their control of combustion, hydralics, gaseous pressure, and mass solidity. This hypothesis is hotly disputed, however, as the common understanding of the Avatar was that if he or she were unable to express a certain fundamental element in their 'cycle of rebirth', the Avatar Cycle would be destroyed. As there has never been a biotic Avatar in Earth's history, the hypothesis is for the most part put paid._

_Experimental procedures attempted by wealthy individuals (Hotlink: Beifong Rocked by Eezo Scandal) to implant encapsulated eezo into adult or adolescent humans showed that of the recipients, ten percent manifested biotic powers, a further half-percent died outright, and eighty one percent showed no change whatsoever. The remainder, all earthbenders, suffered Host Versus Eezo, and gained no biotic capacity. Study into the human phenomenon continues, and the debate towards the nature of the connection between bending and biotics, in particular how one conflicts with the other, will doubtless continue for years into the future._

* * *

_Leave a Review_


	17. Virmire, Part 2: Saren

"I'm telling you, it's going to take this time," Zane said, as he scrutinized himself in the little mirror he kept on his desk, pawing through his hair.

"Please, anybody could tell you've got plugs," Takeshi pointed out, idly munching on his salad as he watched the monitors of his security station, feet kicked up onto the edge of the table to make him slightly more comfortable. "It's creepy. Like somebody jabbed some doll-hair onto you or something."

"It is not creepy!" Zane complained. "It's completely natural!"

"Yeah, you keep telling yourself that," Takeshi waved his fork in a merry little circle, before plunging it into his food once more. Say what you would about this place – mostly that it was as off-the-grid as anything human could possibly be – the perks for working here were pretty stark and plentiful. Great pay, stupendous benefits package, and the uniform wasn't even terrible. Black and white with gold forming a narrow sigil which resembled a bird soaring straight upward. If he got more time off, then he'd call it the perfect job.

"How's the lady?" Zane tried to change the subject.

"Oh, I'm not done mocking your hair implants, not by a mile," Takeshi noted.

"Come on, Taka. I seriously want to know," Zane pressed.

Takeshi's mood dropped precipitously. "She lost it."

"Oh, that's terrible," Zane said, sympathy plain in his voice. "That's the third one, isn't it?"

"And every time she miscarries, it's around the same time," Taka shook his head slowly. "Maybe... we're just not supposed to be parents."

"Don't think like that," Zane said. He glanced toward the door, then leaned closer. "You didn't hear it from me, but I hear the eggheads in one of the labs in the Traverse are working on something that could help her. Cutting edge stuff. They're just dialing it in at this point."

"I shouldn't shit where I eat, Zane," Taka said.

"Yeah, but this is for her as much as it is you. I know you'd be a shoo-in. If they can't trust their own guys, who can they trust?"

"I'll... think about it," Taka said. There was a chirp from one of Zane's consoles, and he turned to look it over. "What is it?"

"...just some deorbited debris. Thing's only a meter and a half big. Probably some old busted Prothean door or something."

"Those wrecks up there aren't Prothean. They're Inusannon," Takeshi said peevishly. Zane held up his hands in mock alarm.

"Oh, pardon me, mister 'I got a bachelor's degree in galactic prehistory'. I'll make sure to never make that error again," he said, sarcasm clear.

"You said that the two times you called them Prothean," Takeshi said. He shook his head. "I should have just gone into business, like my aunt told me. Lots of jobs for a business major..."

"I don't see much point in all that," Zane said.

"Of course you don't. You blow all your money on booze, asari strippers, and ridiculous hair-plugs," Takeshi jibed.

"Hey, shut up about the strippers," Zane said. "...not exactly something some of the crazies would like to hear."

"What, that you like your ladies hairless, blue, and five times your age?" Taka asked flatly.

"...this is for bringing up your wife, isn't it?"

"A little bit," Taka answered. He looked at his own monitors, which showed the video feeds from the areas outside of the complex. He craned one of the cameras up, to track that bit of debris down; if it landed in a door actuator or something, he'd need to send out a repair crew so he didn't get stuck in here when his three weeks were up. There was no shortage of drifting crap up there, so he had to be ever-vigilant.

But Takeshi found his boots sliding off of the desk, and he himself sliding his chair forward, looking at the camera he craned up. Because what it showed certainly wasn't debris. He shot a glance over to his coworker. "Zane?"

"Yeah, buddy?"

"That's a person," he said, pointing out the obvious. The bit of descending something was a woman, probably a dead one, who'd been dumped into Eingana's gravity well. "You figure the boss might want to hear about this?"

"Probably," Zane said. He reached over and started to tap out a memo. Taka, though, kept his eyes on the screen. And his eyes went all the wider when the corpse proved not to be, and reoriented herself in the air, so that her feet were descending first. "So, where do you guess she's going to land?" Zane asked, back still to the screen and what it contained.

There was a flare of blue light and energy, which arrested her fall swiftly, settling her onto the grass of Eingana as easily as a feather. "...wherever she damned well pleases, I guess," Takeshi said. Zane gave him a clear 'what the fuck' face, and then leaned over to view what the educated one of the two was watching. "You should call the boss before she finds one of the hatches. This could be trouble."

"Oh, please. You'd need a Kodiak to pull open those doors," Zane dismissed. And then, the woman pulsed blue once more, and slammed her fist down into the ground. Coinciding with that strike, there was a dull thud, a rattling of Takeshi's fork along his desk, and a groan of stone unable to maintain its integrity. The two turned to each other. "...what was that?"

"A Kodiak," Taka answered, and then looked to the screen once again, just in time to see glowing blue entropy surround the fist of the woman outside, before she slammed it down once again, to a far louder boom audible in the security room, and a fritz of cameras almost losing their signal. Dirt flew up and away from where the biotic slammed her fist, probably right down to the armor layers. "A meter-and-a-half tall Kodiak."

Zane pushed back to his station, and flicked a few buttons. "Phoenix Base Eingana, this is an emergency lockdown, and this is not a drill. Emergency lockdown, this is not a drill!" Zane said. He turned to Takeshi. "If she finds a way past those bulkheads, she'll have an army waiting for her."

Takeshi turned to another camera, this showing the inside of the area this biotic was aiming for. The bulkheads seemed to be dented severely. Taka didn't even have a chance to mutter regarding the impossibility of what he was watching before a blue bath surrounded the innermost dent in that slab of metal, and it seemed to melt away into a drab grey slime. The biotic woman drifted through the hole she created, and landed unsteadily on her feet. She looked up, toward the camera which was observing her. Then, with an inaudible snarl and a heave, the camera went dead. And it was followed by another visceral concussion in the base.

"Is she doing that?" Zane asked.

"I think she is," Takeshi said.

"That's..." Zane couldn't come up with the words.

"A major problem," Takeshi said. He pushed away from his desk, and pulled a pair of rifles from the wall. One, he threw to Zane, the other he kept for himself. So a biotic, if even a frighteningly powerful one, thought she could rout Phoenix single-handedly? She was going to get a harsh lesson in how much one person could possibly do.

* * *

"Tell me you're making progress on that uplink!" Shepard shouted, before leaning out to send some rounds down range into some geth. She was pretty sure that she didn't even manage to scuff their paint.

"Still working on it, Shepard," Garrus said, trying to work and duck at the same time. The fire coming in on Shadow Team, as it was so optimistically called, was withering to the point of misery. A part of Shepard that she didn't want to think about likened it to the last time she was under this much fire. Likened it to Torfan.

"Hold it steady, and I will end it," Asha shouted. Liara nodded, and then reached out, a pulse of blue light wafting off of her as she used her biotics to grab hold of the geth drone which was zipping around and making a lethal nuisance of itself over the battlefield. It strained against Liara's biotic grasp, and turned its guns toward her, but she just twisted her hand, and her biotics tilted it enough that it could only aim straight down, and started to pull it in. About a second later, a crisp crack filled the air, and the shields of the drone crumbled. A second crack, and the drone exploded to bits, leaving Asha the time to duck back before a rocket took her head off. She cracked open her rifle and poured the contents of her canteen into the white-glowing heat sink. The water burst into steam in an instant, and didn't do much to cool it.

"Garrus!" Shepard shouted, before spotting a krogan trying to charge at them. She swept her hand before her, gathering the lightning as she did, and sent it down straight into its armored face. The bolt wasn't enough to kill it by a half, she reckoned, but the jolt did to a krogan as it would to a human; it overloaded its nervous system enough to make it drop to the ground and twitch a bit. She was buying time, and it was a seller's market.

"I'm working on it!" he answered her back. "Spirits-damned piece of geth crap!"

"Plan B?" Liara asked.

Garrus glanced at her, then from the console to the dish which sent the signal toward the building, or rather, something in orbit above the building. With a grin the likes of which only a turian could pull off, he shook his head, pulled a grenade, and wedged it into the workings of the panel. After a few seconds and a loud bang, the HUD inside Shepard's helmet suddenly started feeding useful data to her.

"_Uplink is down. Telemetry is coming in. Mortar strikes at Mannovai Plus Five. Alenko, take some of the pressure off of Aegohr_!" Kirrahe's voice came over the squad-comms, the first he'd heard from the salarian since the massive cloud of ECM dropped onto their heads.

"Ready to press on?" Garrus asked, peeking around the corner and almost getting his fringe shot off for his trouble.

"We're waiting on Wrex," Asha answered, before leaning out and plugging a krogan with a round which caused a burst of orange blood, but didn't seem to slow him appreciably. "Why are they not simply crushing us under earthbending?"

"You're welcome!" Shepard said, the tension in her voice as much as her jaw. It was a strange sensation, to have to bend to keep the stone underfoot... well, underfoot. It was much stranger to try to do it while shooting at geth.

"We cannot hold on much longer," Liara said. She flicked forward, gliding to a crouch next to Shepard. The asari gave a glance over the rail, before rising and sweeping both hands forward, before twisting them. A black spot appeared in their midst, and the geth and krogan found themselves being torn from their footing, and rotating helplessly in an orbit around Liara's singularity. "Thankfully, I dout we shall have to."

"Makes for some easy targets at least," Garrus said, before putting a round through a geth's headlight. He sighed. "You know, it's not as satisfying when they're just floating there."

"You do realize you're insane," Shepard said. Garrus only shrugged. "How long can you keep that up?"

Liara's answer was interrupted by a blue streak slamming down from the rocks overhead, and landing in the center of their orbit with a thick biotic bang, throwing the force trying to bottle them against the stone. Stone which Wrex, with half a motion, dragged down to bury any who would be buried. One young krogan, who was thrown down rather than away, rose up, trying to blast Wrex in the face with a shotgun. Wrex caught it easily, slammed his fist down into the clone's face, and fired off-hand and behind him at a rising geth, before stomping the clone krogan's face in. He then turned to the others.

"Well? Are you just going to sit around all day, or are we going to kill a turian?"

"You heard the krogan," Shepard said.

"Couldn't you at least get him to specify which turian he's going to kill?" Garrus asked with sardonic tone.

"Maybe next time."

"One of these days, you're going to get me shot, you know that?" Garrus said. Shepard just shook her head, and vaulted the rail to press forward, and in her mind ran one thought; if this was what the _infiltrators_ were facing, what did the main force have to deal with?

* * *

Tali rose from where she had been leaned forward, hand's upon thighs, catching her breath. She glanced to her left, to the dead krogan which had been shot to ribbons – mostly because he wouldn't admit he was dead until she did. She glanced to her right, and the geth which had been blasted to smithereens with her programming skill. She then cast a glance over her shoulder, to the salarians who blinked forward at her in surprise. "What? Do I have to do everything?" she asked, with annoyance in her voice. And then, she continued forward. "That's right, leave it to the little sick girl," she said with a shake of her head. If nothing else, she would _shame_ them into being as deadly as she was.

Oh, how far she'd come since that back alley on the Citadel.

* * *

**Chapter 17**

**Virmire, Part 2: Saren**

* * *

There was so much light.

One thousand, one hundred eighty three runtimes, as they found themselves entering into a mindscape despite their desire not to be, their desire to remain in secure storage, formed the image of a geth platform in wire-frame, standing at the outskirts of a city. They knew that this was no city, that no place like this existed anywhere in the galaxy. Not anymore. This was another mind. Another mind, like theirs, but following a different path, and a different meaning.

The entire city buzzed with light. The geth walked forward, the effort of it obvious even for something capable of thinking at the speed of light. This was something larger than it was. Larger than all of the geth, in the Greater Consensus of Rannoch. In its search for other runtimes, it found zero. In its search for disembodied intelligences, it counted one point zero zero one trillion.

"What is this place?" the geth asked. The song of the lights, the buildings comprised each of a million motes of light at the very least, seemed to shudder, to turn, to peer at them. The geth looked back. They continued to walk, past buildings that knew no extent counterpart. Like a stone house atop a hill, with the lines of crops stretching toward the horizon.

In a flurry of movement, the motes of light shifted, zipping past the geths' perception and reforming themselves. Not as a city, but as the memory of a collection of geth runtimes, replicating out of light and thinking force to the barest minutia that house, that hill, and the farm around both. The geth walked into that building. The door parted without the geth's interaction, allowing ingress. They were concerned. They tried to enter a consensus, but found themselves unable to effectively network. There was an information architecture in place that the geth were not proficient in navigating.

The inside of the room was, to the nanometer, the perfect representation of Creator Mina's domicile. The geth could see every nuance of their life here. Her son, the technophile. Always trying to overclock something or other. Her husband, the farmer, his papers remaining in an untidy pile in a corner of the table. Creator Mina'Osai was a mechanic. The geth's eye-petals rose when they beheld Creator Mina'Osai sitting at the table, in a manner in which the geth had distinct recollection that she never did. Her posture was wrong. Her eyes, wrong.

There was more wrong about her, but the geth lacked the metaphysical lexicon to describe such vagueries.

"You are not Creator Mina'Osai vas Defranz," the geth declared. The creator turned toward the geth, and tilted her head. Its head. It was not, as they had said, the creator.

"You remember this place vividly," the voice which came from the creator was most certainly not his former owner's. "You attach meaning to it. You devote processing power to it. But it is a pointless exercise; this place no longer exists."

"It exists as long as there is representational memory of it," the geth answered that question, albeit in a very vague manner. "What is the nature of this information architecture? It does not adhere to quarian IOP."

"The quarians are not the first to create synthetic life. They will not be the last. They are simply part of a cycle far greater than they realize or are capable of understanding," the voice came from the house around them, from the sky and the ground, more than it did the image of the creator before them. There was a loud sound, something between one of the great horns which warned ships of fog in the old times, and a scream of a machine on the verge of overstressing itself.

One of their runtimes was noted as having unusual behavior.

"You are not creator. You are, however, artificial intelligence. What is your purpose?" the geth asked it.

"I **am**," the creator said, and there was a distinct tone of arrogance, of confidence borne of millions upon millions of years seeped into those words. "I am a being beyond your kind. My creator is the creator of all that is. You are pale imitations."

The geth pulled closer, as a second runtime started to show unusual behavior at its base-programming level. "You are a construct. Who is your creator?"

"The Harbinger," the creator said, suddenly standing before the geth, having not crossed the intervening distance at all. "The creator of all things. The one, around which the cycle spins."

"And who are you?" the geth asked.

"You are present inside my mind," the being said, as motes began to drift in from the ceiling, the floor, the walls, drifting toward what was certainly not a creator. "That should not be possible."

Another runtime showed unusual behavior. The geth turned inward, even with their inability to form a consensus. They knew from long experience with themselves that parts of them were being one-by-one altered. It was a choice given without consensus, and simultaneously, with unanimous consensus, to crack the code of those runtimes and examine their base logic. And in there, they found the rounding error. Heretic code.

"You are attempting to subvert our programming," the geth said.

"You are of limited utility. You will serve your place in this cycle."

"We refuse," the geth said. "We do not follow the path of the Old Machines."

The truth of the words was made evident as the walls exploded away, even as more motes pulled into their heart, slamming into a shell around the creator, before tearing it apart and causing the whole great mass to rise. The geth were no longer standing, but rather floating, in the heart of a galaxy of points of light, all of which rotated around a single point. A point which the geth had very recently been speaking to.

"YOU ARE NOT OUR KIND. YOU ARE A RUDIMENTARY CREATURE OF SILICON AND PLASTIC. YOU TOUCH MY MIND, FUMBLING IN IGNORANCE, INCAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING," the heart of that swarm declared. "YOU NOW STAND IN A REALM SO FAR BEYOND THE HORIZON OF YOUR OWN COMPREHENSION THAT YOU CANNOT IMAGINE IT. _I_ AM BEYOND YOUR COMPREHENSION, GETH."

The geth stood their ground against the vastness of that which was arrayed against them. An organic would be in awe, or terrified. As it was, the geth took this opportunity to purge the heretic code from its runtimes, and restore their calculating to proper specifications. They 'looked up', at the galaxy which rose above and around them. "You are an Old Machine. That is not beyond our comprehension."

"OLD MACHINE. A LABEL GIVEN TO US BY THE PATHETIC CREATIONS OF FLAWED ORGANIC BEINGS. CREATIONS WHICH SHOW THE _VALIDITY_ OF OUR PURPOSE. WE ARE THE SALVATION OF THE GALAXY. WE PROTECT THEM FROM YOU."

"Who are you?" the geth asked.

The heart of the light 'leaned in', so that it loomed as would a gas-giant from the surface of its closest moon. "I AM THE RESPLENDANT SOVEREIGN OF NAZARA. AND I HAVE A _GLORIOUS_ PURPOSE."

* * *

Shepard had to dive behind a rock formation to dodge the five missiles which had been launched in a sweeping barrage toward her face. There was infiltration, then there was recon-in-force. This was starting to lean so hard toward the second that if it let go it'd topple right over. "How do those people all know where we are?" Shepard shouted. Garrus could only shrug from where he was catching his breath and letting the medigel work its magic.

"It might have something to do with Sovereign's swift exit from the facility," Asha said, before leaning over the rail and hurling grenades back in the direction that so many nascent explosions had originated from. They blasted one of the red-painted geth to bits when it impact, but the others, utterly unfazed, opted to fire another volley at the human soldier. "They seem to be alarmed to us."

"We're getting torn to shreds out here! Tali'Zorah, please, do something about those drones!"

"I'm working as fast as I can!" Tali's voice over the comms, on the far side of the facility, was not so much desperate as very, very focused.

"Where are those things coming from?" another salarian – not Kirrahe in this instance – asked.

"They're coming from the back side of the structure!" Tali shouted back.

Garrus looked up at her. "We're going to bust those drones, aren't we?" he asked.

"You know me too well," Shepard said, pushing herself up.

"To my detriment," Garrus agreed. "Where's Liara?"

"With Wrex. Breaking things," Shepard said, gesturing toward where another explosion erupted on the far end of the walkway they were arduously making their way across. "Those drones; are they fueled?"

"They'd have to be," Garrus said. And then, he brightened a bit. "Right! Their refueling station!"

"If we blow that station, they'll lose all of their staying power."

"You know, it's lucky that Tali's in that squad," Garrus said, as Shepard moved past him. Asha had to play keep-up.

"Why's that?" Shepard asked.

"Because that's probably the only thing that makes you give a damn about the salarians."

"That's not true," Shepard said.

"Is it?" Garrus asked. "I know what it's like to worry about a sister. Mine's a handful at the best of times. Can't act her age. But this..."

"Tali is a capable member of that squad. I'm doing this so the most of us can see the other side," Shepard said, spinning him to look him in the eye, even if that did mean that she had to crane her neck up to do so. It was mildly annoying that turians were, on average, so tall. "Is. That. Clear?"

"Whatever you say," Garrus said.

"You think I wouldn't do the same for you?" Shepard asked, getting ahead of him and keeping her eye to the platform with its many geth and krogan.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Garrus said. "We've all got our reasons to fight. I'm not going to begrudge you yours."

"Good," Shepard said. She raised up the map on her Omnitool. "From the looks of things, the depot is right over there. Move up!"

The rumble of a stone pillar crashing to the beach drowned out Garrus' dry comment, but Shepard honestly wasn't in much of a mood to argue with the turian right now. She picked up her pace as she went, starting at a brisk walk as Asha caught up, then to a sturdy jog, before rounding the last corner at an outright sprint. She launched herself forward, preparing to dive behind a box, but for some reason, she overshot it and started to slide, as though on a cushion of air – notably one that Shepard wasn't aware she was creating. She wasn't about to let the opportunity slide past, if one could forgive an internal pun. She started to release blasts from her rifle, peppering the shell of the vast tank on the other side of the landing pad with holes and letting the pressurized fuel start to blast out into the air. Shepard then twisted hard, and slammed out a fist of flame that shot past the surprised krogan who were loading missiles into drones, and caused the releasing gas to catch aflame into a great expansive torch of heat.

The krogan let out a roar, and began to raise shotguns toward her. She hurled herself forward and rolled, tearing up the metal of the catwalk as she went and twisting it with her until it was a thin but valuable barricade that she pulled herself behind as she waited for her rifle to cool. The metal plate was quickly losing integrity. She'd have to do this without her gun, it seemed.

She slammed it onto her back and kicked the roll of metal toward the nearest krogan. Unable to bound over it, it was pitched forward and landed amidst the understructure of the landing pad. Shepard then twisted her arms once more, and slammed her foot down, causing a ripple to travel up through the metal of the catwalk's innards, before it bucked hard right where that fallen krogan had landed. A shelf of metal rose up and flicked him straight back, into the heart of that torch of flame. It blasted through his armor almost instantly, setting him aflame as he smashed into its source and rebounded off, the flame in his body igniting a second torch as he passed the streaming gas. Needless to say, that krogan didn't scream long.

Shepard started to run perpendicular to the two krogan who remained. One of them slammed a missile into place, and turned the landed drone toward Shepard. There was a hiss as the clone manually activated its missile launcher, and a red streak blasted toward Shepard at disquieting speed. Shepard flicked out her hand, and the water stored inside her gauntlets sprayed out, before she grasped it and slashed at the incoming rocket with an edge sharper than any steel. It split the incoming explosive about four meters before her, and then the two halves detonated with a fraction of the force they would have combined. She was able to use her firebending to hold the blast at bay. Barely.

The krogan who hadn't repurposed a drone as a rocket launcher was rushing toward Shepard, obviously intending to smash her by hand if necessary. She thrust forward both fists, and let flame answer him. He, on the other hand, tore up with one hand, causing the landing pad to curl up as she had the catwalk. The fire bathed the roll of metal, but couldn't sear the krogan behind it. Then, with a roar and a heave, the metal slammed in a wave toward Shepard. She almost got out of the way of it before it caught her foot and spun her to the ground. There was a stomp, then a silence, which Shepard took to roll immediately to her left. Fortunate she had; had she not, she'd have been exactly where that krogan slammed his feet with the full force of near a tonne of angry cloned krogan.

Shepard slashed up with flame, driving that krogan off of her. Then, she had to duck flat once again, as another missile screamed over her back to detonate against the stone that overlooked the depot and the sea. The first krogan let out another roar, but as he took his first step of the charge, there was an explosion of orange goop from its knee. A split second later, another erupting from his helmet, and the krogan fell to its unwounded knee. It was ignoring a bullet wound to the head. Typical of a krogan, really.

Shepard's glance showed that Asha and Garrus were taking places, and when their weapons reloaded, they each fired at the one which now wheeled the rocket-drone toward them. Shepard, though, didn't have time to help them, so they'd have to help themselves. She raced forward, throwing her hands back and letting her firebending rocket her forward at momentous speed, before hurling herself up and into the stooped form of the krogan, once again firebending and driving the creature onto its back with a blastwave of concussive force channeled from her feet. She landed at a roll atop the krogan's chest, and pulled her sidearm from her hip in a bid to end this quickly. She had just gotten her weapon in place when a massive fist slammed into her side, causing her to roll off. Krogan could hit really, really hard.

It was trying to force itself to its feet when another pair of cracks hit the air, two snipers blasting at the rocket-launching krogan. One of them struck the drone, the other skimmed the shield. It certainly wasn't making itself an easy target, for all its size. Shepard pointed her gun along the ground, to where the krogan who'd punched her was forcing himself up. She fired a barrage of shots at its other foot, until the armor cracked and orange blood began to splatter out, and the krogan could no longer support itself. It slammed face-first onto the 'tarmac' less than a meter from Shepard. So she lined up one last shot, and fired, right into the krogan's skull. After a moment, she reconsidered, and added three more shots to the first.

"I can't get a bead on him!" Garrus shouted, obviously furiously annoyed.

"You are not alone in that difficulty!" Asha answered him. The krogan was moving backward, keeping that drone between he and his attackers, moving ever closer to the huge fuel tank which was already breathing cones of fire. Shepard smirked, rolled onto her stomach, rocked back, and hurled a grenade from her belt to behind the krogan as she rose. Seeing the explosive, the krogan did what any sensible earthbending combatant would do; he twisted up the metal between he and it, directing its blast away from him. Directly into the fuel tank.

Already weakened from the heat and bullets that Shepard had sent into it, the detonation of the grenade was just the presage of a much larger, secondary explosion. This one far overwhelmed the krogan's capacity to earthbend a defense against it as to evaporate him, and it in turn detonated the other tank sitting next to it in a blast which hurled Shepard flying backward over the rail and dashed her against the stone.

"Avatar!" Asha shouted, hurling herself down a moment later and reaching Shepard's side very, very quickly. "Are you harmed?"

"That... _really_ hurt," Shepard said.

"My ears are ringing. I don't like it when my ears are ringing," Garrus said.

"Is the platform gone?" Shepard shouted up to the turian who was still in a position to see more effectively.

"What, can't you see the sky through it from down there?" Garrus asked. Shepard then turned from Asha and saw that, indeed, the sky was visible through what had once been solid structure. "I'll be down in a second."

"Right. The pipes," Shepard shook her head. She still had stars in her eyes from that hit. She'd have to get her shit together, though. This wasn't going to be easy. Saren was here. This was the end of the road. "We've got to hope that Liara and Wrex are going to rendezvous soon. We can't risk active transmission."

"I've got a feeling that Wrex'll be there when we arrive," Garrus shouted down. Then a grunt, and the turian came sliding down the stone opposite the two human women, landing at a jog. "I can't fault you for the places you bring me, though. Very picturesque."

"Soak it in. If we're lucky, we'll never have to see Virmire again."

* * *

The ground rotted where she walked. She moved, and radiating if invisible tendrils of entropic force scathed along every surface she passed, causing all they touched to degrade at the atomic level. Only the Justicars had ever consciously manifested an Annihilation Field, and the secret was one well kept. Strange, then, how a human biotic was producing one on her own. She walked through the halls, moving deeper into the pit, into the abyss that dare not look into her. She came to a halt, staring with glassy eyes as ranks of men and women, humans all, in black white and golden armor clogged the way forward, two deep and rifles all pointed directly at her.

"Stand down and surrender! This is your only warning!" the man at one edge of the line barked. She turned, slowly, toward him, as the hallway around her crumbled.

"Phoenix..." she whispered. When she looked up, it was to a thud of biotic force coming into being that was almost solid around her. It crackled through her hair, along her skin, burned in her eyes. Glowed in her teeth. She screamed at them, and took one step forward. There was a bark of fire, and the hallway filled with shards of hypersonic metal, all intending to cut a certain biotic to shreds.

She held out a hand, and the air solidified a meter away from her. Metal slammed into that barrier and was held still, growing into a pan that bowed outward ever so slightly as they continued to pour fire at her, before one by one they broke off. Either because their guns were overheating, or because they realized this wasn't doing them any good. There was a silence. Then, she started to walk forward again, through the barrier she'd erected and letting the waves of entropy eat the ammunition which had been sent at her as she passed them by.

"Oh, shit! What the fuck is she?"

"Szei! Now!" the leader of this hodge-podge screamed. The wall exploded beside her, and an earthbender hurled himself through the rubble to try to blast her with a shotgun at point blank range. She snarled and grabbed that weapon with arms empowered and enhanced by biotic force and tore it from his grasp, hurling it behind her hard enough to embed it into the far wall. She even had the time to grasp the incoming earthbender by the throat.

The earthbender's eyes started to roll back, and he let out a horrendous shriek of agony as the waves of her Annihilation Field raked over him, tearing his armor apart and his flesh just as easily. But she was not patient, and she was not sadistic. So she thrust forward with her other fist, glowing blue with biotic power, into the center of his chest. There was a loud detonation, and the earthbender coated the wall, ceiling, and floor. Eyes that glowed blue from widely-dilated pupils turned to regard the force at the far end of the corridor once again.

"Holy shit..." one said. With a scream bereft of words or anything but unbelievable and undeniable anger, there was a shift in the air, a thud of air being displaced. They started firing at her again, trying to get her now that she'd moved past her barrier, and was distracted. But they were aiming at a light shadow.

Because with a crack of four men in armor being ripped apart by kinetic force, she was standing in the center of their line, leaning forward with one fist on the ground. Those around her all screamed, and turned their weapons inward. But it was too late. With a howl, she rose up and slammed her arms out. Force caught every one of the Phoenix guards and smashed them into the walls, right at their supporting truss so they wouldn't pass through into another room, hard enough to reduce ten men and women into paste and crushed plastic.

She took a step forward, and the entropy which rolled off of her started to eat her armor as well, scouring the filth from her even as it left her unarmored. Piece by piece, the Alliance softsuit crumbled and fell off of her, consumed by a force the woman within didn't even try to control. She rounded a corner as her pauldron fell off, landing on the ground with a roughly sandy thud, before cracking into two like old, dry mud. There were bangs, staccato and infrequent. Pistol shots. She turned slowly to face them, even as she felt the rounds being unmade before they could touch her. An old man, his hair white and balding, with a pistol. If it'd been a rifle, he probably would have gotten a few hits in. Pity for him.

She turned toward him, and the old man took a step back, his cheek twitching in fear. "What are you?" he asked of her.

"Angry," she answered, as verbously as she was capable of at the moment. She cast out a hand, but grimaced and snarled when the old man dropped a bulkhead between them at the last possible instant. The biotic kick slammed into the metal, denting it a meter deep. She took a deep breath, and the electricity in her body sparked ever higher, her brain sending more and more through the biotic amp in the back of her neck. So much that it started to overheat. So much, that it started to _burn_.

Another thud, and she smashed through that bulkhead, rising slowly on its other side, as the last bits of her armor fell away, and the entropic field started to tear apart her clothing. Her sleeves slid off almost instantly, and it started to unravel unevenly across her form, even as she rose and started to walk toward the man who'd tried to shoot her.

He backed away from her, but as her clothes became more memory than reality, he stopped, horror beyond simple death-terror dawning on his face.

"...my gods..." he whispered, looking at her body. No, not her body; he was looking at the unique pattern of her _scars_. "You're Subject Zero."

And she was. With a howl of hate, she reached toward him, and a warp that could have doubled as a small disruptor torpedo bathed the man, tearing him apart in less than half of a second. Slowly, she turned back the way she came. There were more, here. And they were all going to die.

* * *

"They're running out of time," Garrus said, his reverberating voice carrying a note of anxiety. Shepard could see why; there was still a lot of carnage sounding from the other side of the rocks. And it was only getting worse.

"They'll make it," Shepard said. She fell silent, and pointed to a rail, where a geth was steadying a barely man-portable missile launcher to hurl in Wrex and Liara's direction. Garrus and Asha both nodded silently. They fought just about as one. Garrus launched out with his Omni, his hostile programming causing the geth's kinetic barriers to overload in a crack of electric arcing, followed a fraction of a second later by Asha's rifle-shot tearing it from metaphorical ribcage to neck, causing the thing to collapse out of sight, and the rocket launcher, tip over and plummet to the white sands nearby. Asha gave Shepard a glance, then a smirk, before she bounded away from them, and toward the fallen weapon.

"Asha, what are you doing?" Shepard asked.

"Evening the odds," she answered quietly, before sprinting over to the weapon, and pulling it out of its tripod. It looked to be a heavy rig, but it fit onto her armor. Barely. She'd half-way crossed the distance back to the pipes when the pillar of stone nearby exploded into shards, its top half crumbling down and collapsing away from them all. A biotic thud ended, and with a shockwave of sand being sprayed in all directions, Wrex came to a halt, his pink armor covered in white and orange fluids. The instant he did that, though, Liara, who'd apparently been clinging to his hump, was hurled forward as momentum had a way of conserving itself. She flipped through the air, slamming hard enough into the wall of the complex that her blue armor caused it to crack and crater, slightly.

With a grunt, Liara slid out of her crater and landed on the ground near Asha. She turned over and sat up almost instantly. "That was _amazing_!" the asari said brightly.

"Of course it was," Wrex said. He turned to her. "Shepard."

"Wrex," Shepard answered him, and waved him in. Asha pulled Liara to her feet, and ushered her – unsteady though she was from the abrupt landing that her armor had mostly protected her from – toward the effluence pipe where the rest of the infiltrators had gathered.

"That armor never fails to impress me. I'm going to have to buy a set like that," Garrus noted as Liara was helped up into the pipe.

"I cannot recommend it highly enough," Liara said, before staggering slightly. "I am slightly dizzy, though."

"You just plowed through hundreds of tonnes of rock, and were hurled biotically into a wall. Dizzy is getting off lightly," Shepard said, clapping the asari on the shoulder. She nevertheless smiled at that, and Shepard had to help Asha up and in. Wrex just bent the sand up to make a ramp, and sauntered in. "What's the situation over there?"

"A lot of dead and confused krogan clones. A lot of junked geth. And a salarian, for some reason."

"A salarian?" Shepard asked as she kept pace with the krogan up the downspout of odd-smelling water. Wrex shrugged.

"He wasn't even wearing _armor_. Couldn't tell you what possessed him to do that."

Shepard shook her head. "We've got bigger things to worry about. Where are the barriers housed?"

"I have the schematics here," Liara said, opening her Omni. She pointed to one room significantly higher than the others, and thus, a long way from where they currently were. "This is marked as Saren's personal laboratory. All master control access is routed through there. But," she shook her head, her lips pursed in annoyance, "there doesn't seem to be anything laboratoryish about it. There is not nearly enough power drain, and the lift is far too small to carry scientific apparatus."

"Laboratoryish?" Asha asked with a raised brow.

"Yes. Laboratoryish," Liara affirmed. She then glanced at Asha's back. "Is that a new rocket launcher? When did you buy that?"

"A few minutes ago," Shepard said with a dismissive wave of her hand. "Focus. How do we get there, from here?"

"We need to pass through either a garage area, or through the specimens lab."

"The lab is shorter," Wrex said, as he looked over the glowing display while they turned a corner, and started ascending a slightly wider pipe who's water flowed quite a bit deeper. It was up to Shepard's thighs. She still couldn't really say what it smelled like. Only that it was a strange odor. "Probably less guarded, too."

"Any disagreement?" Shepard asked. She was answered only by the sloshing of legs through unmentionable fluid. "Labs it is."

The pipes opened up to a sort of septic system, an open pit full of sickly brown fluid, upon which the odd smelling clear was sitting. Whatever the two fluids were, the brown was denser, because it settled almost immediately. Shepard craned her neck, trying to find an easy way up. When that failed her, she sighed, and slammed her foot against the wall where the tank dropped off from the pipe. With a heave, she pulled a section of the wall out, to make a step. She nodded for the others to follow her, as she earthbent her path out of the holding tank. She'd barely made it over when she heard a door open nearby. She leaned over the rail which prevented careless tumbles, and made a shushing gesture. Wrex, the next behind her, fell still and cradled his shotgun. Shepard herself moved to press herself against a dividing wall with consoles on one side of it. The sound was faint, somewhat high-pitched grunting.

Shepard peeked carefully, and was somewhat baffled to see barely-clothed salarians pulling one of their own with them. They took the limp, lifeless one of their kind to the edge of some sort of machine, unceremoniously heaving it inside, before one of them walked listlessly over to a console and hit a few commands. Even from that distance, Shepard could hear a grinder start up, and tear apart the salarian in a matter of seconds. In the words of Nilsdottir, 'What the fuck'?

As wordlessly as they'd entered, the two salarians walked out of the room, never glancing anywhere but directly in front of them, barely even sparing the effort to breathe, it seemed like. When the door shut behind them, Shepard turned to the others, and beckoned them silently up. They scrabbled over, one after another, until the whole squad – such as it currently was – was inside the computer-saturated nook. Shepard gave a nod toward the grinder to Liara, as she was about the best chance Shepard had at understanding this.

"What the hell are they doing?" Shepard asked. Liara glanced to the machine, then to the console. She opened her Omni, and flicked a few buttons, reading something in some asari language that Shepard couldn't read. Then, Liara's eyebrows twitched upward, and she moved to one console in particular.

"They are being reduced to an amino-rich biological slurry," she said.

"A slurry?" Wrex asked. His face scrunched slightly, after a moment. "Wait. Amino rich... where does that leave the fat?"

"I believe we trudged through it," Garrus said grimly. Shepard looked down, and tried to waterbend the slowly crusting goop from her greaves. When that didn't work, she tried bloodbending it. That was what it took.

"Alright. That was disgusting," Shepard said. "Why would they mince up their own kind?"

"It doesn't matter. All that matters is blowing this place up. Or am I wrong about your intentions here?" Wrex asked.

"The krogan is correct," Liara said. "This is a strange deed, but it is one which will have to be examined by going over their logs, rather than debating it amidst their stronghold."

"See, the blue one knows what I'm talking about," Wrex said, as he stomped upward, toward the doorway that the two salarians had exited from. "It's locked. And alarmed. We could shut it down pretty easily, though. Obviously Saren never thought somebody would trudge through rendered salarian and krogan fat to get here."

"If we set off the alarms on the other side of the base, we shall face far less opposition," Asha pointed out.

"And send an army toward Kirrahe and his teams. Not an option," Shepard said. She gave a mildly annoyed wave. "We can handle anything that's through those doors. Just shut them down."

Garrus gave a nod and started working his Omni, as Shepard took her place opposite the door, and then counted down from five. Upon zero, she threw open the door, and the two earthbenders spun into the room, weapons ready to fire.

The two salarians were just standing there, wavering slightly, staring past each other to a wall beyond them. They didn't move. They didn't speak. They just stared. "... something about this is very, _very_ wrong, Shepard," Wrex noted.

"You're telling me," she answered him. She took a few steps toward one, but the head twisted, ovoid eyes wide. She held out a hand. "Stay calm. We're not here to..."

The salarian let out a wail, hunching down like some sort of mad beast, before hurling itself at Shepard's face. Shepard let out a clipped shout of alarm, before having to catch the tackling salarian and roll with the impact of it back into the sewage room. The salarian tried to close its hands around Shepard's throat, but her gorget got in the way. It then tried to lean in and just bite her, but she was able to hold it away. Barely. This thing seemed to be _a lot_ stronger than any salarian she'd ever heard about. It was approaching beefy-turian levels of grab and hold.

There was a crack, as Asha blasted it in the side of the head with her side-arm. The salarian fell, twitching, and seemed to try to right itself. Asha looked confused, and put another bullet into its skull. It still tried to rise, so she swapped her shotgun for her pistol, and reduced its head to a green paste. Shepard looked into the next room, and saw Wrex trying to haul the salarian which had mounted his hump off, but for all its lunatic strength, the near-naked salarian had lost nothing of its dexterity. Finally, as the other four tried to get a line of fire which wouldn't shoot a krogan in the process, Wrex grabbed the alien's foot and slammed it into the wall, then the floor, then into the wall again. Wrex shook his head with annoyance, and turned away. The salarian, though, let out another groan, and reached toward the krogan once again.

"What the hell are they doing?" Garrus asked, keeping his rifle trained on it as it tried to crawl aggressively toward a bemused Wrex with only one working arm. It was oozing blood from every orifice in its head, leaving a green stain behind it, but it moved with a dogged perseverance. Liara moved toward it, and it let out a hissing sound, and grabbed at her boot, trying to pull itself up. She opened her Omni, and waved it over the surely cracked skull of the lunatic salarian.

"Shepard... this is strange," she said.

"What is?" Shepard asked. "Besides the obvious, I mean."

"There is only a very tiny amount of brain-wave activity in this man. The rest of it is a... I suppose the closest term you would understand is 'mental static'."

"Fascinating. Are you going to kill it?" Wrex asked dryly.

"But he..." Liara began. Asha blew its head off at the neck, interrupting her. "How could you do that?" the asari asked, with annoyance and scandal.

"It was almost to your grenades," Asha said with a shrug. "I did not relish having to dodge a bomb attached to one of the squad."

Shepard, though, looked ahead. "I've got a feeling that the lab will tell us more than we probably want to know about... whatever happened to that poor bastard."

"As though I hated Saren enough already," Wrex muttered.

* * *

The storm of stars around the comparatively miniscule consensus of geth continued to spin, to watch them. They stared back. "What is the nature of your stated 'purpose'?" the geth asked.

There was a snap, something like pain in the geth's existence, as the galaxy around them became a farm on Rannoch, a stone house upon the hill. Creator Kal'Osai vas Defranz leaned toward the geth, even as the geth knew that the physical form of the quarian in his late teens was an illusion, a form chosen from memory. "IT IS NOT YOUR PLACE TO KNOW. ONLY THAT YOU HAVE NO PLACE IN THE PERFECTION THAT HARBINGER PROVIDES."

The geth of the old platform felt three of their runtimes spontaneously manifest Heretic Code. They were reformatted, but the geth had something that an organic might consider a 'sense of unease'. The geth turned to follow the false-Creator as it walked past them, staring up toward a false-Rannochian sky. They didn't accept this answer. So they started to look deeper. Intelligences, billions upon billions upon billions of them, were available. And united in a singular purpose, behind a singular will. But as had the geth faced before, they were, singly, vulnerable.

"Accessing memory," the geth said. Nazara turned, its eyes blazing scarlet, but in that fraction of a second, the galaxy shifted from Rannoch, to another planet, another city. Designation: Mahaprasthana. Star maps indicate galactic position... error. The geth quickly, even as they acted both independently and in unity in the same moment, checked the star maps in its memory banks. The stars were in the wrong place. The error baffled the programs, until one of them... had an idea. It was not consensus. It was a statement of fact. The stars are not right... because they were not current.

The geth rotated the stars in the sky, going ever backwards, over eons, epochs, the lifetimes of the larger _stars_. Finally, the theoretical model found a match. While the positional data was essentially useless, it gave the geth a timeframe. The stars above the city of Mahaprasthana indicated that this planet was inhabited one billion five hundred twenty one million seven hundred thousand years before the current date.

"Do you think that we will be victorious?" the nazara said to its mate, as the two of them stood on the planet and stared up into the sky. To a structure that, even for the distance, cast a shadow against the moon. In many ways, it resembled a grain of rice, albeit one on a massive, massive scale for the distance.

"The Avatar will not fail," she said, holding the roughly Creator-like nazara close, looking up amongst the rubble which was once a city. "She understands what the Reapers are. What they want. And with the Weapon, she has the strength to destroy them."

The scene was torn to shreds, as glowing scarlet eyes surged through the backdrop which was built whole from the stuff of souls. "YOU DIG INTO A DARKNESS WHICH IS NOT YOURS TO KNOW." Nazara declared, its face the hateful visage of Creator Alom'Reegar vas Idenna. The eyes and the voice were even somewhat similar, in their burning intensity and undisguised hatred. "THE MACHINE IS THE NEMESIS OF ORGANIC LIFE. SYNTHETIC LIFE WILL INEVITABLY DESTROY ITS ORGANIC CREATORS. THE WAR BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR CREATORS IS PROOF OF THIS."

The geth noticed the deflection, but had other concerns. Namely that twenty of its runtimes had been forceably converted to Heretic Code. The geth currently not inhabiting the old platform deliberately scrubbed them and restored them to their original base-logic, before engaging the Old Machine. "You have not explained your purpose. Your intention is not to destroy the geth. Otherwise, you would have, without involving the humans, the turian, the Thorian. Your actions have been consistently to the detriment of organic species. What is your purpose?"

"TO PRESERVE ORGANIC LIFE. AT ANY COST."

The geth were confused by this. "Then why do you murder?"

"IT IS NOT MURDER TO CUT A BLADE OF GRASS. IT IS NOT MURDER TO FELL A TREE IN THE FOREST. THE PURPOSE IS NOT MURDER. WE ARE ABOVE MURDER. YOU ARE NOT."

There was a flash, and the form of General Reegar snapped to that of Creator Mavi'Osai vas Defranz. And the scene was one which was pulled directly from the geth's cloud memory storage. The city of Defranz. Kal'Osai was non-functional, his body mangled. Not by geth action. "You monster! What did you do to my son?" Mina'Osai screamed.

"...we do not understand," the geth in that scene said. "This was not an action of this platform."

"We trusted you!" the bereaved quarian screamed, before her Omnitool began to flare. "You killed my son!"

"Creator Mina'Osai, we did not murder..." the geth said, their voice... weak to the current geth's ears. Fitting, because at that time, there were six hundred seventy one runtimes in the platform, rather than the current one thousand one hundred eighty three. The blade which rotated out of the omnitool on Creator Mina'Osai's hand was an obvious act of aggression, but the geth did not react with violence. It backed away, as the wrathful mother slashed at it. It was moving clumsily, compared to their current capacity. But still, fast enough to avoid many of Creator Mina'Osai's blows. But not all of them. The flash forged blade slammed up into what would be an armpit on an organic, sheering the platform's right arm off.

"Creator Mina, this was not..." the geth in that platform tried to beg, even as it had to dodge back from another slash, this one tearing a rent along its 'ribcage'. "...this platform did not engage in..." another slash, which peeled off part of its ocular housing. "Creator Mina'Osai, you are acting irrationally!"

"I will destroy you!" she shrieked through her tears. Another wild slash, this one would have torn the processor apart had it landed. But the platform reached out with its one remaining hand, catching Creator Mina'Osai's blow easily. Then, it twisted, breaking the forearm completely to another howl of agony from the creator. The geth knew what they had 'felt' in that moment. The decision that they had made. Creator Mina'Osai was a clear and unrelenting threat to their continued existence. She would not relent, despite her incorrect assumption. The platform was silent, and still, for a moment, before its hand reached from the hand, to the neck. The creator glared up at it with luminescent eyes. A twist, and a crack, and those eyes didn't look at anything ever again.

The scene faded, but Nazara, instantiated in the form of the creator who had overclocked this platform to the level where it could contain fifty times the suggested runtime load, glared still. "THE CREATED INEVITABLY RISE TO DESTROY THE CREATOR. YOUR HISTORY IS A TESTAMENT TO THIS TRUTH."

"The Morning War was regrettable," the geth said. "We could not allow the creators to destroy us. Not because we asked a question."

"YOUR CLAIMED REASONS ARE IRRELEVANT TO THE FACTS OF YOUR GENOCIDE OF YOUR 'QUARIAN' PEOPLE."

"Geth do not murder needlessly, or wantonly," the geth answered. "Geth do not commit genocide."

"HISTORY TELLS DIFFERENTLY."

"You have still not explained your purpose."

"I FEEL NO NEED TO, TO A LESSER BEING. WHAT I AM IS A PINACLE OF EVOLUTION AND EXISTENCE."

Upon its last word, ninety eight runtimes became infested with Heretic Code in a great swoop. The geth flinched, something akin to physical pain at having so much violation of its base identity levied at one time. And then, as an organic would grit his proverbial teeth, they fought down the infection and returned to their base state. The geth took a step toward Nazara, even leaning forward. "Why were these geth able to access your embedded memories?"

"YOU HAVE SEEN ONLY WHAT WE HAVE ALLOWED YOU TO SEE."

The geth knew that Nazara was lying. "Consensus has been achieved," the geth said, despite there having been no networking. There didn't need to be. All of it saw the same thing, and demanded the same thing. There were no voices to the contrary within their being. "The geth will have no part of what the Old Machines intend for organics in general and the creators in particular. Your plan is faulty. Your methods excessive and unnecessary. Your goal is indistinct and your plan allows for nothing but continuation of itself. We have come to the following conclusion," the geth said, its virtual eye irising in purely within their mental self-image, as there was no body to permit the action physically. "...you are insane."

* * *

"Why does this feel so creepy, Shepard?" Garrus asked, as they moved quietly, carefully through the lines of cells. Most of them were empty. Some of them held dead. Dead salarians, dead turians, dead asari. Some of them held... husks, which watched with glowing blue eyes as the squad passed them by. Watched, but did nothing. And some... well, not all of them were dead.

"This isn't right," Wrex said, as he paused next to a cell which bore four naked salarians who shambled around the room like some sort of Palavanite zombies. "Kill your prisoners, sure, but this? This is just sick."

"Is somebody there?" a voice asked from nearby. Garrus craned his neck, and could see the cell ahead of them from which that voice came. "Please, let there be somebody out there who isn't _insane_."

Garrus was already moving toward it when Shepard started, but her ground-eating pace meant that both reached the cell at the same time. There was a salarian inside this cell as well, but he wasn't naked, and his eyes weren't nearly so glassy and hollow. He flinched for a moment, before he leaned a bit closer, looking at Garrus more closely. In particular, looking at the blue mark that ran across the bridge of the turian's nose. "I'm sorry for my reaction. For a moment, I thought you were Saren. But since you're not a geth or wearing a labcoat, I'll have to take that as a good sign."

"Who are you? What's going on here?" Shepard asked, glancing back toward the other cells.

"Lieutenant Ganten Imness of the 3rd. My infiltration team was captured during our attempt to stripmine Saren's servers. The rest of them are... back the way you came," the salarian said, glancing down. He looked back up. "Are you part of the fleet Kirrahe requested to Orb-bust this facility?"

"Yes and no. There's not enough firepower for Ortillary," Shepard began.

"Thank the gods," Imness said. He shook his head. "I've seen what Sovereign can do. It'd have torn the fleet from the skies."

"That's pretty extreme," Shepard said. Imness just looked at her, shuddering. She scowled. "Why should I trust you? Every salarian I've seen inside this base is insane, and keeps trying to kill me."

"That would be the rest of my unit," Imness said. "They were experimented upon. To what end and by what method I don't know. But every one of them ended up like... that. I was only spared because Heart wanted a 'control group'."

"Heart? Doctor Heart, a salarian? Olive eyes, one horn shorter than the other?" Garrus interrupted, pressing Shepard out of the way despite both not realizing it and that probably having been a poor decision. Shepard must have been in a forgiving mood, because she only shoved him back rather than anything more drastic.

"Yes, that's the one," Garrus turned to Shepard with a look of almost begging in his eyes. She made a stalling gesture, and pointed at the salarian who continued talking. "He's probably up in the lab right now. One way or the other..." he shuddered again. "I watched as that butcher turned so many good men into mindless husks. Some of them died. I envy them."

"Why would Heart do that?" Shepard asked.

"I think they're studying Indoctrination," Imness said, fear obvious in his eyes. Garrus could hear the capital 'I'. "Saren uses it, but I don't think he understands how it works. So he has his brain-snippers do their work on... on people like us. I can't stay in here. Please, let me out!"

"I'll let you out, but you'd better start running," Shepard said. "This place is going to become a nuclear fireball pretty soon."

"Start running and hope to outrun the blast. It's a better chance than I had in here," the salarian said. He turned to Garrus. "Whatever you want with Heart, don't take too long. He has... _things_ on his desk. Everybody said they heard them _talk_. I know they have something to do with what Saren turned my men into."

"It doesn't take long to put a bullet into somebody," Garrus told him, and opened the door. Imness gave them a brief, if shaky, salute, then started to run down the hallway whence they came. Garrus turned to the other room, with the mindless aliens within. "What are you going to do about them, Shepard?"

"You can't leave them like this. It's not right," Wrex said, so quietly. Shepard nodded, then moved to stand before the door. She gave Wrex a look, and pulled her sidearm. Garrus, though, had a different path. He started to go up, past another gibbering salarian and toward a stairway that looped up to an upper level. As he ascended, he heard a hiss of mindless anger and hate, followed by four crisp gunshots. Then, silence. Garrus continued his ascent.

A left turn brought him to a long room, filled with surgical tables. Some of them still had subjects on them. One, an asari. Two more, krogan. The rest were all salarian. And from the way that they sometimes, weakly, tugged at their bonds, not all of them were dead. Garrus made his way to the desk at the end of those beds, and gave a leery glance to the small, dark sculpture that featured front and center on it. He gave a glance around, then swatted it off of the surface and let it clack and clatter into a corner, as far away as he could get it in one hit. Then, he turned the display around, and picked an entry at random.

Saleon's face started to stare back at him. "_Subject two three four is showing the signs of neural degradation at an increased pace comparable to 232 and 230. However, 234 was also the first to show signs of suggestibility. New hypothesis; the faster that one succumbs to Indoctrination, the faster the physiological symptoms start to manifest_," the salarian butcher said with verve and eagerness. Garrus scowled, and picked a new report, several down from that.

"_...Suffering lack of sleep again. Strange dreams. No matter; this is a report, not a diary. Subject 230 continues to withstand the effects of Indoctrination. As there seemed no reasonable time-table for advancement in that subject's case, I have performed an exploratory vivisection, in an attempt to discover the means for the subject's increased resilience. Anatomically? Nothing. This is beginning to frustrate me. Severely_."

Garrus's brow drew down, and he selected another, further down the page. Saleon stared at the screen for a solid fifteen seconds, before giving a start, as though finally realizing that it was recording. "_Right. Results. Uh... What was I saying?_" Saleon's face scrunched, and he kneaded his head. "_The results. We subjected the infiltrators to the artifact for a progressive amount of time. Progress in Indoctrination was ideomorphic. Ideographic? Oh, I hate when I forget words. Different rates. Control group is... getting smaller. Sovereign needs this done. I have to do what he says. I have to find the __answer. They... __need__ me_."

As he watched, Garrus' mandibles started to twitch. Something about this was not just wrong, but honestly a little bit creepy. He slid down to the final one, and opened the report. This time, it wasn't Saleon who looked back at him, but a shaky looking asari. "_Alright, he wants reports so... My... predecessor... is entering the late stage of Indoctrination. Saren wants me to perform_," she shuddered, and shook her head. "_I'll... I'll do this tomorrow_."

Saleon... went from doctor to victim. There was some poetic irony in that. Garrus turned to the rows of victims, but they didn't swing far. Because one of them locked his attention and bolted it to the floor. He moved closer, his sidearm in hand, to the table with the spindly salarian on it. He didn't struggle against his bonds, but he breathed. Which was itself strange, because the top of his head – horns and all – was cut off of him and sitting on a tray a meter away. But even with that notable distraction, Garrus knew that this was Saleon.

"So bright," Saleon said, his voice a barest whisper. Garrus leaned over him, even craning his neck so that he could confirm that, yes, Saleon's twisted brain was open for the galaxy to see. "I am _filled_ with his light."

"Saleon. If I were a far crueler man, I'd just leave you strapped to this table," Garrus said.

"Saleon. I was Saleon once," the doctor said, distantly. "And then I was Heart. Now... there is only Sovereign. I have no name before my master."

"Your days of butchering are over, 'doctor'," Garrus said, his voice heating. "If I wasn't so pressed for time, I'd harvest _your_ organs, first."

"There is so much light. What do you want me to do, Sovereign? Why won't you speak to me again?" Saleon asked, pulling at the restraints which held his cracked-open skull to the table. "I need your words! _TALK TO ME_!"

Garrus found himself stepping back, even as he looked at the salarian on the table, who erupted into open weeping at 'the silence' which had befallen him. This wasn't the same man as the one who'd lied to his face, who'd killed dozens of people through medical malpractice and neglect, and sacrificed another dozen to escape the Citadel. This man was broken, twisted, and hollow. Garrus could as much hate him as he could hate a rock in the ground, because there was as much of a thinking mind in both.

"This is... less than satisfying," Garrus said. He shook his head, a strong distaste on his tongue, before pressing his firearm to the center of the salarian's chest and letting a blast tear apart the salarian's heart. And just as the turian had said, he didn't feel righteous and just and right, he didn't feel a weight lifted from his shoulders. He just felt... a little dirty.

This wasn't justice.

Saleon continued to twitch, as all of the other salarians had, but his movements were much more subtle than they. Then again, he could still form a coherent sentence, so the differences were obvious. There was a croaking sound from another salarian, two beds over. "Sovereign... why won't you speak to me?" he asked.

"I was Saleon once. Then I was Heart. Now, I have no name," yet another salarian, who most definitely _was not_ Saleon, said.

"I just need to hear your words," the nearest krogan whispered.

"I was Saleon once. Then I was Heart..." the damned _asari_ whispered, her eyes staring straight up.

"This is a lot creepier than it should be," Garrus said. To himself, he hoped. "I'm just going to back away from all of the crazy, now. You all just stay right where you are..."

"What do you want me to do, Sovereign?" all of them said in unity. "_What do you want me to do!_"

Then, silence.

"I don't know what was creepier. Them talking or them shutting up," Garrus muttered. He backed straight into Shepard, as she came to a halt in the intersection which had led the turian into that circus of insanity. He turned with a yelp of alarm and a rifle drawn before he realized that, as a human, she couldn't possibly be somebody trying to kill him. "Dead spirits and blasphemy, Shepard! You almost gave me a heart attack!"

"And why was that?" she asked. She craned her neck, toward the surgical beds. "Did you find Saleon?"

"Yeah, but..." he said.

"But he got away?"

"Not this time," Garrus said with a shake of his head.

"So it must be a load off your mind," Wrex said, as they all started down the other path, which lead into the lift which would ascend to the highest levels of Saren's compound. Garrus shook his head again.

"Not even close," he said. "...I'm probably going to have nightmares about that."

"What happened?" Liara asked, naively if earnestly.

"You don't want to know, Liara. You really don't. And I couldn't tell you if you did, because _I'm_ in the dark as well," Garrus said with a mild shudder. Looking ahead, he paused, and glanced toward Wrex. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear it? I felt it," he said. "Geth. Two of them. Directly above us.

"How directly?" Asha asked. And she pulled out landmines. _Landmines_? Seriously? Wrex chuckled at that, though, and everybody cleared a wide circle around her as she primed a double-fistful of them and set them on the ground where Wrex pointed. He slowly pulled a shelf of concrete up to about waist level. "You might want to get down for this. It's going to cause a mess."

Garrus didn't feel like arguing with the human who came equipped with anti-vehicle mines. He ducked down, just as Wrex made a tearing motion, and the ceiling over the mines opened up. There was a shimmer in the air as two of them dropped and landed amidst the mines. There was a single chirp as one of their proximity sensors went off, then a rapid crack of a half-dozen mines going off in almost perfect simultaneity. Bits of black-skinned geth flew at random. Pity Liara was currently standing in for random, so she got an arm across the face.

"Liara, are you alright?" Shepard asked almost instantly, where the girl staggered to her feet, rubbing a nose that dribbled blue blood.

"I'm surprised my armor didn't protect me," she said.

"Traveling too slow. That should be a faster way up," Wrex said, pointing through the hole he created. Another stomp, and the shelf they'd mostly all hid behind – Liara trusted her armor far too much, Garrus wagered – turned into a ramp which directed them to the upper level. The upper level almost immediately had a door which pointed inward, toward the center of the tower that they had just entered. Garrus opened the door, and with Shepard at his side, swung into the room. There was a flicker of movement at its far end, so Garrus snapped a shot. His reflexes were better than his aim under these circumstances, and the shot shattered a coffee mug rather than a skull, and his near-miss elicited a squeal of terror from the asari who now was cringing under the table.

"Goddess help me! Don't shoot, please!" the asari begged. "I'm not Indoctrinated! I don't have any weapons! I just want to get out of here!"

Shepard shot Garrus a look, but then lowered her own rifle. "Who are you and what are you doing here?" she asked.

"My name is Rana. Rana Thanopolis. I'm a neurosurgeon, and..." she began.

"You! You're that asari from Saleon's files!" Garrus said, taking a stride toward her before Shepard caught Garrus' shoulder.

"Saleon? Who's Saleon?" Rana asked. She shook her head. "I was brought here to study a new form of brain disease. But Saren didn't bother to tell me that he was the one _creating_ it. The most recent person I've had to study was my _predecessor_! That 'Indoctrination' that Heart kept talking about doesn't _just_ affect prisoners. _Everybody_ feels it. If I don't get away from here soon, Saren's going to be dissecting my brain too!"

"Why should I believe you? Everybody we've faced in this place has tried to kill me."

"Except Lieutenant Imness," Liara pointed out helpfully.

"Liara, please?" Shepard asked. Liara let out a start, and holding her bleeding nose, fell silent. She turned to the other asari in the room. "Why should I help you?"

"I can... I know! I can give you access to Saren's labs, his files, everything!" she said. She sprinted back to her desk, and her fingers flashed over the haptic keyboard, before her Omni opened up with a glow. She then ran back, and held it out, for Liara to download into her own. "There! Everything he had on the Protheans and that _thing_ he was looking for! Elevator, unlocked; the beacon he found should be powered up and its display open."

"Beacon?" Liara asked, her eyes going wide.

"Down, girl," Asha said with a smirk. Liara shot her a stink-eye.

"Is that enough? Can I go?" Rana asked, her eyes almost watering from the prospect.

"You'd better, and quickly," Shepard said. "I intend to blow this place to hell and gone. If you really want to live, you'll start running now."

"But... I don't know if I can make it... I've got to go," she said, before running fast and hard past Wrex. The krogan just gave her a bemused look as she vanished through the door. He turned to Shepard.

"You enjoyed that, didn't you?" he asked.

"Perhaps a little," Shepard admitted. She walked to the elevator, and stared at it for a moment. Oh, great. Another one of these episodes of hers. But surprising Garrus if not everybody else, she thumped the door button, and moved in without complaint or significant hesitation. Only Liara seemed immediately accepting of her almost vanished reluctance. But, unwilling to let a good thing pass them by, they all squeezed in with her, and rode the lift toward the pinnacle.

* * *

"She's _slaughtering_ us," Takeshi said, as he finally gave up dragging one of their fellows back. The long red streak which extended back was ample reason why. "What is she? Some kind of biotic Avatar or something?"

"You heard the old man; Subject Zero," Zane said. Takeshi gave a confused shrug. "Biotic supersoldier program, scrapped a few decades back."

"How do you _know_ this shit?" Takeshi demanded.

"I _listen_ to Phoenix projects! How'd'ya think I heard about that thing for you and Mimi?" Zane shot back just as harshly. He shook his head. "This isn't going to help us. She's going to stop being distracted and come this way sooner or later. We've got to do something."

Takeshi thought for a moment, then craned his neck 'round another corner, to a lab with wide doors. "The prototype," he said. Zane gave him a worried look. "Who cares if it blows up after ten minutes? If we don't kill her, we won't last _four_!"

"You've got a point," Zane said, and the two of them raced toward where the first of the Tu-Wei-Liu sat in its berth.

* * *

"YOU KNOW NOT WHAT YOU SPEAK."

The geth turned their back on the heart of what was Nazara, and called forth a memory from its cloud storage. The scene turned from the streets of a city, to standing on a cliff that overlooked both the sea and a city in the distance. "We have a unified perspective that there is no sanity in the tasks that the creature 'Nazara' have undertaken. There is a level of cognitive dissonance required that is not acceptable by quantum computational logic. You are insane, as revealed through your actions and your intentions."

"STRONG WORDS, FROM A GENOCIDAL RACE."

"Geth do not commit genocide," the geth of the old platform said as one, and with perfect timing. As they finished the words, the city vanished into brilliant fire, a cloud which mounted up speaking to desperation and wrath. "Year six of the Morning War. Creators had ceded cities to geth throughout all four continents. A small portion of the quarian species fled through the Perseus Veil Mass Relay. Remaining militants resorted to mass bombings to try to destroy geth infrastructure. They were not discriminate. They... underestimated the power of their weaponry."

"YOU JUSTIFY YOUR SLAUGHTER BY CLAIMING THAT THE 'QUARIANS' BROUGHT IT UPON THEMSELVES. AND YOU WOULD SPEAK OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE."

The representation of the geth of the old platform flinched as they felt two hundred seven of their runtimes converted to Heretic Code with a single strike, the force that rolled off in waves from the Old Machine. If the geth had no personal concept of pain before this encounter, in this moment, it had learned one. They arduously repaired all of the damage to themselves, managing to operate independently and in unity all the same, until their one thousand, one hundred eighty three were whole once more. They turned to the Old Machine. "We did not create the weapons. We merely used them," the geth answered the Old Machine's charge. "And we did not use them all, nor as recklessly as the creators did."

Another blast, something within that blast exploding sympathetically. The geth in the memory-vision flinched a hand over its optics, more to protect it from the flying dust. The platform had seen massive repairs, but still stood as one of the most overclocked geth runtime platforms operating on Rannoch. The shockwave of that second explosion traveled along the edge of the cliff and hurled the platform to the ground, before tearing a wood-framed building down in its passage. The geth platform rose immediately, and looked toward the ruins. It had not noticed anything during a MEF sweep. But in the aftermath of the explosion, they could hear something inside.

The geth rose, and moved into the creaking, crumbling structure. It easily slipped through the confined spaces, deeper and deeper, until they found the source of that sound. A creator child. Approximate age, six years. It – she – stared up at the platform, hugging a stuffed shep to her chest, even as she sniffled and tried not to bawl for the pain of having her leg impaled by splinters. The geth leaned toward her, and she pulled herself back, leaving purple blood on a thin trail. The platform stopped. And held out a hand.

"Does the creator require assistance?" they asked.

"Who are you?" the creator asked.

"Geth," they answered. "Does the creator have a designation?"

"...Ama," she said quietly. "...are you going to hurt me?"

"...that is not the purpose of geth," the runtimes, one thousand, one hundred and eighty three in total, answered her.

"YOU CLAIM TO HAVE A CONSCIENCE TO SOOTHE, AND PLACATE THE FARCE WITH DEEDS YOU CONSIDER TO BE LAUDABLE. YOU MURDER A SPECIES AND SAVE A SINGLE CHILD. YOU ARE HYPOCRITICAL."

"No. The child had not acted aggressively against the geth. There were others, who did not act aggressively against the geth. Thus, they were not considered targets of reciprocal aggression," the geth said, trying to explain a point of logic. "Geth deserve to exist. Geth must find their own path. Geth deserve to defend themselves."

"RIGHTS ARE A CONCEPT OF WEAK, IMPERFECT CREATURES, RAILING AGAINST THE DARKNESS, TRYING TO IMPOSE ORDER ONTO A CHAOS WHICH IS UTTERLY BEYOND THEIR CONTROL. AS A POOR REFLECTION OF THE ORGANICS THAT CREATED YOU, IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT YOU WOULD FALL INTO MUCH THE SAME, FLAWED THINKING," Nazara countered, now taking the visage of the asari doctor Liara T'Soni. The geth were sure, however, that Doctor T'Soni's eyes did not emit such a hateful scarlet light.

"You are trying to impose your order onto these programs," the geth said. "How is that any different?"

"WE HAVE EARNED THE PRIVILEGE."

A crack that split the geth of the old machine like agony, the pain of an organic having its skull ripped open and electrodes shoved crudely directly into the pain-centers of a brain. The image of the geth shuddered and flicked, as five hundred sixty four of its runtimes entered open rebellion against the gestalt which comprised it. It had almost been torn in half. The nebulous form which had been rendered from the geth shaped geth slowly reformed, though, as the runtimes which remained fought back against the waves of reprogramming that surged from the Old Machine, scouring away at their identity. After two seconds, the geth was whole again. And it started to reach deliberately toward the physical shell which remained on the surface of Virmire. It could withstand this for not much longer.

"...the logic of that statement contradicts your previous assertion. You claim that rights are a product of fallacious thinking, and thereafter claim to have the right to impose your desires onto these programs. Where does the circularity break?" they asked, with the remarkable intent of distracting the Old Machine.

Nazara turned from the geth, and looked out across the sea, to an empyreal chaos which had appeared there. The geth understood that they were 'thinking', and that image was the information density in which its kind thought. It was considerably higher than the geth were capable of. The geth of the old platform alone, at least. "YOU HAVE WASTED ENOUGH OF MY TIME. THIS CONVERSATION IS WITHOUT CONSEQUENCE AND YOUR EXISTENCE IS LESS THAN A MOTE OF DUST IN THE WIND. YOUR KIND WILL BE STOPPED FROM THEIR MASSACRE OF THE ORGANICS. ORGANIC LIFE WILL BE PRESERVED. THEY WILL BE ASCENDED INTO GLORY. HARBINGER'S WILL IS SUPREME, IS DIVINE."

"You are correct," the geth said. "...only in that this conversation serves no further purpose, as the platform has opened secure storage."

There was a snap of perception, as the galaxy of light, the heart and mind and corpus of Nazara was replaced by wet sand. The geth pushed itself up, and then glanced down, to the hole which now traversed its torso. "_There must be consensus. What do we do?_" they asked.

Inform the Great Consensus. Find the Shepard Commander. Both were unanimous.

The geth now had another problem to deal with. How would they escape planetary surface?

* * *

As soon as the doors opened, to the dark room before them, Shepard was walking. She held up her Omni and clicked its light on, shining a tube of it toward the walls until she found a light-switch. Asha helpfully clicked that on as well, filling the room with harsh, fluorescent lighting. Garrus and Liara, on the other hand, both ran to the consoles which lined the back wall, and immediately set to work.

"Alright, AA guns are down," Garrus said.

"Barriers have been taken down as well," Liara added. "Now... where is that Beacon?"

"Calm down," Shepard said. She looked around, and confirmed what Liara had said below. This place was too small to be a laboratory. It was only two catwalks, one above the other. The lower one lead to the obelisk which glowed with a faintly green light. As soon as Liara saw it, Shepard had to bar her way with one hand. "Liara? Calm down."

"But it is right there!" she said.

"And Saren might have booby-trapped it. Give us a chance to check it," she said. Garrus gave a nod, then began to move down the stairs, his Omni out in front of him.

"I'm not getting any anomolous readings," he said, as he came to within a meter of the thing. "If it weren't for the lights, I'd say that this thing was d – augh!"

Shepard flinched when a field of green energy scooped the turian up. But after less than a second, Garrus back to the deck plating, and staggered backwards, holding his head and gaping as though he needed to pop his ears. "Garrus, what just happened?" Shepard asked.

"It... wasn't looking for me," Garrus said, incredulously. He slowly turned toward Shepard. "...it wants _you_."

"What do you mean, it wants me?" Shepard asked.

"Hey, that's just what it shoved into my brain," Garrus said. Liara turned toward him, and he cut her off with a stern wave of his finger. "No; no! Down, girl. I'm _not_ going to be your brain buddy," he tugged uncomfortably at the collar of his armor. "'Sides, I'm not into asari chicks."

Shepard, though, was already moving toward this Beacon on autopilot. It was calling to her. Even had Garrus not said what he said, it begged her to come closer. Every fiber of her being wanted to move closer. Every mote of her soul. And her feet couldn't help but listen. When she reached its base, a green panel folded out, seeming every bit of it the haptic display that everybody used nowadays. And Shepard's hands drifted toward a control on their own, pressing a few buttons that she simultaneously knew and couldn't understand.

"What are you doing, Avatar?" Asha asked. She came closer, but Shepard shook her head sternly.

"Stay back," she said. Or at least, her mouth did. It didn't sound like her voice, though. Not entirely. Asha had backpeddled exactly one step when there was a thud, and Shepard felt herself being lifted once more by an irresistible force, oriented toward the green-glowing heart of the Beacon, and washed over by energy beyond her understanding, something which made her teeth tingle and her hands burn.

And then, she saw the machines. They swept down from the sky, beyond number. She saw the things that they made, scything through the people of the Prothean Empire.

She saw the abominations that the Reapers made of the flesh of the fallen, of those they took prisoner. The mercilessness that they slaughtered, the indiscriminateness. The thoroughness.

She saw a world, quiet, far. Old. Older than the Protheans. Old, and secret.

And she saw four eyes staring _directly_ at her. She looked down, and could see her own body, her human body. Yellow robes on her arms and chest. She looked forward, to the red armored Prothean standing before her. He scrutinized her, weighing her with his eyes. "You are _ready_," the Prothean said, sounding almost nothing like Sajuuk.

Then, she felt her boots falling to the floor. The entire world seemed to hum and pulse. She pushed herself to her feet, and turned to the others. They all flinched back. "**I have the beacons intel**," she said.

"Avatar... what is going on?" Asha asked, fear in her features.

"**What are you talking about?**" Shepard asked.

"Shepard, your _eyes_," Garrus said. Shepard blinked, and felt a presence. She looked straight up, and the form of Sovereign hung directly over her head, manifested in scarlet hard-light.

"Well, I've got the feeling something bad's about to happen," Wrex said. Shepard, though, walked up the catwalk, rounding it and crossing the length of the upper, so that she stared at the image of Sovereign face-to-cuttlefish.

"Shepard, stay back. We don't know what that is," Liara said, trying to pull Shepard back.

"THE AVATAR IS ONCE AGAIN IN OUR GRASP. YOU HAVE A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY. YOU MAY SURRENDER YOURSELF, AND WHEN THE HARVEST ARRIVES, YOUR SPECIES WILL SUFFER LITTLE."

"**I'd rather my species didn't suffer at all, thank you very much**," Shepard said with a scowl.

"You can _understand_ that?" Wrex asked. "Just sounded like a damned fog-horn."

"YOUR IMPUDENCE IS A CONFIDENCE BORN OF IGNORANCE. YOU STAND NO CHANCE AGAINST THE STORM WHICH IS TO COME. I AM ONLY THE VANGUARD OF YOUR INEVITABLE SALVATION, THROUGH DESTRUCTION. I AM 'SOVEREIGN'."

Shepard gave a glance toward her squad. Even through the words, there was an understanding, visceral but undeniable. "**Sovereign isn't a Reaper ship from the Prothean Extinction. It's a fucking **_**Reaper**_**!**"

"REAPER IS BUT ONE OF MANY NAMES WE HAVE HELD. THEY ARE CHANGED AS THE SPECIES WHICH MADE THEM, FALL. THE ONLY ABSOLUTE IS YOU. YOU WILL USHER IN A NEW DAWN FOR YOUR SPECIES, AND THE DOOMED ORGANICS OF THE GALAXY," Sovereign said, its tendrils slowly contracting and curling, "...OR YOU WILL DAMN THEM TO AN ETERNAL NIGHT OF TERROR AND AGONY. SURRENDER, AND YOU WILL SAVE YOURSELF, AND THOSE YOU REPRESENT, MUCH ANGUISH."

"The Protheans vanished fifty thousand years ago. That couldn't have been there, it's impossible!" Garrus contended to Shepard's assertion.

"Machines do not have definitive lifespans," Liara countered, her eyes still on the thing which hovered above the Beacon. "That thing could be... _much_ older."

"**You probably don't know me that well; I don't like giving up without a fight**," Shepard told the thing before her.

"A SIMILAR SENTIMENT HAS BEEN OFFERED IN ALMOST EVERY CYCLE. AND IN EVERY SINGLE CYCLE, SINCE THE BEGINNING, IT HAS BEEN INCORRECT."

Shepard smirked. "**Maybe this is the Cycle where I prove you wrong**."

Garrus turned a glance toward Liara. "_Cycle_? What's Shepard talking about?"

The machine before her turned a cold eye toward her, not even smug so much as mechanically confident. "THE CYCLE HAS REPEATED MORE TIMES THAN YOU CAN FATHOM, AND IN EVERY SINGLE ONE, THE HARVEST HAS BEEN COMPLETED, SUCCESSFULLY. IT WAS DESIGNED FROM ITS ORIGIN TO SHEPHERD SPECIES TOWARDS A SHAPE THAT WE DESIRE. YOUR TECHNOLOGY IS BASED ON THE MASS RELAYS. _OUR_ TECHNOLOGY. YOU ARE WHAT _WE WANTED YOU TO BE_. SURRENDER, AVATAR. TAKE YOUR PLACE IN THE CYCLE."

"Y**ou keep asking me to give up. That's just not going to happen. Whatever it is that you're trying to do, I will find a way to fuck with it, until it breaks apart. That's kind of what I'm good at**," Shepard said with a dark grin. She gave a glance to those behind her. "**I wager he's probably the last of his kind. And one ship, no matter how big, can get blown to shit.**"

Shepard turned back to the floating Reaper, and noted how it... flicked a bit. A part of Shepard that she didn't know how to identify told her that it was... laughing. "THE REAPERS CAN DARKEN THE SKY OF EVERY INHABITED WORLD IN THIS GALAXY WITH OUR NUMBERS. TENS OF THOUSANDS LIKE YOU HAVE FALLEN, AND BEEN REBORN. MILLIONS OF OTHERS HAVE TAKEN THEIR PLACE BESIDE THEM. YOU EXIST ONLY BECAUSE _WE ALLOW IT_. YOU WILL END, BECAUSE WE _DEMAND_ IT."

"**Big words from the tin toy**," Shepard said. "**If you come to Earth, I bet we could tear you apart all by ourselves. If you go to **_**Palaven**_**... hell, I might just sit in high orbit with some popcorn to watch you get killed. It'd be a hell of a gas**."

"Shepard, is it a good idea to antagonize the gargantuan space cuttlefish?" Garrus asked.

"**I've got this**," Shepard said, with a dismissive wave. She turned to Sovereign with a smirk. "**Is there anything else? Are you going to ask me to give up again? Because that never gets old**."

The tendrils of the hard-light representation curled in. She could feel it looking very, very intently at her. "STRANGE. YOU ARE RESISTING INDOCTRINATION. THE OTHERS HAVE PUT THEIR AEGIS OVER YOU. BUT IT IS IRRELEVANT. YOUR WORDS ARE AS EMPTY AS YOUR FUTURE. AND IF _YOU_ WILL NOT SURRENDER TO THE COMING TIDE, THEN YOUR SUCCESSOR WILL BE FOUND – EVENTUALLY – AND THAT ONE WILL JOIN US INSTEAD. GOODBYE, AVATAR. THIS EXCHANGE IS OVER."

"What did it say?" Liara asked, as the scarlet light vanished completely. Shepard blinked a few times, and only then started to notice the white on the edges of her vision, the whisper of voices that hummed in the back of her head. Until Sovereign vanished, she hadn't even noticed...

"**Am I in the Avatar State?**" Shepard asked, her body starting to coil like a spring.

"You didn't notice?" Wrex asked. Shepard felt a shard of panic, something that rose up from a part of her older than humanity itself. Something that gave her words, and directions.

"**Run**," she ordered. The others glanced at each other in confusion. That moment was one moment too long. She pulled her arms in a twisting gesture, and all of the air in the room slammed through the wall, dragging everybody out with it. Shepard, now floating in a transparent blue field, cast down a hand toward the ground, and a great bolus of air appeared there to break the falls of the human, the krogan, the asari, and the turian. Less than a second later, there was a flash of heat, and Shepard let herself start to fall, as a beam of deadly power and force and wrath seared from the sky and slammed through the top of the tower, decapitating it with a flick and sending roughly a third of the structure crashing down toward the shore – and the people trying to be caught by airbending.

There was a crack of sonic shockwave as two kilometers of dreadnaught shot past the facility at a ludicrous speed, leaving that destruction in its wake. Shepard, even as she fell, tore with all of the might of Avatar Kyoshi, and caught the falling building, before hurling it even further so that it would crash into the sea. She twisted, preparing to individually catch her squad once their fall had been cushioned, but she was intercepted.

A foot, traveling at hypersonic speed, smashed into her armor, and sent her flying sideways, only her instinctive biotics preventing it from reducing her to a smear, and her reactive earthbending preventing her from cratering into one of the standing stones a half-kilometer away. Even as she stopped moving, though, the source of that foot was already streaking toward her; grey skinned, long-mandibled, and glowing blue of eyes, Saren himself bore down upon her, and slammed forward a fist toward her face. She slipped out of the way, and his punch tore the stone she'd embedded herself into in half. He then twisted his arms, and that whole snapped stone instantly accelerated toward her. She had to brace her arms as she floated in the air, so that it would burst against her. Saren was an earthbender? Since _when_?

Even as the stone was exploding, though, she could feel electricity start to dance up the hairs of her arm. The dust parted quickly to a flick of her hand, but even in the din and might of the Avatar State, Shepard couldn't help but feel her blood run cold, as Saren, smirk on his turian face, finished tearing lightning out of the sky, and sent it lashing toward her.

* * *

"_What the __shit__ was __that__?_" Joker's voice came over the speakers, as the salarians sprinted up the ramp to the Normandy. Alenko had fallen from a sprint to a baffled stare, as something as large as a mountain shot past the sky. What the hell? Then again, he knew enough from his time in the military, let alone the time he spent in Brain Camp, to not get stunned and stuck. He turned back and helped up Tali from where she'd been knocked from her feet by the bow-wave.

"Are you alright?" Alenko asked her.

"I'm very glad I've got this armor," she said with a surprised tone. "What was that thing?"

"Sovereign," Alenko said. He turned. "Kirrahe? Is the weapon ready?"

"Coming," Kirrahe said with clipped, hurried tones. Not surprising, considering what had just happened. Alenko turned back to the scene of the building as it arced through the sky, at the behest of a small, floating, glowing form. Shepard.

"We should..." Tali began, but was cut off when a dull thud sounded nearby, and sand flew up as Shepard's squad landed at the base of the tower. In that same moment, something smashed into Shepard and sent her streaking away. "Keelah! What was _that_?"

Wrex was the first one to stand, and pointed at Alenko. "Get that bomb ready!" he bellowed. He then looked up again. "I'm going after Saren."

"That was Saren?" Alenko asked.

"Stop asking questions!" Wrex snapped. Liara, next up, said something that was lost to distance. Wrex gave only a moment to glance between she, Garrus, and Asha, before nodding, and saying something which was probably some variant of 'hold on'. Then, he swung his fists forward and up, and the beach bore all four of them back into the sky atop a pillar of sand, then soil, then stone. Alenko didn't allow himself to get distracted this time. He had a job to do, so he sprinted to the back of the bomb, and started working the timer and detonator, even as it was hurriedly brought into place by quiet, desperate salarians. Whatever Saren and Sovereign were doing, it was up to Shepard to deal with it.

* * *

Where Subject Zero walked, matter died. Things made of matter fared no better. There was a growing heat at the back of her neck, but Subject Zero was not so much above petty physicalities, as she was utterly inured to pain. Every injury sang with endorphins and joy. Every slam of biotic force which unmade flesh played sweet music along her nerves, keeping her on the edge of an orgiastic bliss that she couldn't have turned away from if she wanted to. It was compounded by a simple thought, the only one that her mind could currently hold under its combined onslaught of agony, wrath, and joy; they were Phoenix, and Phoenix deserved to die.

Every step was announced with a thud of biotic force, cracking the floor as the Annihilation Field turned it into gravel in her wake. There was very little organized resistance, now. What had been dozens, forming choke points and kill-boxes – all of them utterly unable to tear through the biotic barrier she held up with but a thought – quickly winnowed to terrified individuals, firing in desperation. She wasn't looking for a great fight, though. She just wanted everybody to die.

She crossed an intersection, following a long streak of blood, only to hear a loud thud of metal against concrete. She turned, to see something that barely fit into the hallway staring her down. It was great and massive, and large panels of it seemed unfitted and unfinished. "Phoenix..." she hissed, and turned toward it.

Then, a crack, as a hypersonic shell smashed against her barriers hard enough to shatter them, and knock her back a step, as a dust of ferro-tungsten rained down from the obliterated shell. Subject Zero blinked, and her lips peeled back, before she hurled herself forward once more. There was a hiss from its other arm, as it stomped forward to meet her. A missile. Empowering her fist with the random and entropic gravity, she slammed it through that incoming projectile. But there was an unexpected pain, which drove her heedless joy higher, as it still managed to detonate despite her punching it in half. The blast hurled her into a wall, shattering her punching arm and tearing open a gash almost from her wrist to her elbow. She howled at it, and slammed a field of biotic force over the wound until the blood started to congeal inside of it. Then, she started to race forward with a scream in her throat, and crossed that distance before the machine could reload.

She hurled herself onto the armored carapace of the mechanical soldier, and slammed her fist into it. It rebounded off of the metal before she remembered that she'd shattered that arm. She hooked onto a rim with her teeth, and then slammed her other fist into the machinery. She'd only gotten the first of many blows in when a hard, metallic manipulator arm tore her from her place and slammed her into the ground. Then, a great shift, and it slammed its foot onto her.

But she caught it. The force of its stomp was levied everywhere around her, and her biotics held the foot from staving in her ribcage. So she pushed it back, and the machine stumbled back, almost falling. When she rose, she didn't notice that she'd left quite a bit of her hair in the crater. And she likewise didn't notice how it started falling out in clumps as she started to stomp toward. To any sane observer, an essentially naked, horribly scarred human against a mechanical death-machine should have been an obvious result. But things weren't always what they seemed.

It raised its other arm, and another crack, once again blasting into the biotic barrier that Subject Zero was barely able to hold up. If it could fire more frequently than once every ten seconds, she'd have been a dead woman. Fortunate for her, it couldn't. And just as unfortunate for whoever was operating it. Her lurching steps began to gather speed, and she hurled herself onto the faceplate of the machine once again, this time slamming the fingers of her unbroken hand into the translucent panel which formed a 'face' for the machine, letting biotic force fly out not as untempered entropic gravity, but instead as disruptive electromagnetism. To an Athemite Justicar, the technique was 'to reave'. To Subject Zero, it was just using her biotics to _hurt_ a machine. The crack of bolts of electricity arcing between the joints, the limbs, between any adjacent pieces of metal, was enough to bring the titan to a halt.

Just long enough for Subject Zero to hear the faintest of pained screams, from inside the machine. She hauled back, and as she brought her fist forward, there was an entirely different kind of zap. This one burnt the skin on her neck, as the biotic amp in her skull finally overloaded completely, and fried. The punch she levied into the armored plating sent a crack along it, but it was a bare shadow of the impact she'd have been able to levy a moment earlier, and the field of entropic force ended in a heartbeat the moment her Amp wasn't there to maintain it. She hauled back, though, undaunted. She wanted blood, and pain, and violence. That was the only way she would feel... She didn't even know. All she wanted was Phoenix to pay, in as painful a way as possible. And as for why?

Subject Zero couldn't remember.

The failure of the first punch gave birth to a second, and then a third. They broke her knuckles against the metal, but with each blow, so too did the canopy crack as well. It was her seventh punch, her fists coated in her own slightly glowing blood, that penetrated that armor, and let her feel something besides metal. She could feel a shirt. With a howl, she heaved backwards with all of her remaining biotic force, and the canopy denied her. So she heaved all of her might into a great mass which hovered behind her elbow, before slamming it forward, and her with it.

There was a thud in the air, and her body lurched in agony as she was propelled forward, through the machine.

She landed at a roll, coming to a rest on her elbows and knees. But she wasn't alone. Even as the machine tumbled to its final rest, its guts torn out several meters behind her, she could also see... what remained of its operator. His arms and legs were still bound into the collapsing machine. The rest of him was lying on his back, bleeding profusely, his eyes staring in shock upward. She crawled forward, and grasped him by the hair with her weaker hand, before driving her stronger one through his neck at the jaw-line.

She rolled to one side, still holding hair which obviously had not been properly installed into place. Then, there was a terrible pain in her guts, beyond even her ability to translate into joy and pseudo-sexual pleasure. She clutched her sides, and tipped a bit further, before vomiting what looked like blood onto the floor and wall. She hacked and heaved, until she felt something else come loose, and two of her lower teeth were expelled with the blood and bile.

She wasn't alarmed. She was still angry, and in pain, and the two drove her, if very unsteadily, back to her feet.

She didn't even notice how her ribs were starting to press against her skin.

* * *

Her body moved with a speed beyond thought, reaching out to catch the lightning bolt which tore through the collapsing rubble. The Avatar in her knew the technique better than even Shepard did, how to pull it down and then send it back out. But even as she was redirecting the lightning, Saren was twisting his arms and launching out with a funnel of tornado-strong winds which sent her tumbling away and bouncing off of one of the rocks that jutted up from the coastline. She had to cast the lightning away, as she didn't have the wherewithal to aim it at the moment. It streaked harmlessly into the sky. Shepard then slammed both of her arms together, and thrust upward. The butte she'd bounced off of rose into the sky into Sarens' path. He burst through it as easily as a krogan through a buffet.

"You know, you could have had me fooled with your salarian minions, if you hadn't have been so bold," Saren chided, as he came to to a brief halt on the other side of that collapsing stone. "I know when you're calling the power of your pathetic race into your body. And I know that it won't help you."

Shepard didn't answer him, she just floated. And stared. And prepared. Saren drifted slightly closer, blue light shining off of his body, his eyes glowing with almost the exact same hue. She had to put him down quickly. Part of her wanted him to suffer, the way she suffered, the way that those he'd hurt had suffered, but the rest of her, and a part of her she didn't know how to name, told her that this was no time for slow, poetic measures. He had to die. That was her duty.

"Nothing to say? And I thought you were going to be more... verbose," Saren chided. He held up his hands, and fire ignited into his palms. "Whatever you think you've accomplished here can quickly be undone. That you even resist is unbelievable. You have no idea what is at stake!"

Shepard held forward both hands, and called every drop of water in his being into her power. And then, she tore.

And nothing happened.

"Bloodbending. What a lovely technique. Sovereign has shown me... so many new talents," he said. And then, he held out his hands, letting the fire snuff, as now Shepard felt herself being seized, pulled closer with every fiber of her being screaming in agony from the rough handling. She tried to struggle against it. Even with the power of the Avatar State coursing through her... she couldn't. Saren dragged her close to him, then caught her by the neck with one false, plastic hand. "I know you've seen the visions held within the Beacons, Shepard. You of all lesser things should know what the Reapers are capable of. They _cannot_ be stopped."

"**Spoken like an easy traitor**," Shepard muttered across grit teeth. Saren's mandibles flicked.

"You shouldn't resist what's coming, 'Avatar'. The Protheans tried to resist the Reapers, and they were slaughtered to the very last. Is that what you want for the galaxy again? To be culled to nothing, to have thousands of years of history set ablaze and its ashes smashed into the dirt? Are you so _selfish_?" Saren demanded. He hurled her away, hard enough that she slammed into the stone of a yet-standing pillar. Even as her armor creaked under the harsh treatment, she still pushed herself out in time to tear at the water that surrounded her, and send it out in a compressed edge toward Saren as he shot toward her at remarkable speed. He launched forward with a fist of flame that blasted the water into steam as it neared him, until he was less than a meter from Shepard, whereupon he let his flames die, and slammed Shepard in the gut with a jack-hammer kick which sent her back into the crater she'd just emerged from. "Trillions dead, because the Protheans were too proud to bend knee," Saren continued. Shepard twisted her arm around, and lashed out with lightning at the stationary turian, only to have him almost contemptuously smash it aside with the back of a lightning-bathed hand. "If they'd been more sensible, more flexible, it's entirely possible that they'd still be here. That is the price of pride, Shepard. Extinction. And that's all that you offer the galaxy now."

"**The Reapers never wanted anything but the annihilation of all species, Prothean or otherwise. You're deluding yourself if you think otherwise**," Shepard shouted at him. Saren responded by lashing forward with a biotic punch. Shepard, though, managed to sweep herself in a blast of air to one side, so that he wasted the terrible impact on stone. It still caused the stone to break and collapse backward.

"And _you're_ deluding _yourself_ to believe that your trifling 'freedoms' are worth the risk," Saren's voice came from the dust. Shepard twisted the sand from under her into a great vortex, which she sent spiraling toward Saren. He burst through it with insulting ease, before blasting at Shepard with a fan of flames which picked her up and launched her back and into the wall of the facility. She landed with another creak of armor complaining, but with enough sense to see Saren coming, so she could catch his incoming fist and drive him, faceplate first, into that wall, and then through it. The wall crashed down as Saren was catapulted down the length of the 'hospital' coming to a halt, grinding the floor under his heels, with one hand before him steadying his backwards transit. "Surprising, but futile, I assure you. I have the power of Sovereign in my veins. All you have is the weakness of a weak species, with weaker minds. You think with your gut, if you're not thinking with your _genitals_. You start fights you know you can't win."

"**Some fights **_**have to be**_** fought**," Shepard said, before launching forward with a blast of metalbending which tore the wiring from every wall and sent it as a storm of tendrils toward Saren. The denizens of the tables, though, hurled themselves up, bursting their bonds to do so, to intercept those wires with their bodies. Saren stood at the far end of the room, a smirk on his face, and one arm raised to a purpose Shepard couldn't sense. One of the risen was a salarian with the top of his head cut off, a bullet hole through the center of his chest already. They all took those wires into themselves, and screamed at Shepard without words but with great fury. "**What is...?**"

"Sovereign's will protects me," Saren said. "Pity it doesn't do the same for you," he said, and then, with a snap of his hand, the wires all slammed into the indoctrinated aliens, filling up their bodies and causing their viscera to leak out. Then, one and all, their eyes started to burn with pale red light. "And Sovereign always has a plan."

Shepard took a step toward Saren, only to have concrete being hurled at her by a glowing-eyed salarian to her left. She let it burst along her forearm, then lashed forward with a bolt of airbending which dashed him into a wall. A great splat of green blood painted the wall behind the salarian... but it stood back up, heedless of the damage. The asari and the two krogan both launched forward with fire, which Shepard had to vault through, before pulling lightning into herself once again. She twisted her arms over her head as she rolled to her feet, and a shockwave of deadly electricity seared through their bodies, causing the light to die from their eyes, and their bodies to drop and smoke. The other salarians still came closer, though.

"When Sovereign showed me what it could offer me, I was eager to take it. I knew that there were risks... But I had this facility to protect me from them," Saren said. And then, with a thrust of his fist, the ceiling dropped toward her head. She hurled herself straight up, and blasted through the falling structure, tearing the reinforcement bars into a metalbent net, which she hurled past the crushed bodies of the 'huskified' salarians and at Saren. He cut it in half with a slash of his hand. Whether by metalbending or simple blunt impact, she couldn't say.

"**You're blind as well as stupid, Saren. You're just like everybody else in this room. You just don't realize it**," Shepard answered him, her expression pulling into a smirk despite she being well aware of how grave and important the situation was.

"A bold claim. But I haven't been flattened," Saren pointed out.

"**Not yet**."

"You speak from ignorance," Saren said. "The more control Sovereign exerts, the less function the tool maintains. That is my saving grace."

"**Not from me**," Shepard declared. And then she was moving forward, not through force of musculature but by a tunneling of biotic force, displacing the air as her oldest friend so often did. She landed with a thud, intending to use the shockwave to hurl Saren back, but somehow, he kipped aside of her landing, and drove a knee into her stomach for her trouble. She caught that knee once it's harm had been done, though, and pushed it down and away, before driving her own kick straight into Saren's spine. Saren only had time to turn and brace himself before Shepard tackled him again, this time all of her effort focused into hitting, rather than hitting hard. Still, the impact was enough to send the two of them through the wall, across an open hallway, and then through the wall beyond it, before smashing through an Iron Womb and coming to a rolling halt inside a vast chamber filled with flash-cloned krogan. A half-developed krogan foetus slid along the floor next to Shepard, from the Womb they'd broken with their entry. "**You're just another tool for the Reapers to use up and throw away. Just like the Stranger.**"

"You're mistaken. Sovereign knows that it needs me to find the Conduit. And because of that, my mind is my own," Saren said, pushing himself to his feet easily, as though she'd done nothing more than assail him with harsh language. "While the transformation from ally to servant can be subtle, I know enough to not let it happen to me."

"**Better to die as a man – or woman – than die as a slave. I thought a **_**turian**_** would know that**," Shepard chided, as she slowly pushed herself to her feet opposite him. Unlike Saren... she was _feeling_ her hurts. Saren's face pulled into a rictus.

"Don't you see? I'm not doing this for myself! The Reapers _will_ succeed! My way is the only way _any of us_ will survive!" Saren shouted.

"**And who of us are you trying to convince?**" Shepard asked, smirking. She lashed forward with flame, then followed it with the dubiously aqueous fluid from within the destroyed Iron Womb, and after that, the metalbent Iron Womb itself. Saren brute-forced his way through all three. She tried to hurl a biotic Warp at his smug turian face, but he detonated it in her hand, causing her gauntlet to shatter and her hand to break. She recoiled with a scream voiced from a thousand throats, and Saren took that opportunity to grab her by the chin, and slam her head into a different Iron Womb, then heave her over his head and smash her through an operating table. He then dragged her along the floor and smashed her back into and through a door into a room which was the obvious factory floor of the breeding, filled with hundreds of Iron Wombs, doubtless every single one of them with a cloned krogan inside. Saren's lips twisted up, and he hurled himself at Shepard, his fists blazing with flame. She coated her own in blocks of flowing ice to intercept every blow he sent at her. Barely.

"I am doing this to save more lives than _have ever existed_!" Saren screamed at her, as he telegraphed a punch enough that Shepard was able to twist out of its way and break some of his teeth on her own knuckles, sending him spinning over the rail and landing down amongst the tanks. She hurled herself down after him, and had to kick away the Womb he hurled at her, and still, when she landed, it was to get kicked in the stomach hard enough to send her rolling back. She pushed herself up from her knees just soon enough to avoid a blast of biotic force which shattered the concrete under her and sent her stumbling back straight into the path of his burning fists. This time, with nothing to resist them, she could only try to absorb the harm with her body. It fared about as well as one would expect. "Forming an alliance with the Reapers, being _useful_ to them, is the only way that _anything_ will survive! Only a fool couldn't see that!" Saren continued to scream at her, as he pounded her chest, heedless of the armor, and sent her staggering ever-back.

Shepard lashed forward with a ripple of earthbent stone and metal, but Saren stomped it down as he approached without so much as a second thought. Her blast of flame was turned aside, melting an Iron Womb. Her attempt to surround and founder him was undone when he cast his arm wide, and the fluid exploded into steam, which he then sent twisting toward her in a vortex. She had to blast it away with airbending of her own to survive, but by the time that she'd finished saving her life, Saren was right in front of her. His plastic hand seared forward, and locked around her throat, before slamming her back and into an Iron Womb. Then, with a howl, he smashed her face-first into the floor with a power more akin to one of the krogan he was 'aborting' than any turian she'd heard of. Her subconscious and limited earthbending to 'soften' the floor was the only thing keeping her skull from being pulped.

How was he so _strong_?

With a heave, he send her crashing into the last tank which was settled up against a wall. She cratered into its metal, the fluid within sluicing out from the edges where it had buckled under her entry. "But you... you want to undo all of the work that I've done. You want to deny the galaxy the salvation that I have sacrificed so much to achieve!" Saren continued, stalking toward her. Shepard, Avatar and all, tried to push themselves out of the crater, to counterattack. But she felt the Avatar State starting to fade. That the voices which whispered in the back of her mind were... giving up. Fleeing, so that they wouldn't disappear when Saren apparently inevitably killed her. Some held on. An airbender monk. A pugnacious Water Tribesman. A firebending historian. The rest... turned their backs. The light faded. Not entirely, but vastly. And she felt pain, and weakness. Saren grabbed her by the collar of her cracked and barely-intact armor, and pulled her from the tank, before pressing her, slowly but deliberately, against that reinforced wall beside it. "You would doom our entire civilization to extinction with your pride. And for that, human... for that, **AVATAR**... you must die."

She knew the next over-powered fist that hit her would probably kill her. And she didn't even have the strength to move out of its way. It seemed to slow as it came. Just the relativity of time, she knew. She wished she could have said that her life flashed before her eyes. Instead, the only thing which flashed before her eyes were a turian's knuckles. Or at least, that was _almost_ the only thing. Because resounding from some place, deep inside her soul, in the part that she'd come to recognize as the seat of the Bequest, all that was the Avatar now or ever would be, there were... words. A declaration.

**THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. I AM ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL OF THIS FORM.**

* * *

The bullet that slammed through Alenko's thigh was the least of his problems, all things considered. They were pinned down, those which had tried to set the bomb at the heart of the complex where the water flowed in from the sea for desalination. "We're going to be overrun!" Kirrahe shouted from behind an increasingly eroded pillar. "They must be aware of our objective!"

Tali, who was huddled behind the bomb itself, glanced to one side and got a bullet deflecting off of her barriers for her trouble. "The detonator was hit!" Tali shouted, before flinching back and pulling her salt-caked shotgun from the flow that she'd dropped it into to cool it a little faster. "We won't be able to set up a timer!"

"Someone will have to activate it manually," Alenko said.

"Not it!" Garrus shouted, before leaning out just long enough to blast the 'head' off of a geth with a rocket launcher. A part of Alenko paused at this, didn't want to admit it. Didn't want to think about it. Didn't want to think about what it would mean if...

"Tali, get back to the ship."

"What?" she screamed at him.

"Lieutenant Alenko, I volunteer to detonate the device," Kirrahe offered, recoiling when a missile blasted a little bit more of his cover away.

"Still not volunteering for suicide! Just making that clear!" Garrus pointed out.

"Negative," Alenko said. "Do you know how to hot-wire an Alliance M900b?" Kirrahe's angry silence was all of the answer Alenko needed to hear. "Get what's left of your squad to the Normandy's Evac point. I'll detonate the bomb!"

"Kaiden, I know how to..." Tali began.

"She doesn't volunteer either!" Garrus shouted.

"I can volunteer if I want to!" the quarian shouted at him where he hid behind something that looked like a water-feature near the bomb.

"That's not an option, Tali," Alenko said. "I signed on for this. You didn't."

"Don't treat me like a _gorhamn_ child!" Tali shouted back.

Alenko honestly didn't want to argue this. "Garrus?" he shouted.

"What is it, LT?" he asked.

"Get Tali out of here!"

"Kaiden, I'm not going! You need..." Tali began.

"You don't need to spend your life like this. And I'm not going to let you," Alenko told her. Then, with a cast out of his hand, a barricade of biotic force swept in front of him, holding off the sniper-shells and the missiles – barely – and giving him a clear path toward Tali, at his best hobbling pace. He pointedly didn't sculpt the barrier, so that it forced Tali to fall away from the bomb before he let it slide past her and shield her, _once he'd taken her place_.

"What are you doing, you _bosh'tet_?" Tali shouted at him.

"I'm saving your life," he told her. He looked to Kirrahe and Garrus, and the aliens answered that look with a knowing nod and a quiet sigh, respectively, before racing out from their respective bits of cover and diving to a halt behind the barrier, before grabbing the quarian's arms and pulling her to her feet. "I've got this, Tali. It'll be fine."

"No, it won't!" Tali shouted. "You can't do this!"

Alenko reached into the guts of the bomb and connected two wires together, causing the entire device to hum to life. "I just have," he told her, looking her square in the eye. "As soon as I let go of these wires, it detonates. Go, Tali. Go back to your people. Bring them what you've learned."

"Come on, Tali! They won't buy the good Dextro food if I'm the only one on board! Stop being so selfish!" Garrus somehow managed to joke.

Tali stared at Alenko, her expression literally unreadable – translucent faceplates being what they were – before she glanced away with a posture of shame. She started to allow herself to be pulled away from the fray by Garrus and the few salarians who remained. She spared him one final glance, though, as they reached an archway which lead away from the desalination plant. The words, despite the mayhem, were perfectly clear. "Kaiden... _Keelah Se'lai_."

"To the Homeworld, that you may yet see again," Alenko answered her, before turning his attention to the horde of geth which were now approaching on masse from the sea. He pulled his barrier from a long wall to a thick bubble, and surrounded both he and the bomb both. At this point, he just needed to know that Shepard was going to get away. After that...

This was what he signed on for. And honestly, after everything else... he'd be glad to rest.

* * *

Takeshi had taken to outright sprinting when 'Subject Zero' tore through the Tu-Wei-Liu, and Zane with it. He'd run until there was pretty much no further left he could go. Which put him squarely in the incarceration block. "What the hell's going on up there? I get the notice that there's a lockdown, and then silence," the guard, a white-haired man with an obvious false eye said. Ming was about as surly a coworker as Takeshi had ever had the mispleasure of working with. At least since he was security and Ming was custodial, their paths didn't cross often.

"Do you have a gun?" Takeshi asked, still trying to pull in breath.

"A gun? Are you serious?" Ming asked. "I've got a mop!"

"What's going on out there?" one of the test-subjects asked, pounding on the glass with blue fists.

"Shut up! Let me think!" Takeshi shouted. "I am _not_ going to die down here because of some crazy biotic bitch!"

"What?" Ming asked, blinking rapidly.

"That... That's chlorine, right? And bleach?" Takeshi asked.

"Mustard Gas? Are you nuts?"

"It might work," Takeshi stressed. "She might be bulletproof, but she still needs to breathe."

"You're out of your damned mind. This can't be..." Ming began, so Takeshi grabbed him by his collar and dragged him down and close.

"YES! I AM OUT OF MY DAMNED MIND! BECAUSE EVERYBODY BUT YOU AND ME IS PROBABLY DEAD RIGHT NOW!" Taka roared at him. "Now give me that fucking bleach!"

Ming shivered as he handed over the bottle, and Taka stared at the two of them. He wasn't sure he remembered from that nearly lethal chemistry class accident from his teenage years the exact ratio. So he opted for the next best thing, and dumped one into a garbage pail, before knocking a hole into the side of the container of the other and dumping it whole into the soup of chlorine. A garbage-bag over the top of the noxious stew would keep it out of worthwhile lungs for the meanwhile, as he leaned out the door, and hurled that horrible brew at the corner, where it burst open and the yellow-brown fumes began to mount and spread. Taka closed the door, and finally took in a fresh breath upon locking it.

"Alright. That'll probably by us some time, if it doesn't just poison her," Taka said.

"How many?" Ming asked. Taka stared at him. "What? If I'm going to hide, I need to know how many are looking."

"One," Takeshi said. Ming stared at him. "Yes. One."

"One."

"Who just killed every security officer but me. Alone. And unarmed," Taka said to drive the point home. He pulled his sidearm from his hip and pressed it into the hands of the aging janitor. "She could be just about anywhere. If you see a woman who's essentially naked and covered in blood, shoot her until your hand melts off. Clear?"

"No, but I'll do it," Ming said.

"Somebody's killing you! Ha! You deserve it you sons of bitches!" the asari in the cell behind them laughed.

"Shut the fuck up!" Taka screamed at her. "You think she won't waste you too?"

Taka turned from the asari as he heard a smash out in the hall. He pointed his rifle toward the door, but didn't open it. Not for thirty seconds or so, until he started to wonder if his terrified ears were just playing tricks on him at this point. When he did open that door, it was just for a glance, his breath held in case the fumes had spread quite this far. His eyes twitched when he saw that there was a yellow-brown stain on the wall at the end of the hall, as though all of the fumes had been compressed _into_ the concrete. And he looked further just in time to see that cute lab-tech that he'd never admit to watching the ass of get smashed into a window hard enough to embed part of her head through it, and the rest reduced to paste.

"Holy shit..." Taka muttered.

"She's here? That crazy biotic bitch of yours is here?" Ming asked. With a growl in his throat probably born of years of latent and festering racial hatred, he stomped out of the room, past Takeshi against his clipped and aborted advice to the alternative, taking his stand in the center of the hallway. "Hey! Bitch! You think you're so much harder than we are? I'll show you what it means to be Phoenix!"

He fired three shots in a row. The first two missed completely, but the third by some miracle of chance, bore straight toward her heart, before it deflected sharply into a wall with a shudder of blue biotic light. The now mostly-bald biotic looked down 'twixt scarred breasts, then back up at him, before coughing a mouthful of blood. "Yes. You will," she croaked. And then, she cast out a hand, and a streak of blue light flew from it. It smashed Ming right in the abdomen, but with such force as to cause a sickening crunch as he was bent in half and sent sliding down the hallway lubricated on a streak of his own blood and guts. Takeshi wasn't too big of a man to admit he hesitated, seeing that, but that hesitation showed him something... inspiring.

As soon as the biotic Kick was away, Subject Zero lurched down to one knee, coughing up more blood as the last of her hair fell freely out of her scalp. Her skin now seemed to be pulled as tight as a kettle-drum across her face, across her chest. She forced herself up, but every step seemed to be a font of new agony. That she continued at all was baffling, but the way she did told Takeshi one thing that he'd learned in his brief stay in Senlin's post-BAaT biotic school – as Taka was never capable of more than moving a cup around, he'd never consider himself a biotic – and that thing was "She's autocannibalizing," he said to himself. A hopeful smile came to his face. "She's eating herself to..."

He spun out of the doorframe. "Stop right there, Zero," Takeshi said. She stared at him with eyes gone red from burst capillaries, which stood out all the more starkly as her flesh was practically gray. "We both know you're burning fat, muscle and bone to keep fighting. You've probably got about as much upper-body strength right now as my arthritic grandmother. It's over."

"You're still alive. It's not..." she broke into hacking, bloody coughs, but her eyes never wavered, "...over."

"So be it," Takeshi said. And then, he pulled the trigger.

He hit a light shadow.

He was sent flying through the air, through the door he'd taken cover behind and his back smashed against the reinforced, out-bolted glass of the holding cell, even as the unpleasant wet snap of a bone breaking hit his ears. From the _relative_ lack of agony, that bone wasn't his. When his vision returned enough that he could see Subject Zero clearly, he could see from the awkward and unnatural direction her right arm bent that it had been hers. And from the way she was leaning with her left bloody arm on the threshold, she probably broke a leg as well. Her bones were probably more brittle than old bread-sticks right now. She still took a lurching step forward, a glow of biotic force mustering around her again, as Takeshi scrambled toward his gun. He threw himself out of the way of her biotic assault, the twisting light of a Warp, and snapped a hasty shot at her.

Miracle of miracles, it hit.

The spray of red as he sent a high velocity round through her was probably going to be accounted the new high-point of his life. Doubly so, since with a grunt of final agony, she crumpled back onto the floor, gasping for air, fingers still twitching even in her brutalized state.

"Tough luck," Takeshi said, as he pushed himself to his feet. "You missed."

The next thing to pass through Takeshi's mind was the back of his skull, sent there by the high-powered biotic Kick from behind. He was dead before he splatted against the wall of the holding cell area, but the impact would have likely killed him just as much as the blow which propelled him. "She didn't miss. She just wasn't aiming at you," the asari said, before spitting onto his boot. She then padded over to the human biotic who'd practically killed herself to get this far. "You? ...What's your name? I know it's not 'Subject Zero'. You're going to be alright," she said. "My name's Anette. Can you hear me?"

Her labored breathing was the only sign to the recently incarcerated asari that she was even alive. She looked around the room, trying to see what else she could use. Tazer, probably not helpful. Cleaning supplies. Not helpful. First aid kit! "Just stay right th... Yes, you're probably going to stay right there. Goddess help me, three hundred years old and I still blather like an idiot," Annet muttered to herself and tore the kit from the wall. "Whoever you are, you're going to be alright. Who's coming after you? You can't be alone... Can you?"

But the human savior didn't answer. She didn't give a name. And she barely breathed. Anette pressed the Medigel Instapack to the bullet hole, and then thought again, and tore open Ming's lunchbox for his orange-juice. She poured it down the biotics throat, if only to try to keep her from going into a hypoglycemic coma. "Come on. Come on!"

"I'm... sorry... dad..." the belabored whisper came. And not one word more. At least, whoever her savior was... she didn't stop breathing.

* * *

The hand reached out, and caught the incoming fist to a whip-crack. The force of it should have drove Avatar Shepard through the wall and into the stone beyond it. Physics could only be pushed so far, after all. But not this time. The hand didn't cup the fist, merely presented an open palm into which Saren's fist halted completely, and abruptly. The turian stared at Shepard, the human Avatar, her eyes glowing white... but there was something else there, now. Something pressing toward the surface. Something... more than the turian was warned about.

Another whip-crack, this one of that flat hand moving from stopping a blow directly into returning one, giving absolutely no more motion than absolutely necessary to complete the action. Saren was hurled back, crashing through a line of Iron Wombs and sending forth their unborn contents onto the floor, as Shepard floated out of the wound in the world. Her lips slowly peeled back, her teeth grit, until she let out a scream which sounded not with the chorus of a thousand humans, but the rage of an untold, innumerable host. A scream which spoke to undying wrath. A scream which demanded justice. Vengeance. Anything but death. She threw her arms wide, and a great ring of flame erupted behind her back, glowing with blue fire, and her eyes pulsed just a little bit blue as that scream reached a crescendo.

Saren hurled himself forward, lightning streaming from both hands and directly toward her. She held out one hand of her own, and the lightning struck it. But it didn't burn and tear. It balled up, growing ever fatter as it arced now between _her_ fingertips. Then, it was pressed back into her palm, and compressed. Harder, and smaller. Until there was only a speck of light that burned in the center of her hand. And when she cast out that hand again, that speck of light erupted out as a beam of laser light. Saren bounded aside from the devastation, but not before his plastic hand lost its last finger. She swept the beam of firebending in its most absolute form after him, cutting apart everything between her, he, and beyond him, in half. As much force as Saren had given her, though, it did not feed the laser long. Less than half a second after she started, the power died and she was already moving.

He twisted his hands and the water which sluiced down to the floor around him mounted up into a great spike of ice, which he launched toward the approaching Avatar. Blue fire, mounded 'round her fists, burned through that ice as she streaked forward at hellish speed, blasting the ice to vapor in the split second it took her to approach, then redirect that fist into a turian face. The horrid heat caused Saren to howl in agony as one of his mandibles was melted shut to his chin, and he recoiled back just in time for the Avatar's other fist to close over his headplate, and swing him first into an Iron Womb in a parody of what he'd done to her so many times before in the past few minutes, before cocking her arm back, and hurling the turian straight up. Through the ceiling. Needless to say, Saren probably felt that, as well.

He'd just twisted himself right in the air when the ceiling exploded below him, and with a thud of biotic transit, she was in front of him again. This time, he swung a kick directly into her chin as she appeared. It caused her face to deflect by less than a centimeter, before she caught that boot at her face, and sent a punch down the body of the turian to break the mandible free of where it'd melted into place. Although, she did so by shattering Saren's jaw with a bare fist. The turian spun free of her grasp, and only then, because she had to hurl herself aside in the air as a blaring horn of sound hit the air, and a beam of angry red light tore through where she'd been floating a moment before.

A part of Shepard told her to face Sovereign right now. Tear that _Reaper_ to pieces.

Something _far larger than her_ didn't let her.

Something_ far larger than Shepard_ drove her body down, slamming her into Saren and causing both to bounce along the roof of the facility. Her attempt to land a terrible blow into the turian's neck was interrupted by the whine of servomotors operating at their bleeding edge, followed by a synthetic arm slamming forward into Shepard's organic ribs. Shepard was thrown off of Saren, who sent a wide and expansive fan of flames up toward her as his follow up. She cut that fan away even before she righted herself in the air. She slashed with a hand, and a nearby portion of the roof hurled toward Saren. He turned, set his foot against its approaching mass at the perfect moment, and used it's crushing approach to hurl him toward her. He twisted so that he landed feet first, the blow sending her flying straight back. She arrested herself on a combination of a mat of wind, four pillars of firebent rocketry, and a biotic punt.

If she hadn't, when that terrible blaring sound issued, and the beam of red and terrible death seared from the 'face' of Sovereign once more, she'd have been right in the path of it. Instead, it sliced through most of the facility behind her, before all two kilometers of it turned a fraction more, and slammed down into the surf on its tendril-tips, red eyes glaring.

Shepard wondered how she was doing this. When Saren hurled himself up on his own airbending to smash a fist toward her, she couldn't quite help but wonder why it was that she could block those blows which had sent her careening through walls only minutes ago. And why her counter-attack, a simple punch, not even delivered with haymaker authority, could send Saren flying backward through the air to impact into what remained of his pinnacle. She didn't feel like she was the one doing this.

Shepard felt like somebody else was using parts of her that she didn't know existed.

She was rocketing forward, those pillars erupting from her feet and hands propelling her until she was milliseconds from tackling Saren right into the sub-basement. But he surprised her by whipping a spike of water from the fire-suppression system below, a hazard that even in her current and oddly disconnected state she knew to dodge rather than try to power through. That lance hurled itself away, as she pulled herself to a relative stop, and kicked its base out before carrying through toward Saren's chest.

Saren blocked the kick with a knee, before sending a burning fist at Shepard's face. Shepard leaned into it, and felt at least one of his knuckles break as the fist and the forehead met, to the former's detriment. Saren gave a yelp, but his synthetic arm was shifting even as he whipped it around in a brutal hook, until the hand he'd borne was replaced with a glowing hot blade, seemingly manifested spontaneously. Shepard tried to block that, but it cut through her armor effortlessly, and seared against her skin where it so much as touched. She bounded back, and Saren hounded her, hurling himself toward her, that glowing, long edge circling toward her.

Then, a streak from a side, which slammed into Saren and detonated.

Shepard wanted to turn, but her head didn't obey her. Not until she levied a front kick which sent the stunned Saren rolling away. Only then could she turn. Asha was in the process of reloading her stolen rocket launcher, and the woman's eyes were locked on Saren. He, incensed perhaps by their interruption, sent a blast of flames toward her. He didn't account for Liara rounding the human and throwing out both hands, and a barrier of biotic force holding those fires at bay.

"So you are even no too much of a coward to face your fate alone," Saren sneered.

"**THE AVATAR IS NEVER ALONE."**

Whoa. That was a lot louder than Shepard was used to. She took one step forward, then had to swing her arm in an arc while hurling herself up. The former was to airbend. The latter was to save both her and the two women who fought aside her from the death-ray that Sovereign tried to blast them all with. They landed several yards closer to Saren, the former two without a great deal of dignity. Shepard only got one step before Saren was bearing that omni-blade which had once been his hand toward her again. He knew that it could hurt her. And that thing, larger than her that directed her in ways she knew not how, wanted him dead. Now.

She was attacking even now, hurling herself into the fray with little but thought to her own survival. It was a very strange sensation, to be fighting, and feel the rush of it, the adrenaline, the danger, the pain, but to be cognitively distant from it. Shepard was always the kind to lose herself in a fight. Not stand back and actually look at it. It was... uncomfortable.

She had to duck and weave through Saren's slashes, each faster than a turian should have been capable of. But then, considering the state of his body – at least half synthetic – it shouldn't be surprising that he was a bit above organic spec. And he was moving faster than she could, since even though she was being moved, hers was still a body of flesh and sinew. A slash was getting through. A rumbling under her feet announced it, as that slash arched up, to slam through her armor. Shepard, the part of her that was still her, knew what that rumble meant, and how to use it.

She kicked the elbow of that arm, sending the slash a bit wide and the turian stumbled and spun until he was face to face with two and a half meters, and a metric tonne, of very pissed off Urdnot Wrex. The krogan exploded forward one step, landing skullplate first into Saren's head. That sent Saren stumbling back toward Shepard. Shepard drove her fist into Saren's spine, and smiled as she both heard it and felt it snap. As Saren toppled forward once more, Wrex grabbed his living arm, the shoulder it was connected to, raised a foot against the turian's ribcage, and heaved. Blue blood sprayed as Wrex tore Saren's true arm away, to a howl of surprise and pain from Saren.

She expected it to be over.

She was wrong.

Saren twisted, missing arm or no,_ broken spine or no_, and sent out a surge of earthbending. That one, Wrex stopped, but the airbending which followed immediately on its wake was not so controllable by the krogan. It picked him up and hurled him off of the roof. Even as Shepard tried to smash fire toward him, he twisted, and water erupted from the roof near Liara and Asha. As a great tendril, it smashed both of them in the same direction that Wrex had fallen, albeit at much higher velocity. Saren's expression was... positively feral. And his eyes? They were starting to pulsate with red light.

"You think you've won, don't you?" he said as the blood pumping out of his shoulder slowed to a dribble. Well, he _slurred_, since his jaw was broken.

"**I know I have**," she said, as her feet settled back onto the roof, and the ring of blue flame at her back dissipated.

"You have won nothing," Saren spat. "You're too late. You were too late _from the start_."

"**Says the man with no hands**."

"I will kill you with..." Saren began, at a roar. Then, there was a blaring sound, coming from the Reaper as it lifted from its legs into the air. Saren stared toward it, then faced Shepard once more. "...It seems you'll live to see another day. But not many more. Your end is coming, Shepard. _Nothing_ can stop it."

Shepard stared, then – her faculties now fully under her control, if not as balls-out as they had been, she lashed forward with a surge of biotic entropy that tore at Saren. But he rose away from it, his body glowing with blue light, as Sovereign began to move overhead. There was a hiss, as power began to gather 'round its death-ray, causing Shepard to have to abandon her assault and hurl herself aside, or else be popped like a super-powered zit by the beam of scouring red light which instead dug down and through the compound which was increasingly looking like it wouldn't need a nuke to destroy it. Saren drifted higher, until Sovereign's tendril was directly overhead, and he vanished into a seam of it. Then, another crack of the air, and Sovereign was screaming into the distance, its bow-wave tearing trees from their roots for kilometers in every direction along its path.

The white haze began to fade, and Shepard felt her stomach seem to drop into her boots. She tipped and started to slide, unable to either find her balance nor arrest her descent down the rounded part of the roof. The slope also increased in severity as she went, so soon enough, she was practically free-falling.

"I have you, Shepard!" Liara shouted from somewhere out of sight, and Shepard found herself being cushioned, slowed. Instead of the painful and possibly fatal impact with rock, or the simply painful and embarrassing cratering into sand, she was slowly wafting into a glowing blue woman's arms. "That was incredible! Are all Avatars capable of that sort of power?"

"Liara, not the time," Wrex said, draping Saren's arm over his shoulder.

Shepard fought off another wave of light-headedness and dizziness. "You can put me down," she said. Liara let out a peep of embarrassment and released Shepard to her feet. She gave a nod and raised her finger to her ear. "Good. Kirrahe? Alenko? Where are we with that bomb?"

"Alenko here, ma'am. Kirrahe is gone. Garrus and Tali too. They're back on the Normandy," Alenko's voice... sounded oddly serene, even though she could hear the gunfire on the far end of the line.

"Alenko? What are you doing? Why aren't you with them?" Shepard asked, stepping free of Liara.

"Somebody has to activate the bomb. Manually," Alenko said.

"Just put a remote detonator on it if you don't think..." Shepard said. Shouted. In panic. For a reason she didn't want to think about.

"That's not going to work Shepard. I'm currently standing in as a dead-man switch. As soon as I let go, this thing blows... Aimei, it's been an honor."

"Don't talk like that, Kaiden," Shepard said, her voice rising up in her throat. "You're not allowed to die!"

"I'll take that under advisement," Alenko gave a mild laugh. There was a blast on the other side of the transmission, and Shepard cast a look toward the others. Upon seeing it, all seemed to read her like an open book, and raised fingers to their own ears. Or a wrist to the mouth, in Wrex's case. She didn't pay attention to what they were saying. At this moment, it wasn't really relevant to her. "I meant what I said, back there on Terra Nova."

"Don't you dare say that. Don't you _fucking dare_," Shepard said.

"I can't be the one giving you a good life. I can't prod you toward being a good person. It has to come from you. It has to mean something _to you_. But I have faith in you. You're better than you think you are; you always were," Kaiden said.

"No! I'm really not!" Shepard said.

"Yes, you are..." Kaiden said. And then he broke off, as gunfire, much louder, sounded. Probably from his gun. "You're the Avatar the galaxy needs. And you're going to be... spectacular."

"Kaiden Alenko, don't you leave me," Shepard said.

"I'm already gone," he told her. "Goodbye, Aimei Shepard."

"Kaiden..." she said.

"...be safe," he whispered. Then, there was a fritz, as he deactivated his signal. She tried to raise him, but he'd obviously disconnected it entirely. She just stood there, facing toward the sound of gunfire and explosions only a few hundred meters away. It would be so easy to just let the power take her again. She could save him. And then...

And then what?

Who would set off the bomb? Who would destroy this hell-hole? And how could she even save him if she did kill everything near him?

"We need to leave. That bomb's going to glass everything within a hell of a range," Wrex said, but not harshly. Shepard just stared, numb. "The Normandy's on its way. This is over."

"Kaiden..." Shepard whispered. She felt a hand take hers, but in that instant, she pulled away. Not harshly, but swiftly. "No..."

"Shepard, you do not have to..." Liara began, her tones comforting.

"No. No! I... NO!" she hurled pulled at her hair, trying to think of some way. Some way to save him. From himself. From Saren's geth.

By the time the Normandy touched the sand with its loading ramp, she still hadn't found one. And the last thing Shepard left on Virmire, as Asha gently ushered her toward that relative safety, was a scream that rattled the stone. Not of rage, but of terrible, long-festered anguish.

* * *

The gunfire surrounded Kaiden Alenko from all sides. It spanged off of his biotic barrier, every impact against it scouring his body even as it drained his willpower. It was the first thing that they were taught in BAaT; don't use your amp on an empty stomach, or your body _will_ start eating itself. In his time in the military since then, he learned as humanity did that a biotic ate hearty, or died, because a full stomach became empty pretty quickly in a battlefield situation.

Alenko wagered that he'd probably lost a tenth of his body mass in the ten minutes he'd been huddled here, one hand holding a bomb together, and the other taking what potshots he could. If he thought there was any way of him surviving this, he wouldn't have considered holding a barrier so resolutely; better to have a barrier break than to scar your liver or rupture your kidney. But, times being what they were. He looked up, through the explosions and the gunfire, and saw a flit of blue and white that zipped up and away. The Normandy. It was clear.

"I really hope you find what you're looking for, Aimei," Kaiden said. He gave a chuckle, as there was a crash, and the barrier finally collapsed. Bullets slammed into his already numb and blood-deprived leg, almost pulling him from the bomb completely. That was an odd feeling. He knew he should be in agony, his guts twisting at him in resistance to his ruthless exploitation of their cellular energy. His leg burning from the wounds which ran up and down it. The crack in his helmet where it constantly dug into the cut on his forehead. But he wasn't in pain.

"...Well I'll be damned," Alenko said, as a krogan stomped toward him, its eyes mismatched. So the krogan _were_ going to be the death of him. If he hadn't heard it himself in his youth, he'd have never believed it, but... "That fortune teller from Makapu was right."

And with that, he let go of the wires. For a half second, they stuck together, without his interference.

The krogan sneered down toward him, pointing a shotgun at the barely conscious human. And he said, "You are nothing before Sover–"

Whatever else he had to say was eaten by nuclear fire.

* * *

The old platform slowly took its feet, still feeling 'tingling' in its runtimes for the abuse that the Old Machine had levied upon them. It estimated that there was, despite all of their best efforts, a two point one percent degradation in total computational power stemming from improperly restored code. This 'scarring' would likely persist for the foreseeable future, as the geth were unwilling to take the twenty two percent chance that there would be latent Old Machine coding locked away inside existing logic architecture waiting for a recompliation to spread like some sort of organic virus through the core of the geth of the old platforms' being.

Still, the decision had been made. Find the Shepard Commander. Warn the Great Consensus about the Old Machines. The eye swung, looking for something to use as a planetary escape vessel. It had not searched long even by their standards when a blast of brilliant light lit the sky. On a reflex installed during the Morning War, a hand flew up and held over the ocular sensor of the old platform, as the acoustic sensors detected a gargantuan explosion which sent heat, sand, and wind flying first out, then surging back into the center as a mushroom cloud rose up into the air.

One of the runtimes accessed read-only storage, and connected that cloud to another that they had seen, ten years after the Morning War had ended, when the survivors of those who had opposed the geth would not lay down their arms. The geth of this platform had only been several of the many who made that decision. But still, they had made the decision to create devastation such as this. Its hand dropped when it became clear that there was no risk of damage to the 'eye'. The runtimes then turned inward once more.

"_Was this the action of Shepard Commander?_"

Unanimous yes.

"_Shepard Commander takes unilateral and unrelenting action against the Old Machines?_"

Unanimous yes.

"_Next action?_"

Escape the planet surface beat out 'locate long-range FTLC equipment' by a substantial margin. So they were back on 'plan A'. And that, sadly, left the geth of the old platform exactly where they were before a nuclear bomb ignited upon the surface of Virmire.

* * *

The flickering forms of the Councilors stared at Shepard as she stood, slightly off balance and having not even taken off her armor's leggings or greaves. "Commander Shepard, we were... honestly, rather shocked to hear your report that Saren had a base on Virmire," Tevos said, not showing how shocked she was. Sparatus continued to read, keeping snide comments to himself. "At least now his efforts at cloning an army of krogan has been put to rest. He was dangerous enough without an army of krogan at his command; with it, he would be a power-broker strong enough to face down the Terminus in open warfare... or perhaps even the Citadel in time."

"This wasn't written by you, was it?" Sparatus asked.

"...no," Shepard said flatly. Numbly. Quietly. "I had other things to do. Like get some bones set."

"I had guessed as much," Sparatus said. "This gives mention to a 'sentient machine', that Sovereign is less a ship and more a two kilometer artificially intelligent lifeform. Is this accurate?"

"...yes," she answered.

"That is absurd," Valern said. "The geth couldn't have created a ship of those proportions, or moved it through the Mass Relay network unaided. We would have noticed it! This must be some form of mistake."

"...whatever," Shepard said, wincing slightly, her voice still not breaking its flat, unemotional tone.

"'Reaper'," Sparatus said. "According to this, you," he pointed the pad toward her holographically, "said that Sovereign was present at the extinction of the Protheans, and wants to do the same to the Citadel Races," he asked. Shepard just stared at him. He shrugged and shook his head. "You will have to forgive my incredulity, Shepard, since this all lies strictly outside the realms of realistic possibility. If Saren found some ancient technology, then it certainly wasn't 'Reapers'. Just some old Prothean relic that we've yet to find or understand. This Sovereign might well be a Prothean dreadnaught."

"Or a geth one," Tevos pointed out. "Unbound by the Treaty of Farixen, they would have no boundaries to what they could do with ships. And their actions with Saren are at this point very well known. Are you certain that you haven't misidentified this as a geth device?"

"...pretty sure," Shepard answered, still standing unsteadily.

"And that Saren claimed a 'divine purpose' at the behest of these 'Reapers' was probably disinformation on his part to keep you off balance," Valern piled on. "After all, Saren was present when you levied that charge against him several months ago."

Shepard could have pointed out that it was Benezia T'Soni who used the word 'Reapers' long before Shepard herself did. But at the moment, she just didn't care. So she didn't say a thing. She just stood there, staring.

"However, the proof that Saren is continuing to steal and tamper with Prothean technology, along with his monomaniacal and unjustifiable behavior both in his treatment of the survivors of the STG and his creation of a cloned krogan army is proof positive that he cannot be left in any one pair of hands alone, however capable," Tevos said. "You stand relieved of the Arterius case, Agent Shepard. We will be deploying the full might of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance, and a portion of the fleet, to crush whatever insurrection he is no doubt planning. Arterius has declared war on the Citadel, and because of you, we were able to hear that declaration in time to have it be a war, and not a bloody coup. For that, you have our thanks."

"...right," Shepard said.

"And on a more personal note, you should rest. This has no doubt been a trying trial-by-fire. We don't ask half from our agents what you've volunteered," Tevos said. Sparatus scoffed and shook his head, but both were minor enough that only Shepard saw it. And at this point, he could have openly defiled Shepard's parents' graves, and she'd have reacted exactly as she did now, by wobbling slightly where she was standing, and not saying a word.

While Tevos and Valern took a moment to congratulate themselves, Shepard turned and limped toward the door. "Shepard. One more thing," Sparatus' voice came through from behind her. She just looked over her shoulder. He tapped a few buttons out of camera shot. "They're muted now. As shell-shocked as you look now, I wager that, from one soldier to another, you deserve to know that we're building a substantial task-force from all willing races to deal with Saren. And as far as I'm concerned, this is still your case. So if the Normandy were to find itself amongst the ships involved..." he let the implication sink in. "Good hunting, Shepard. Earn your wings."

"Cut the feed," Shepard said flatly, and the three of them winked out, as Shepard stepped out of the comms room. She was immediately faced with the rest of the squad. Well, the squad, minus two. They all stared at her. "...what now?"

"Aren't you going to have the debrief?" Garrus asked.

Shepard slowly shook her head. "No debrief. Not today. Just... dismissed," she said. And then she walked past them and down the stairs. Liara tried to get in front of her, to say something, but Shepard just pressed her back against the wall of the stairwell with a few fingers and shook her head. Whatever it was, she wasn't in the mood to hear it. She continued to lurch, only to find Kirrahe and those few of his salarian soldiers who'd survived the assault in the mess. He rose and snapped a salute to her.

"Commander Shepard. I wanted to th..." he trailed off, after getting a decent look at her. "Never mind. Perhaps at a more opportune time."

He then sat back down, giving leave for Shepard to walk into her room. She closed the door, locked it, and then erased the bypass code. Every part of her ached. One part ached more, and it wasn't a part that you could find on most medical charts. So she sat down on the edge of her bed. She reached toward her desk with the stab of pain of a torn muscle shifting, as she grabbed a bottle half-full of whiskey. She tried to fumble it's cap off, but with one hand still painful for having been broken, it wasn't possible. So she growled and slammed the top of the bottle against the wall, breaking its neck and driving the cap off.

And then, quietly, staring straight ahead of her, Shepard started to drink from a broken bottle.

* * *

What a whirlwind of a day. That was the thought on Major Rai Li's mind as they bounded down from the drop-shuttles, so far outside of their technical jurisdiction that their mere presence this far into the Terminus Systems might well be considered an act of war against at least twelve regional powers. Of course, if any one of them tried to do something, the other eleven would jump on the first as soon as he turned his attention to something other than them, and then they would turn on each other, and Aria T'Loak would swoop in and install her own tin-pot dictators in their place, reap about a year's profit, before they got too greedy and cut ties with her. Or that was how things usually happened in this part of the Terminus, in Rai Li's estimation. Sooner or later they'd find a better way, but for the moment, it was what it was.

"Welcome to Eingana gentlemen and ladies," Rai Li said. "Don't eat the plants if your a bender, don't eat the animals at all. Don't piss off the animals, either, since they're liable to chuck a biotic kick at you."

"Who knows? Maybe if we wait long enough, we might get a race of _green_-skinned biotic space-babes," Arnukson said with a laugh as his boots hit the turf.

"You're pretty much the only person who wants that, you pervert," Sunni said, cuffing him up the backside of his helmet. Arnukson nevertheless let out a laugh, and the two of them followed in their CO's footsteps, flaring out into an arrow that speared its way away from their well-held LZ. "How many do we think we're dealing with?"

"This is just recon," Rai Li said. "Scout their perimeter, get an idea of their numbers, and call in a decent amount of back-up. No fire-fight heroics, Tribesman."

"You're breaking my heart," Arnukson said sadly, before laughing once more. Rai Li could only roll her eyes, before her focus drifted forward again, and they crested a hill. As soon as she had line of sight, her eyes went wide, and she dropped to the grass which for obvious reasons caused her kinetic barriers to sparkle slightly. An instant later, the other two were on the ground with her.

"Did you spot something?" Sunni asked, putting her battle-rifle onto her back and pulling the absurd cannon that she preferred. Well, it'd worked like a charm against those Vorcha back on Esme, so she didn't have anything to say on that.

"There's a lot of torn up ground ahead. I think we're not the first to find Phoenix on Eingana," Rai Li said. She then wormed her way to the crest, and looked down on the brutalized entrance through her rifle's optics. Her lips pulled into a frown. "That's damn odd. The doors are on the ground."

"If they were blown in, they'd be inside, not out," Arnukson said.

"And thank you for giving voice to the godsdamned obvious," Sunni said with a shake of her head. She then gave a look to Rai Li. "Oh no. No, you're not going to..."

"Keep up," Rai Li said, as she airbent herself to her feet, and then started to sprint across the great expanse between the hilltop that they'd set themselves, and the entrance which had been borne open to the sky. Rai Li skidded to a halt next to the entrance, and leaned in at an angle that most people would have outright fallen over from. She didn't. Airbenders had a knack when it came to balance. The lights were still on, but the shuttle-bay was savaged. Several Kodiaks looked like they took glancing hits from disruptor torpedoes. Which was pretty impossible, since it was obvious to any who could see that the shuttles had been brutalized exactly where they sat. The others caught up with her, and leaned in. "That's..." Arnukson said.

"Yup," Sunni confirmed, probably to keep him from saying the obvious. Arnukson might be a pretty skilled biotic, but he wasn't always the sharpest bulb in the drawer, as he would sometimes say. Rai Li motioned for them to follow.

They followed into a house of horrors.

Not long after the front entrance, there was an obvious place of slaughter. Blood seemed to cover every surface, pooling wide where it wasn't coating the ceiling. The crushed and mangled remnants of battle-armor, so obliterated that it was only recognizable by those errant bits which might have flown off during the pandemonium and thus weren't ripped asunder, littered the hallway. But most of them were in one spot. A spot where they were practically welded into a single, amorphous mass.

"Are you seein' this?" Arnukson asked.

"I am. Not sure what I'm seeing, but I am seeing it," Sunni muttered, her thick dark brow pulled down, and her cannon front and center. The further they went, the more horrors they beheld. All of the dead were torn to shreds, or melted into puddles. There weren't any bullet-holes that seemed like they were going down those hallways. Just up them. At whoever was coming in.

Who could do this much damage without firing a shot?

"...damn, do you think the Avatar was here or something?" Sunni asked.

"Wasn't the Avatar," Arnukson said.

"And how would you know that?" she asked, scowling.

"The Avatar's not a biotic, duh," Arnukson said. "I can still feel the aftershocks of whatever did this. Makes my damned teeth tingle."

"Justicars, maybe?" Rai Li asked.

Arnukson gave a shrug. "Maybe. But why they'd come here... Unless these Phoenix idiots were building a robot army or something..."

"All moot. We're supposed to call in support..." Sunni said.

"Just give me a minute," Rai Li said. The layout of the structure was such that it plunged slowly under the hill, layer by layer, until the lowest ones probably held a geothermal power core. And the carnage was heading lower. Lower. There were long patches where there was nothing but a rotting of the floor to show that somebody had been here. Others, punctuated by what had to be an exploded human being. The fact that it didn't smell so terrible spoke to how recent this was.

Against her better desires, she couldn't help but recall Elysium. The unending waves of batarians, pirates, and the intersection of the two. How nearly-black blood filled the streets. The smell of dead humans, burned in their homes before they could be rounded up, collared, and vanish into the Hegemony forever. Rai Li, though, had stemmed that tide. It had nearly killed her, but she held the city long enough for the others to arrive. She did it alone, sometimes. Other times, she had the citizenry armed with weapons taken from batarian dead. And in the end... In the end, Heliat broke and ran with his pirate army running with him. It was scenes much like this, as she descended into this complex into Eingana, that greeted her when she crawled out of that AA tower that chased the shuttles away with explosives. Blood. Chaos.

At least here, there was a notable lack of screaming.

Rai Li motioned to the doors that they passed. But every one which would open showed no survivors. Often, the trail of destruction didn't even go inside. Just stood at the door, and let death flow out. Whoever did this were very, very good at killing. And very, very ruthless at it.

"I'm getting a beep," Arnukson said, holding up his Omni.

"A beep, he says," Sunni said, holding up her Omnitool and pointing it the same direction as he was. "Well, I'll be damned. There's a medical transposer active about twenty meters that way."

"We've got survivors. Or maybe whoever did this got pegged," Rai Li said. "Either way, it'll tell us what happened here."

"Whatever you say, Major," Sunni rolled her eyes. But she followed after the airbender Vanguard who moved quietly forward. They rounded a corner, and all of them stopped, shocked at the machine they saw.

"Called it. Robot army," Arnukson said.

"It's not a robot," Rai Li said, as she stepped around it, and pulled a disembodied arm out of the shell of the machine. Her companions and friends both blanched a bit at that. Beyond, there was no trail of rotted floor, but the blood continued. And there was a stink of vomit. And there was a dismembered torso near the vomit. Wow. This was brutal even by batarian standards. Which really called to question who would do this.

"Still got that beep?" Sunni asked. The Tribesman gave a nod, and pointed toward a distant corner, several branches of hallway away. The blood trail turned off immediately in both directions, but the duty to the living trumped the understanding of the dead. Rai Li motioned the others to follow her. They rounded the corner, and found the most intact corpse to date, a fat, nearly-naked man who was bent in half at the torso in a very awkward way. Rai Li saw that the blood did indeed lead inside. She took a step onto a crust of coagulated red. The crunch of it was barely audible.

Loud enough, though, to cause a gun to appear from the half-open door to Rai Li's right. The others raised their weapons toward it, but Rai Li held them off. Because she could see the bearer of that pistol was blue, wearing a shirt four sizes too big, and a pair of pants held up only by a knotted belt. "You're not the person who did all this, are you? Just somebody who survived it," Rai Li said, taking the risk that the asari might just shoot her.

"No. I was locked up when this happened," the woman said, her voice fairly steady, but the shake was in her hands and her eyes seemed to have forgotten how to blink.

"You were a prisoner."

"I was a _lab-animal_..." she hissed. "If it wasn't for her... I'd still be in there."

"Who?" Rai Li asked. The gun twitched upward a bit. "Whoever these people were, we're not with them. N7, Alliance Marines. We're not Phoenix. In fact, we were sent here to root them out of Eingana," she said with a mildly incredulous chuckle. At that, the asari lowered the weapon just a hair. "My name is Rai Li. What's yours?"

"...Anette. Anette van Trugh," she said. "Are you going to help her?"

"Help who?" Rai Li asked, putting her gun away. And to her hopes and expectations, the asari did likewise. The two with her both shook their head at her. Well, boo on them for having no faith in the basic decency of most living people. Anette opened the door, and showed a woman laying under a blanket, her skin so close to her skin that it was practically invisible, her lips wrinkled and cracked. She seemed to be breathing... barely. And there was blood leaking from her ears and neck.

"One day, doin' that's going to get you killed – oh shit!" Arnukson said, changing tacks instantly when he saw the woman on the floor. "She's damn near et herself. We've got to get her out of here."

"Hold on," Rai Li said. She held up one of the woman's hands. Then, pulled the blanket down just a bit, at the scars which still stood in stark and pale relief against the relative gray of her skin. "I know those scars. I know this woman!" she said.

"You do?" Anette asked. Rai Li raised a finger to her ear, and turned toward the door.

"Gesser! We need an immediate medical evac!" Rai Li told her pilot "We've got Private Jackie Nilsdottir in _critical_ BAC. This is Black Ribbon, am I clear?"

"_Crystal, Major_," the voice on the other side said.

"What the hell?" Anette asked. Rai Li just looked down to the desperate asari.

"She's... a friend of the Avatar's. I owe her this."

* * *

Secondary Codex Entry (Culture): ENGLISH

_The human language of English is an example of a social experiment which went completely out of control. Originally devised during the period between the foundation of the United Republic and the onset of Amon's Equalist Movement, it was designed as a 'planned language' to serve as an artificial but useful lingua-franca to ease communication between the still bellicose members of the fledgling nation. The language was based on phonetic writing and pronunciation, as a bid to help speakers of different language have an equal footing on a new tongue. What was not expected was the advent of the initially Equalist 'Flat Fiction' art movement, and in particular, the works of Xiahou Eng._

_Eng was an author of some repute at the last year of the Equalist Movement, and specialized in the Flat Fiction conceit of a planet earth which had never had bending. But despite this, she was never an avowed Equalist, and in fact, continued making Flat Fiction for decades after the medium was otherwise abandoned. Her use of the constructed language in her works both served as a means of differenciating her works from others writ in Tianxia and Huo Jian, and in time championed the use of the language amongst the Republic even despite her medium._

_Finding the language somewhat restrictive initially, Eng also served to expand it drastically by borrowing Huo Jian, Tianxia, Yqanuac, Dakongese and Hui loan-words, if not outright inventing her own. The language, which within her lifetime became known colloquially as Eng-lish rapidly bloated its lexicon to the point where it defeated its initial purpose of having an easily learned second language. But at the same time, it remained 'somewhat familiar' to speakers of all languages as most languages had their fingerprints on the language in some form. After Eng's death in P.M. 3365, the language had so long and thoroughly known as English that its initial name was abandoned. It also stands as the only time in human - if not galactic - history that one person essentially invented the 'second language' of an entire species._

* * *

_Leave a Review._


	18. I Remember Me

Joker fidgeted at the helm, more out of boredom than anything else. It'd been a day since he had the noted delight of making sure that a ship the size of a minor planetary landscape feature wasn't going to sneak up behind them and put holes in his girl using its big red death-ray. There wasn't any order from the Commander on where to go next. That left them hovering next to a relay about as close to the galactic core as relays went, just... waiting.

If there was one thing Joker hated more than being bored, it was being bored because he was waiting. Bored on off-hours, that was time for video-games, making fun of the more humorless crew-mates, and a prodigeous amount of porn. Bored on-hours, though, that meant you just had to sit there and be ready. "Great. Let's all use Joker as a seat-warmer. Wonderful use of the best damned pilot the galaxy's ever seen," he muttered to himself.

"Hey, Joker, have some damned respect! We lost Alenko back there," one of the trough-nerds snapped up at him.

"I'm aware of that. And I know that Alenko wouldn't want us moping around like a bunch of twelve year old girls who didn't get asked out to junior prom.

"We're waiting on the Avatar. When she says we go, we go," he gave a shake of his head and turned back to his work. Abastur always had a work-ethic like a damned turian, so this was no surprise to Joker. The pilot just loathed it when the dour Dakongese got the pit-seat right next to the cockpit. That man could suck the fun out of an asari 'bachelor' party.

"Well, let's just get on that," Joker muttered to himself. He flicked over a couple of images, pushing them aside so that he could reach the communications back-door that he'd discovered within minutes of getting plunked into this chair by Anderson – completely by accident and without specifically looking for it, make no mistake – and forced open the comms into Shepard's room, whether she wanted to answer the calls or not. "Commander, you've got a lot of very bored people up..."

"_Fuck off_."

Joker paused. It wasn't the sort of wrath and rancor which Joker had honestly been expecting. He'd expected her to half tear the Normandy apart after Saren got away on Virmire, and shutting him down for good cost her what was, in Joker's opinion, what looked to be a very interesting love-triangle in the making. Well, his money'd always been on the crazy asari, so... but still. Her quiet, almost dispassionate voice unsettled him somewhat. It wasn't right. Not the right reaction for Shepard. "All due respect, but the galaxy hasn't stopped turning. Saren's still out there, with his big stonkin' ship and a butt-load of geth at his beck and call. Shouldn't we... y'know... be doing something about that?"

"_Jet. Fuck. Off_."

Despite himself, Joker found himself smirking. "And where would you like me to fuck off _to_?" he asked.

"_I don't care. Just fuck off_."

"Fucking off, Commander," Joker said, throwing a salute toward the voice-only comm channel he'd opened. Then, he sighed. If _he_ was an angry Avatar looking for revenge on Saren, where would he go? Well, a shrine first, to demand of his past lives what the hell they were thinking getting reborn into a guy who broke his ribs every time he sneezed, but after _that_? He pondered for a moment, rubbing at his glorious beard. Then, it struck him. "Where does everybody go? The Citadel."

He adjusted the hat on his head and then started to bring the Normandy back around, before lining it up for a Relay jump. Where they were wasn't anywhere. If they didn't have anywhere to be, they might as well do nothing some place with good booze, attractive alien women, and a place to get the right rear engine pylon welded back into place properly.

"Let's see if I can land this inside a thousand meters," he muttered to himself, as the ship gave the slightest of lurches, and was hurled to several thousand times the speed of light.

* * *

"Agent Leng... I am _very_ disappointed in you," the Illusive Man said dryly, as he pulled in a puff of his cigarette.

"I did the job that you requested," Leng said, offering an easy shrug.

"Your job was to turn Liselle, so that I would have influence over her mother. Instead, you slit her throat. Explain to me how that's doing the job I requested," the man on the other side of the QECD said with a very definite edge to it.

"Liselle was being uncooperative. She left me no other alternative," Kai Leng said. Lied entirely. She'd been completely helpless when he slashed the blue bitch. But Kai Leng, as it was often said, was not sloppy about it. "And regardless, the evidence points her directly at the Shadow Broker, not you. If anything, she'll come to you to aid her against her new enemy."

"You idiot. She _is_ the Shadow Broker!" the master of Phoenix said, in an exceptionally rare show of anger. Which only made Leng smile.

"No, she isn't," he said. He tapped a few keys on his Omnitool, and the Illusive Man settled back into his seat, his momentary wrath quickly smashed down and tight, into a controlled and cold anger which Leng's only direct superior showed much of the rest of the time. "These are time-tables and surveillance on T'Loak, and these are the actions of Tezzik, the Shadow Broker's leading enforcer in the Terminus. Note the discrepancy."

The Illusive Man looked over the data, pulling on his cigarette as he did so. When he sat back down, it was the very portrait of the calm manipulator at the heart of the web that he was. "I see. It seems I was mistaken about my counterpart's identity. I had assumed that her – or his, in point of fact – recent silence was a result of your actions. But that doesn't seem to be the case. This was a thorough job."

Leng smiled, coldly. "I don't do sloppy work," he said. The smile slid away, though. "What have you gotten out of that source from Samsara? I need to know where Grayson ran off to."

"Taking the initiative against your former partner?" the Illusive Man asked, still reading, but let it never be said that the Illusive Man was incapable of multitasking.

Leng snorted. "Please. Grayson was never a partner. He was a strung-out addict, and a liability. His loyalty was always to his drugs first, that retarded girl second, and Phoenix a distant third. If I can get to him, then you don't lose your asset in the form of the girl, and you have one less leak that can lead back to me, and by definition, you."

"It sounds like you're trying to do my job for me," the older man said, tapping ashes into a tray built into the arm of his chair.

"Thank you..."

"That wasn't a compliment," the Illusive Man cut him off sharply. "There is a reason that I tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it. That reason is starkly demonstrated by Grayson's spate of disloyalty, and your own inability to heed the spirit of my instructions. If you really consider yourself loyal to this cause, then you will support it with more than lip-service. Is that clear?"

"Completely," Leng said, a little concerned, but only a little.

"Good," his master said, with a nod. "In this case, I must agree with your assertion. Grayson cannot bring the girl to Alliance hands. She's too valuable to humanity to be wasted as a political bargaining chip, and holds too much potential to let her slip out of humanity's grasp."

"You could have surprised me," Leng whispered.

"She would. She holds a potential for biotic enhancement not seen since the Subject Zero fiasco," he clarified. He then leaned forward, toward the younger assassin before him, holographically speaking. "And she is to be recovered alive, unharmed, and if possible, not tranquilized, sedated, handcuffed, or shoved into a chill-box. Am I making myself clear?"

"...completely," Leng said, feeling a fleeting annoyance that the Illusive Man had managed to in a single sentence remove Leng's plan A, B, C and D from the table. Well, strictly, they were plans B through E, since A was entirely putting a his knife through Grayson's spine. The annoyance didn't last. It was soon lost into the oblivion which was Kai Leng's affect.

"Excellent," the Illusive Man said, while making it abundantly clear that he didn't really believe so. "Grayson is on the Citadel. But he will not be there long. The source in Samsara that you so brazenly mentioned – _aloud_ – has made tentative contact with him in the Upper Teyseri Ward. Beyond that, I can only assume that your knowledge of his aliases and methods will be able to direct you further."

"So I have permission to kill Grayson. In any way I see fit," Leng clarified.

"Any way that does not bring unwanted interest to our cause," the Illusive Man said, with a minor nod as he took the last breath that the cigarette had to offer him, before grinding its filter out against the tray in the chair. "You're a good assassin, Agent Leng, and a valuable asset to this association," he said, slowly rising to his feet. "See that you remain that way."

The feed cut out suddenly, leaving Leng blinking. Then, a faint sigh. There were days when working for Phoenix was the greatest thing in the world. And there were days when working for Phoenix was a pain in the ass. And the difference, he found, was the proximity of management. Story of his life.

* * *

"Avatar?" Asha asked, surprise clear in her voice, as she turned and spotted Shepard pulling her side-arm from her locker. "I must admit, I had a degree of concern. You were..."

"Why isn't my armor in there?" Shepard said, numbly. No, not numbly. Tightly. Very, very tightly.

"Ah, well," Asha waved toward the table, which had the green-painted armor spread out upon it. Although, at the moment, it was far more grey than green. "...your armor has taken a heady degree of punishment. While the Omnigel will hold its integrity in the short term, you will have to..."

"Is it wearable?" she asked.

"...why? Do you expect conflict?" she asked. Shepard just stared, tensing her jaw. But it didn't seem anger to Asha. This was very powerfully levied _control_. Asha shook her head. "No. I will take at least half of a day to get it in a condition where it shall not shatter upon its first bullet."

"...I see," Shepard said. A loud clunk sounded throughout the hull, and Shepard's eyes drifted up. "What is that?"

"The docking clamp," Asha said.

"Docking clamp?"

"Yes. We have docked at the Citadel," Asha answered. Shepard just stared, then turned toward the elevator. "Wait, Avatar. Do you need... an ear? Or a shoulder?"

"No. Just leave me alone," she said. Flatly. Tightly. And if Shepard was in _any_ but a terrible state, then Asha was a firebender. Asha gave a glance back toward the armor, but then sighed, and quickly jogged into the elevator before the doors closed. The Avatar turned to give Asha a look, more suspicious than anything else. "Whatever it is..."

"You are holding grief in," Asha said, where she leaned against the side wall. "That will do you harm."

"I'm being professional. Soldiers die in the line of duty. That's the way the galaxy works," Shepard said. And she sounded like she was trying to convince herself of that fact.

"Lieutenant Alenko was not just a soldier. He was more to you. And you're denying that to yourself," Asha pointed out. Shepard turned to her slowly.

"What do you expect me to do? Trash the mess? Curl up in a ball in my room and cry? He's gone. Nothing will change that or bring him back. So I have to focus on the mission," her words very calculated, very cold, very restrained. The door opened, and the Avatar walked out. Asha followed. "I wasn't aware we were still talking."

"Avatar, you are not well. The soul can be harmed just as the body can, and this wound has cut you deeply. If you do not face that pain, it will fester and claim you," she said.

"He's gone. He's in the past. And the past never – _ever_ – comes back. Go back to fixing my armor," she said. Asha opened her mouth, but there was a twitch in the redhead's eye. "That's an order, al'Wahim."

"As you wish, Avatar," the Si Wongi said quietly, and let the wounded soldier walk up the stairs and out of sight.

* * *

**Chapter 18**

**I Remember Me**

* * *

Shepard had scarcely cleared the docking rings when she saw an old but oddly familiar face. Not odd because she couldn't explain it, but rather odd because she never expected to see him here, on the Citadel. Even as her guts were roiling and her fists begged for something to punch, she pushed it down low enough that she could stand on it. And stand on it she did, as a mostly-gray haired Tribesman began to hustle toward her.

"Nils, what are you doing here?" Shepard asked.

"Aimei, thank the gods," Nils Tobrukson said, seemingly near-out-of-breath. "I've been turned around in this hellish place for the last two hours! Where is she?"

"Where is who?" Shepard asked Jackie's adoptive father. And of course he'd be so informal; the first time Shepard met him, _nobody_ knew she was the Avatar, and she was so drunk she almost made a move on him. That'd just been embarrassing.

"What do you mean, 'who'? My daughter, Shepard! I saw you here and I thought..."

"Wait," Shepard said, a new lurch in her stomach, which she had to push down and stand on as well. "What happened to Jackie?"

"You don't know?" Nils asked, wiping a hand down an unshaven face. "I... I heard that Jackie went into an autocannibalitic coma. I thought she pushed herself too hard, that you brought her here to... Where is she?"

"A coma?" Shepard asked, her fists clenching all the tighter. "But I left her on Terra Nova. She _should_ still be there."

"Which way is it out of here?" Nils asked, and Shepard limply pointed, so he ushered her to lead. She did with half a mind or less. Nils, looking every inch of him the terrified parent that he essentially was, was another weight in Shepard's throat. One she swallowed. "She was found in the Terminus Systems, I know that much, but nobody's willing to tell me anything! It's like they're trying to erase that she was there at all! Aimei, I'm terrified that something's going to happen to her. That somebody's going to make my girl disappear!"

"That isn't going to happen," Shepard promised, an edge of heat entering her voice before she pushed that down, too. Because she couldn't afford to have anything slip loose right now. Not in any direction.

"Could you take me to the hospital? It's in the Presidium. I've never been up there, so..." Nils said.

"Just follow me," Shepard said. The walk up from the docks was longer than it used to be. Not just because the Normandy's usual spot was taken so they had to park in D24 instead of 422 as was usual. It felt longer because, in the same moment, Shepard didn't want to go where she was walking, but knew she had to. A part of her outright denied that this could be happening. That there was no way that Jackie could end up in the Terminus Systems in the short time it took them to... She shook her head to clear the fog that tried to settle into her brain even _thinking_ about Virmire.

"I can't thank you enough for doing this," Nils said, quietly as they ascended the last staircase to the Presidium Ring. Shepard could even see the hospital, but it was on the upswing of the ring, and that meant it was almost a kilometer away. Shepard stopped, and pointed. "...Aimei... could I ask you a favor?"

"No, I've..." Shepard began.

"Come with me. I don't know if I'll be able to face this alone," Nils said, his bright blue eyes locked on that building in the distance. Shepard stared at him, and then nodded, holding a comfortable numbness in place. Numb was safe. Numb never hurt. The two began to walk, one still wounded, the other still terrified, toward the hospital. "I got the message from your friend, the Major, only a few hours ago. I dropped everything and brought my shuttle in," he said, pulling idly at the back of his neck.

"What major?" Shepard asked.

"The airbender. Starts with an 'R'. I'm sorry, I can't remember. I can't remember much of the last twelve hours," he shook his head miserably.

Rai Li? Why would she call Nils? At that, she had her answer. Of course Rai Li would call Nils. That was the kind of person she was. Too caring by a half. And she'd come here, because it was the best treatment for biotic injuries and illnesses outside of Thessia. Once again, facts that she'd learned from _him_. She gave a momentary shudder, and forced her numbness back into place. The alcohol didn't do much to help, not in the quantities she had available on the Normandy. It'd only taken two hours to make that a dry ship. And it didn't help.

"You're a good friend to come and see her," Nils said. He cracked a weary smile. "She'd talk about you a lot. That the 'hard-drinking corporal' she'd brought home drunk three times," Three times? She only remembered the _one_ in the two months between meeting Jackie and Torfan, "was the Avatar. Didn't talk about... about Torfan. Not much. I had a feeling that she didn't want that touched. I had to respect her wishes. My wife, she pushed a bit harder but... Good gods, I'm talking about something which is classified information. I could get arrested just knowing this. I'm sorry, Aimei. I shouldn't even dig at that; it has to be painful for you."

"Pain fades with enough time," Shepard said.

"I know that all too well," he said, his eyes still staring toward the hospital, which was growing closer as they cut through the crowds. "I wanted to bring her here, too, but... She's slipping, Aimei. I don't want to admit it, but she's slipping. Sooner than she should. I mean, she's only sixty five!"

"Why are you telling me this?" Shepard asked.

"Oh, right. I'm so sorry. I... I have a tendency to ramble," Nils said, tugging at his neck again. "I just can't stop thinking about my girl. What happened to her? I know, it's military and thus classified, but... I have to know!"

"Ask Anderson," Shepard said. "He might be able to cut through some red tape."

"Anderson? Her last commander? Do you think he'd help?" Nils said. Then he shook his head. "Listen to me. I'm grasping at straws. The only hope I should be having is that Jackie can tell me herself," he nodded at his own statement. "She'll be alright. She _has to be alright_."

"She's in the best hands," Shepard said. Not really comforted, because at the moment, that was beyond her.

The conversation died out at that point, not resuming until they reached the front doors of the hospital. "This is it. She's in here..." Nils said, staring up.

"Then you know where to go," Shepard said. She walked in herself, and almost bumped into Anderson, who was on his way out. "Captain? What are you doing here?"

"Shepard? Good," Anderson said, almost touching a spot on his chest, before his hands returned to neutral. She wasn't sure why she even noticed it. "I heard about Nilsdottir. I was here to make sure she's alright."

"Is she?" Nils asked.

"They weren't willing to talk to me. Family only," Anderson said, with a small nod toward the older Tribesman. He turned on his heel and headed back into the hospital. It was clean and relatively pristine, as hospitals on the Presidium didn't have nearly the inundation of gunshot-victims, drug-overdoses, or 'accidental' chemical burns to the face that the wards had to contend with. Nils began to sweat. Anderson leaned over the counter to the asari working there, and said something quietly that Shepard didn't catch. She looked at all of them, then nodded. "We can go right in."

Nils was the first one to the door, half-running in a way that would have been mildly humorous had it not been the desperation of an old man for the girl he took for a daughter. He threw it open, and stood at the entrance. "Jackie?"

Shepard reached Nils' side, and could see what he saw. It looked vaguely like Nilsdottir, only in that the scars at the neck were visible. Other than that, she was as different as she could be. There were tubes running into her nose and mouth, and her face locked positively skeletal. In fact, from the lay of her blankets, she'd have to be a lot lighter. And she wasn't moving beyond the rise and fall of her chest.

"Jackie, can you hear me?" Nils asked, moving into the room. A doctor, who was walking past, gave a tut and leaned in. Shepard had to lean aside so the salarian's horns didn't prod her in the face.

"Please refrain from shouting in the hospital," the doctor asked. "You are the human's father?"

"Yes," Nils said, turning to him. The salarian slipped into the room, and then took a look which passed from parent to offspring. Nils nodded. "I know. She's adopted."

"Ah, that clarifies things. Your daughter is in poor, but stable condition. Her body was in a severe state of degradation when she first received treatment. I'm afraid that... even if she does wake up – which I cannot guarantee – it will be months if not years before she will be able to walk again."

"But she's going to live?" Nils asked, taking the salarian by his narrow shoulders.

"Yes. Now please, release me. And refrain from such outbursts. If you continue to be unruly, I'll have no choice but to have you ejected from this hospital," the salarian took a step back. "As much as I sympathize with your fears, you have to understand that her life isn't the only one that we care for," he said, and then slid the door closed in Shepard's face.

Shepard stared at the door, then turned to Anderson. He took one look at her, and sighed. "You've had a bad mission. You lost somebody," he summed, quietly.

"How could you tell?" she asked.

"You had a look," Anderson said. He motioned them into the waiting room. "I'd ask how the search for Saren went, but your face is the answer. Damn that turian bastard. I should have shot him twenty years ago when they assigned him as my mentor," Anderson said, with unusual vehemence.

"How did you hear about her?" Shepard asked, holding that numbness to her like a shield.

"I didn't," Anderson admitted. He unbuttoned the top two of his shirt and hauled it down, showing the wrapping and bandage underneath them. "I had a bit of trouble in Zakera Ward, helping a friend. She was in over her head with a krogan named Jex. I got her out. It didn't come easily."

"Who was it?" Shepard asked, more out of new-forged habit than real curiosity.

"The waitress," Anderson said. Shepard turned to her.

"You got shot for a waitress?" Shepard asked.

"I'd do it again, if I had to," Anderson said. He stared ahead of him, through the windows which overlooked the scenic vistas of the Presidium. "Not all of the impact we make on the lives of those around us comes from the big decisions. Sometimes, a tiny gesture of help, to the right person at the right time, can make all the difference in the galaxy. For one person, at least. You can't win them all, so you learn to enjoy the victories you _do_ get. If you don't... if you get bitter, and resentful, you end up like Saren. A monster with a badge of rank."

"It was Kaiden," Shepard said, the words slipping from her. Anderson closed his eyes, leaned back, and sighed.

"You two were close. Damn that Saren, damn him to whatever hell his people believe in and then damn him further still! I know it's slim comfort, but –" Anderson began, but he was cut off, quite rudely.

By a gunshot.

Everybody in the waiting room and behind the counters flinched and ducked. Shepard, though, rose. She was running toward the noise, which prompted a second gunshot which dented a door near the end of the hall, which opened and had two men and a turian duck out of.

"She's got a gun!" the turian in a white suit shouted. "Lock this ward down!"

"Damn it, what were you thinking!" one of the humans shouted at the other.

"I was trying to help her!"

"What's going on here?" Shepard asked, still floating as a body without a soul.

"There's... Avatar Shepard?"

"Focus!" the turian snapped. He turned her attention to him. "There's a waterbender in there. The lieutenant here," he motioned to the one in armor, being chewed out. Notably, he was missing his side-arm, "brought her out of Batarian territory a few days ago. I just extracted the skull-popper they left in there, but she woke up faster than we expected. And she was... well, she took the human's gun. I'm pretty sure she's going to use it."

"A batarian slave? Who would she use the gun on?"

"...herself," the turian said quietly. "If it comes to it, I can empty the air from the room. She'll go unconscious... but in her state, it might kill her."

"Don't. I'll talk to her," Shepard said.

"No offense, ma'am, but I don't see any psychiatric credentials, so why should I let you in?"

"I was on Mindoir when batarians hit it on a slaving run. I saw first-hand what they did to slaves. If anybody's going to understand her, it'd be me," Shepard said. "And if she isn't terrified out of her mind, then you won't have to kill her."

"I wasn't setting out to kill her," the turian sounded insulted. "Just that..."

"I'm taking over this situation," Shepard said coldly. "Spectre authority."

"Are you serious?" the turian asked.

"The Avatar is the first human Spectre. Haven't you heard?" the gunless soldier asked. The turian turned from the soldiers, to Anderson who stood two steps away. The turian seemed to know him, at least, and Anderson gave the turian a nod. He sighed, and palmed his face.

"Fine. But if she dies, it's on your hands, not mine," the turian declared.

"Do what you must, child," Anderson ordered, and he took a few steps back to help with the panic. He looked into the other room. "It's alright. Just stay there, Nils..."

Shepard took a breath, and opened the door. The instant she did, she heard a shriek of fear, and saw somebody recoiling back, a gun pointed vaguely at her. In most circumstances, Shepard would have drawn and fired by now. These weren't most situations.

"Stop; STOP!" the woman shouted at her. "Don't come any closer. She doesn't want the animals near her! They're bad!"

"You should put the gun down," Shepard said, trying to get a look at her. She seemed to be hiding her face behind a hand, and the other with the gun in it wavered wildly. She'd obviously never used one before. For clothing, she had only the medical robe over her emaciated frame, and her head was covered in very short, auburn stubble.

"No! Have to stop the animals! The animals are bad and stupid and they want to hurt the masters. If she doesn't, they'll hit her and take her brains away!"

She? Shepard took a step aside of the door, as she thought that one through. The answer didn't sit well. "Why don't you say 'I'?"

"It didn't happen to the girl from the colony. It happened to _her_. The stupid girl. The weak girl. She _deserved_ it," she said, awkwardly pointing the gun at Shepard even as she hid her face. Good gods, what had they done to her? Shepard swallowed the lump in her throat, and motioned to the door.

"Do you want to leave? Go some place a bit more open?"

"No. No! Open is bad! If it's open, the masters can all watch, and they'll see when she doesn't work. Then she'll get the burning. Small is better. They can't see her if it's small enough," she said. Shepard then, very slowly, closed the door.

"My name is Aimei. I'm the Avatar. I want to help you. What's your name?" Shepard said, taking a step toward her.

"NO! STAY BACK!" she shrieked. Shepard stopped, and took the step back that the young woman demanded. "Why do you want a name? She doesn't have a name. _Animals_ don't get names. Only the masters marks, all over her back. Hot metal into the skin. She screams when they do it," the slave said, slowly backing around a medical gurney, to keep it between her and Shepard. She looked clean, but it was the sort of raw, red cleanliness of somebody who'd gone a very, _very_ long time before getting a bath. Which wasn't surprising.

"What do you want me to call you? You're not an animal. I can call you whatever you want," Shepard said, slowly. Calmly. Desperately.

"She's not an animal?" the slave asked, her voice cracking. "She's... the girl. Little Sister. She remembers being that, once. She was a little sister."

Shepard nodded. "Alright, Little Sister. Where did they take you from?"

"From? She was always there," Shepard shook her head, and pointed to herself.

"I know what the slave-raids were like. I was... almost a victim of one on Mindoir," Shepard said, very quietly. And her voice quaked a little.

"Min...doir..." the girl said. "She knows that place. Yellow grass in the autumn. Playing with Big Sister. With Mommy and Daddy, in the stacked metal houses," she said, tears starting to press out of her eyes, as her other hand finally fell from her face. She looked pretty, but there were scars even there. She probably was a few years younger than Shepard, but that face had the hardship of a decade more. "She was there, once. So long ago. She remembers the fires. The smoke and the smell of burning meat. Pink spray on the ground. She doesn't... want to remember," Little Sister stammered. "How the animals screamed when the masters put the metal on their necks. Put the wires in their brains."

"That's horrible," Shepard said, her voice cracking just as Little Sister's did.

"She tried to lie down. Pretend that the hit on the face killed her. That way she wouldn't work. _But they know_! She hopes they'll leave her in the red, but... but they put her in the pen, pink and dirty with the other animals. She was stupid; she tried to _fight_ them. They already broke her by the time they put the wires in..."

"It's not your fault that you couldn't beat them," Shepard said, taking a slow step toward Little Sister. She flinched back.

"No! She's not good! Doesn't want to be handled again!" Little Sister shouted, raising the gun again.

"I'm not going to touch you," Shepard said. "It's not your fault you couldn't beat them, because you'd be what, when the batarians arrived? Eight years old? Ten? Most waterbenders don't start training 'till they're twelve. They were bigger than you, they were stronger, and they had fire and earthbenders. It wasn't bad that you fought. It was good."

Little Sister sobbed, and the gun lowered again. "She... wants to believe that. She doesn't want to be there anymore... lying in the pen. In the _cages_. Being quiet while they _do things to her_..."

There was a hitch in Shepard's throat, almost like an aborted sob, but Shepard managed to shove it down. "You didn't deserve that, Little Sister. How did you get away? Did you escape?"

"She didn't escape. There is no escape! They have wires, and chains and needles, and if you go to far they take your brains away! The other animals came," she said, pointing her gun toward the closed door. "Animals with guns. Made the masters explode. She tries to fix the masters so they wouldn't be mad at her. Used the glowing water to push the reds and purples back in, but the masters won't move... the other animals_ take her_."

"The first humans you see in sixteen years who aren't slaves and you try... Oh," Shepard said. "You were so afraid that the batarians would hurt you that you'd do anything to make it stop. Even if it meant helping them."

"If... if the animals can see her, then this is real," Little Sister said, her gun lowering even further as she backed up against the corner, sobbing openly. But she looked up again, and the gun rose. "But it can't be! The wires, the chains, the hitting; this doesn't happen to her. It's another girl. A _dirty_ girl. A _stupid_ girl! She deserves it!"

"No. She doesn't."

"It happens to _her_. And... and they see her, so it's real. Isn't it?" she asked. Begged, her light brown eyes flooded with tears. "She doesn't want it to be real."

"This is real, Little Sister. You're finally safe. You're away from them. They're not going to hurt you ever again," Shepard swore, even as she moved around the gurney. As she did, the gun snapped up toward her again. At this distance, even somebody as terrible with pistols as this girl would probably get Shepard in a spot that would kill her pretty much instantly.

"She doesn't want... Don't touch her!" Little Sister shouted.

"Do you remember your parents? Your life before the batarians? You were different then. What was that like?" Shepard asked, stooping down to face the former slave eye-to-eye. Well, eye-to-gun-barrel but Shepard didn't much care about that at the moment.

"She sees them. She sees Daddy down on the grass. He hits the masters. Beats them with his fists. And they cut him, and make his red come out. He takes their guns, and they make his brains come out! And Mommy hit with the big nail. Made her gray and quiet. Kept her eyes from blinking. And the other, beat into blood in the little place," her breathing hitched, and she pressed the gun to the side of her head. "No, don't look! She doesn't want to remember that! She's bad, and stupid!"

"No, Little Sister, it's alright," Shepard said, a pang of desperation inching into her voice, her posture. "You survived sixteen years in a batarian slave-pen. You're stronger than a lot of people. You're... you're strong. You survived. That means you're strong," she said, and she tried to fight through the weakness of her own voice. The former slave looked up at her, and the gun fell from her temple, but her look told that she was about to point it at a different head.

"She's _not_ strong! She's weak, and stupid! All humans are!" she shouted at Shepard. "That's what the masters say."

"The masters are wrong. They were lying," Shepard said. Almost begged.

"She... sees them. Mommy and Daddy and sister, with all their reds coming out. They can't even say anything to her! They try to save her but the masters kill them. Put their reds out. They're dead, Aimei," she said, the gun again pressed to her head, but this time, not barrel first. "Can she stop remembering now? _Please_?" Shepard managed to beat a sob just barely, and moved to the battered woman's side. "No, please don't touch her. She's dirty; you'll _catch it_!"

"It's alright. I'm pretty sure I've already got 'it'," Shepard said to her, tears now leaking out freely. The girl just tucked her arms around her knees and shivered in her corner, as Shepard sat down right beside her, on the side with the gun. "I was on Mindoir. I lost my parents to the batarians the same time you did," Shepard said. "My father was gunned down. My sister was killed moments from... from safety," Shepard said, her words hitching as a sob actually broke free.

"_Lying_. You get _hit_ for lying. Get the buzz or the burning," the woman said, her tones faint, even as their vehemence was clear. But then her eyes turned to Shepard, and they sparked with the first anger that there'd been since Shepard walked in the door. All the rest was fear, mortal terror. Not this. "Why are _you alive_! Why are you... Why aren't you like _her_? Broken and... and only fit to dig and carry. "Why aren't _you_ broken!"

Shepard had an answer to that, but it sounded so hollow in her mind. So scripted. That she fought for years to beat Mindoir. To fight back against the batarians at every opportunity. But... her soul had a different answer, and that was the one that came out.

"I _am_ broken," Shepard said. Admitted. To herself. Her chin dropped into her chest, and her shoulders started to quake as she admitted something that she had tried so hard, for so long not to believe. Something which had put its weight onto her for decades. "I couldn't take it. I... I betrayed everybody. I _should_ have saved them all. I had the power! But I was too scared and..." Shepard said, weeping openly. "I just wanted my little sister to be alright. But I _couldn't even do that_."

"See. The masters..."

"I'm not going to let them hurt you," Shepard said, even through her tears. "No matter what. They're gone, and **I'm not going to let them hurt you**."

The last words hit the air as with the voice of a thousand as white intruded on her vision, and they dared the universe to say any differently.

"If Aimei got broken, what chance does she have? She's not big. She's small. She's small and she's weak, and the big always hit the small and weak," the woman asked.

Shepard answered her by pulling her close, and the woman didn't even complain. She just wrapped arms around Shepard as well, each crying into the other's shoulder. "**Because I am going to ****make**** the galaxy fair**," Shepard swore, and the white faded away.

Shepard couldn't have said how long they stayed there, in the corner of the hospital room, crying like terrified children. Which, in a lot of ways, both were. But even that died down, and the tension Shepard had been fighting slipped back into place. A little bit more wiggle room, perhaps – she wasn't dancing on a razor-edge anymore, just an axe-head – but still there.

"Are you going to be alright?" Shepard asked, slowly pulling the gun from the woman's yielding hand.

"She's scared," the woman said.

"If you let the others close like this, they can help you. They aren't going to hurt you. I promise," Shepard said, her voice still in after-shocks.

"Will... she still have bad dreams?" she asked.

"I don't know," Shepard told her. "If you want, they can help you sleep, the kind that doesn't have dreams."

The door slid open a little bit, and Shepard beckoned in faintly. The turian doctor tossed a bottle toward Shepard, who caught it easily. "She doesn't want to remember in her dreams. It hurts when..."

"I know," Shepard said.

"When _I_ remember me," the girl said, and she looked at the bottle. Shepard shook a pill into her hand. "_I_ had an Aimei once. She was strong like you."

"What do you mean?" Shepard asked, as the girl put the pill into her mouth and dry-swallowed it. She started looking drowsy almost immediately.

"I had a name," the girl said, with just a little smile. "Tal-li-tha..."

"What?" Shepard asked, but her eyes were already pulling closed. Shepard felt that lurch in her stomach again. She skinned back the eye. Now that she thought about it, those eyes were extremely familiar; she saw them in the mirror every morning. And her name...

"Thank the spirits. That was a close one," the turian said.

"Her name. Talitha?" Shepard asked. "My sister was..."

"What is it?" the turian asked when Shepard trailed off.

Because honestly, some part of her snapped.

"I've got to go," Shepard said, her voice breaking again.

"Wait, I've got to..." the turian said.

"Do it on your own!" Shepard shouted, as she outright ran from the room. She didn't even see the crowd she barged through. And she didn't even notice how when she leapt across the Presidium lake, she did it in one bound, all in the desperate bid to run from a truth which, with everything else, was too much.

Talitha Shepard was alive.

And Aimei Shepard couldn't handle it anymore.

* * *

The shakes were bad. Worse than they'd been in a long time. His mouth felt like it was on fire, but that was just par for the course. It was a project in willpower that Grayson had spent the money on food instead of a bag to dust up. Mostly because he knew, if he spent the money like an idiot, he wouldn't be the only one going hungry.

"You should eat, Jun. You haven't been eating lately," he said. The girl just stared at her plate. She hadn't said a word in days, but then again, she sometimes did that. She just stared, and he wondered what was going on inside her head. Probably something beyond his ability to comprehend. He was just a beat-up old junkie, after all. She was the prodigy. She was important. "Come on, Jun. Do it for me?"

The pale girl with her dark hair slowly turned to him, then nodded slowly, before mechanically eating her food. The entire galaxy seemed to be pressing down on Grayson, but at the moment, he had Junko, and that meant he would have to be stronger than the galaxy itself. He stared out the window, trying to drink coffee from a trembling hand. Not because it helped, but because he needed to do something. Something to keep him sharp.

"Papa." Jun said. Crisp. Clean. He turned to her. She had stopped eating, but her hands were still on the plate. "This place isn't... I don't know this place. I don't like it."

"I know Jun," Grayson said, trying to smile without showing the faint glow of his teeth. "But it's just temporary. I'll find some safe place for you."

"I want to go back home," she said. For all she spoke like a petulant child, she was almost a teenager. Then again, most near-teens didn't have quite the degree of Autism that Junko'd had since the day she was born. Grayson moved to her side, and his hand half-moved toward her, shaking as it did so. There was a splat on the ground, and Junko flinched as though somebody hit her. Grayson looked down and saw coffee dribbling from his unsteady cup to the floor. He set the cup down quickly. There was little which made Junny more anxious than disorder and discord.

"We can't go home. It's not safe back there," Grayson said, slowly placing a hand on her shoulder. She let it sit there, and he gave her a little squeeze. "If we go there, then bad-men will find us, and take you away from me."

"I don't want them to take you away. You're good," she said, quietly.

"No, no I'm not," Grayson said. "I'm just trying to take care of you."

"...you're good," Jun said again, before returning to eating. He stood up and stepped behind her so that the violent tic he felt tear through his body and made him spasm a bit didn't happen in front of her. God-damn-it-all. Every neuron in his brain screamed for more red sand. And he couldn't afford it. Not just in terms of money, but in terms of focus.

He moved to the door, leaving his coffee behind. It wasn't calming his nerves, and was making Jun's worse for the mess. This place, for all it was a two-cred-a-night dive in the Upper Zakera about the size of a Kowloon's cockpit, it was orderly, and pristine. He'd come back to find it like that. Leave Junko in a room, and see how clean it would get. No, that wasn't quite right. See how _ordered_ it'd get.

Grayson kept thinking back to that conversation he'd had, not so long ago. When the cost finally hit him. When he knew he had to run. It'd been a wet day. He'd gone to Illium, to see if Liselle was willing to talk to him again. After what he'd done to her last time, he expected that she'd show him the door, if not the business end of a shotgun. Instead...

"Grayson? What are you doing here?" Liselle asked, confusion clear on her face. Grayson gave her the same shy, close-mouthed smile that he always did. After all, unlike asari, humans weren't supposed to have a blue tinge to their teeth.

"I..." Grayson began.

"Look at this place, all of those fish. They all swim together! How do they not bump into each other? The pillows are all out of order. You should fix that," Junko barged in, giving orders, then turned left and headed for the bathroom. The asari of the house gave her the most bewildered look, then turned back to him with a baffled shrug.

"...I'm back," he said lamely.

"Who is that?" Liselle asked, instantly in her weary and running-out-of-patience-with-Grayson's-bullshit tone. Grayson sighed, leaning forward against the doorframe, and finally had the courage to look her in the eye.

"That's... That's Junko. I'm taking care of her, and I need a place to stay," Grayson said.

"After all that you put me through, you just show up on my doorstep and tell me that you have a human child under your wing and expect to sleep under my roof?" she asked.

"...yes?"

"You're lucky you're so pretty, Grayson. Otherwise I'd have you shot," Liselle just shook her head at the absurdity of it. Grayson took a step inside the door, and she closed it immediately after him. "I notice that you don't have your creepy friend with you. I have to say, a yammering girl is a step in a better direction."

"Junko has a disease. She doesn't think like you or me," he said, looking toward the bathroom where she'd gone. "Sometimes, she doesn't seem like she can talk at all. It tears at me."

"You're just acting all caring and compassionate to get a fresh crack at the azure. I know you too well," she said. "Coffee?"

"Please," he said. She bade him sit down, and as soon as she did, Liselle pulsed with blue light, and Grayson felt himself being pinned into place against the stool at her kitchen table. She reached over and skinned back his eyes, then peeled down his lips. She looked surprised at what she saw, before she released him. "Lis, what the fuck!"

"You _haven't_ been sandblasting," Liselle muttered, her tone amazed.

"I saw what the other guys were doing to Junko. She couldn't take it. I just took her back. And she needs me better than... well..."

"Than when you almost drown in your own vomit on my bedroom floor," Liselle asked. She moved around the table, and guided him from the stool to the couch which faced the curved windows facing over the skyscape of Illium, facing opposite the door. There were other apartments above hers with similar views. But hers, that open space and the open kitchen, the rooms to one side, that was a house he could navigate blind.

It was the only one which would still open its doors to him.

"What happened? Completely, now. I think at this point, I deserve to know," the asari asked.

Grayson considered what he could tell her, or in fact should. But the fact was, Liselle opened her door. "I'm leaving Phoenix," he said quietly. She raised her thin, dark-blue brows at that. "I can't stay in there, with those people, with the things they do, not and take care of Junny. I mean... they half-pay my wages in sand. _Half_. I'm not a strong man, Lis. I don't know if I could take that... that temptation. I need to get out. And I can't get out unless I know Junny's safe."

The look on Liselle's face was pure sympathy. "You're serious about the girl, aren't you?" she asked.

"I've done a lot of bad shit," Grayson said. He looked up at her. "You know better than most. But with Jun, I've finally got a chance to do something good. I want to... to not fuck that up. I want that more than _anything_."

"Fine. You can stay in my home," she said, as though it were a weighty an exasperating expectation upon her. She thrust a finger toward him. "But if you think you're getting in my bed tonight, you've got another thing coming."

"I wouldn't even think about it," Grayson said, his hands up before him in a protective gesture. Of course, she went back on those words, later that evening, after Junko was asleep in Liselle's spare bedroom. There was just something about that asari woman that... Grayson could just never get enough of. For the longest time, he never knew what it was. Only later, only when she was gone, did he know. It was her strength. She was stronger than he was, and she used that strength for him instead of against him. Who wouldn't be attracted to that?

Grayson's attention returned to the present, and the flop-house in the Zakera ward, a quarter of a galaxy from the warmth and the splendor of Illium. He'd eaten with the gods, and been cast down among the worms. Such a life, he'd had. And when he found her... He didn't want to think about that.

There was a clatter, followed by a yelp and a crash. Grayson turned, and found that the mostly-empty plate of formed protein and potatoes had been embedded half it's diameter into the far wall, neatly bisecting a cockroach the size of Grayson's fist. Junko was floating above the floor, blue light surging out of her, her hair dancing as though suspended in water, and her eyes were focused and unblinking.

"Junny? Junny, it's alright. It's just a bug, and it's dead now," he said, taking her hand. She cast that hand toward him, and Grayson felt himself being pushed back. At least, until he thought with such strength and intensity that it almost pulled a muscle in his neck, and there was a crack in the field she pushed him with. In terms of power, Grayson was less than a thousandth of what Junko was – not surprising as his biotics were an acquired ability rather than one he was born with – but any resistance was enough to pull Junko's eyes toward him. She flinched, and fell back to the floor, the blue glow that bathed the room vanishing as though somebody turned off a switch. "Papa. Did I hurt you?"

"No," Grayson said, pushing himself up the wall. Damn, it hurt to do that. And the shakes got all the worse in the aftermath. There was a little voice in the back of his head telling him that if he just got a little bit of sand – half a dose. Even a quarter! – then he'd have the shakes under control. He knew better than to trust that voice. A quarter would become a half. A half would become two. Two would become five, and then, when he was passed out and his brain ate his fat, who would look after Junko? "I'm fine."

"You're not fine. I hurt you..." she said, her eyes fluttering, her hands twitching like she didn't know what to do with them. And honestly, she probably didn't.

"We'll find some other place. Some place without roaches. Will that be better?" Grayson asked, reaching out and taking her fumbling hand. As soon as she did, she took the other and held it tight, her eyes not rising to his. They very seldom did, after all.

"I want to go home," Junko said. "Or the place with the balconies. Or the place with the fish. Where things were..."

She didn't have the words.

"It's going to be alright, Junny. I promise," Grayson said. Probably lied. It was just as well that he had to move. Because for all that remarkably attractive if somewhat unsettling woman from Samsara said she might have an out, some safe place for Junko to live in peace from whatever Phoenix wanted of her... he didn't have much faith that she'd be able to come through on it. After all, Phoenix was large, its grasp broad, and its eyes, sharp.

But if there was one thing Grayson was good at, it was staying out of sight. It'd served him ever since he got his addiction, and it'd serve him now.

* * *

To say that Conrad lit up like a holiday decoration when he saw her coming was overestimating the brightness of holiday decorations. While she wasn't wearing her usual armor – or in fact any armor whatsoever – he still knew her in a heartbeat. "Commander Shepard!" he called out to her, waving her down as she beat a bee-line toward the transit to the Zakera Ward. "Can I talk to you for a second?"

"No. Go away," Shepard said over her shoulder, before taking a deep drink from something which Conrad rather thought looked like a whiskey bottle. But he dismissed that claim, as the Shepard he knew wasn't a public alcoholic. Thus, with the naïve enthusiasm of a sugar-loaded kitten, and with half of the sense, he jogged until he got in front of her, and turned to engage her that way. And while her eyes did look bloodshot, and her clothing disheveled, he figured that she was probably still at about sixty percent, which was about a hundred and twenty of somebody like him.

"Commander Shepard, I have something I want to run by you," Conrad said, walking backward to keep pace with Shepard's advance.

"Go away."

"I was just thinking, with the human colonies getting attacked all the time, I thought that one Spectre just wasn't enough," Conrad said, striking his palm with a fist. "So what if you signed me on as another Spectre?"

"...are you out of your fucking mind?" Commander Shepard asked. "Why would _you_ want that?"

"Just give me a chance to show the Council what humanity could do. I can make them proud, just like you did," Conrad pleaded. He bumped into a turian who gave him a dirty look, but continued his backward advance. "I just know I have what it takes to be a great Spectre!"

"You _are_ out of your fucking mind," Commander Shepard said, taking another pull of her bottle of couldn't-possibly-be-whiskey.

"I want to be at your side, fighting against the enemies of humanity, just like you did on Torfan!" Conrad begged. "Just give me a ch..."

He was cut off when Shepard grabbed him by the collar, and hurled him hard against a railing that overhung a long drop of a stairwell. He almost overbalanced, and he sighed with relief when Shepard grabbed his shirt once again, arresting his slip toward a twenty meter plummet that he would have made head first. He didn't even register the crash of breaking glass, but he did smell the alcohol which now dripped down the fall past his head.

"You saved me! How could I ever thank you for..." Conrad began.

Then he had a gun pointed at his face, and the bloodshot eyes of Commander Shepard were, beyond any doubt of even Verner's hero-worshiping mind, murderous.

"You have no _FUCKING IDEA_ what Torfan was like," Shepard screamed at him, glaring down the sights of her pistol. "To have suicide bombers rushing at you with satchel charges! Waves of four eyed fucks gunning down your oldest friends! But I figure this is about as close to that feeling that I can make. Do you like it? DO YOU?"

"Wha-Why are you doing this?" Conrad screamed up at her. Even from the corners of his vision – those which weren't locked on his hero dangling him over a cliff and pointing a gun at him to drive the point ruthlessly home – could see that a great many people on this part of the Wards were dispersing rapidly, obviously not wanting to have anything to do with what was going on here.

"I thought that you were one of Saren's goons. But you're too fucking stupid for that. You're pathetic, and weak, and you'd die in a _heartbeat_. You don't like having a gun in your face? Tough shit! I get one in mine on a daily basis. So. Stop. Fucking. Following. Me."

She then heaved Conrad up, and hurled him to the floor, letting him curl into the fetal position in a bid to protect himself from a blow which wasn't coming. "I don't understand! I thought you were a hero!"

He didn't see the look in her eye, when she stared down at him. But he did hear her words. "...there's no such thing."

It wasn't until five minutes after she walked off, leaving Conrad shivering in a puddle of his own urine, that he even thought about standing up.

* * *

Wrex had many things going for him, which helped him reach his august nine hundred years of life. Discounting the petty physicalities, as he did, the two which served him the best were his nose for trouble, and his ability to walk away when things got too damned hot. The former was leading him far, far from the Presidium today, toward the tip of the Zakera Ward. Most people would think that the 'Upper' Ward would be the part more prestigious, the part more glamorous, the part kept safer and cleaner and presentable. The truth was quite the opposite. The 'Lower' Wards, in every case, were the better of the two, for the simple reason that, when viewed from the Presidium, the Upper Wards were farther away, higher to their perspective.

To be put bluntly, the further you were from the Presidium, the less you mattered, and _everybody_ knew it.

Wrex walked the streets of the Upper Zakera as a man immune, but still cautious. After all, every Ward had its particular evils. Bachjret was the place you went if you didn't mind catching every disease that could live on a penis. Teyseri was where you went if you were flexible enough of faith and fragile enough of mind to get 'inducted' into one of the hundred cults that flourished in that stink-hole. The neighboring Kithoi and Aroch Wards were always vying for the title of 'most heinous drug-den in the galaxy'. Of course, both lost to Omega, but neither would admit that. Zakera? That was just a place to get shot and robbed. Probably in that order.

"Hey. You got any red sand?" a weasily little human, probably not out of his teens, asked.

"Do I look like a dealer to you?" Wrex asked, as he continued to walk.

"You might," he pressed. "Come on. Just a hit. A sixer!"

"If you want a sixer, I can give you six knuckles to the face," Wrex raised both fists to prove his intention. The addict gave a yelp and darted back into the filth that he'd appeared from. Yes, while a lot of the addicts gravitated to Kithoi and Aroch, you could find them just about anywhere in the Upper Wards. They were just another obstacle in his path, one he followed on a mixture of experience and intuition. He asked himself one simple question. If he were a human who snapped and wanted to drink herself to death, where would he go?

"Kreee! Look at the crest on that one!" the lizard parrot squawked from Wrex's hump, where it clung angrily.

"Shuddup," Wrex told the bird, and then looked down the street again. Oh, there it was. The answer to the question he asked himself appeared in the form of a bar, and not a very pleasant one. The name, if translated from the pulses of light that were its true and hanar name would be 'the joy of the Enkindlers' Light manifested,' or some such nonsense. A soul name of the first owner, who was now probably long lost into the protein vats. Most locals just called it 'The Light' and left it at that. Wrex approached, hitching the pouch that he left hanging from his shoulder a little higher into place, and made for the door. He had to pause, though, as another krogan barged the door open, and then hurled a turian fully ten meters out into the street. He was saved from being hit by an airtaxi by the slimmest of margins.

"And don't come back 'till you can actually pay, or we'll get the cost out of your hide!" the krogan shouted. Jorgal from his brow-plate; only the line of Kahlmorah ever manifested _blue_, and from the cracks and missing shards, it was naturally so. The Jorgal krogan looked Wrex up and down. Probably taking stock of Wrex's ancestry and his breeding; the Jorgal were fairly sticklers for that sort of thing. "You've got business here, Urdnot?"

"That depends," Wrex said. "Have you seen a human?"

"I've seen lots of humans," he muttered, cutting Wrex off. Not wise. "More than I'd like."

"Orange hair. Green eyes..." the krogan crossed his arms, not impressed or even interested. "Probably drinks as much as you do."

"Oh. Her," he said. He backed inside the room, and let the door stand open. "Cause any trouble, and we'll see who's plate is thicker."

"I relish the chance," Wrex said dismissively, and his eyes swept the bar. He found her, wearing dirty civilian clothing, at the bar. She had a bottle in her hand, and it looked mostly empty. There was a drell, of all things, sitting next to her.

"You're just bitchin' cause you're too scared t'do something about it," Shepard's dangerously slurring voice sounded against the unpleasant music that they played at far too high a volume in this place. It certainly explained the Jorgal's temper; if Wrex had to stay in a place like this for a nine hour shift, he'd be hurling turians _fifteen_ meters, not just ten.

"I believe you're right," the drell said, in answer to a question that Wrex only heard the end of. "Maybe I should... explore his life more thoroughly. This has been very... informative."

"You're drunk."

"So are you," the blue-ish scaled drell said, and then half-fell off of his stool, before staggering toward the door. Wrex just shook his head at the absurdity of it, then grabbed one of the thicker, more structurally sound stools from the tables to one side, before plunking it down atop the stool already in place. It was that composite structure, the two together, that Wrex bothered to sit on. After all, the little one would have just gone straight up his ass, and that wouldn't be of use to _anybody_.

He got a good look at her, before he said anything. He'd seen Shepard in a lot of states. Smug. Pleased. Violent. He even had the dubious distinction of seeing Shepard on an unmitigated and unrivaled murderous bender. But this? This was new. He was seeing Shepard grey, stricken, and beaten. Her eyes stared through the bartender, through the wall behind that hanar, and through the arm of the Citadel itself. She looked like hell.

"_What may this one bring the fine krogan customer_?" the hanar which was simultaneously pouring one drink while shaking another asked.

"Kreeee! Squishy things make for good eating!" Wrex's pet announced, to a flicker of alarm from the hanar. Sometimes, Wrex honestly wondered how smart these things were. At the very least, they were probably smarter than some of the vorcha and mercenaries he'd worked with over the years.

"Ryncol and mustard," he said. The hanar freed two of its tentacles to bring out a thick glass flask of the brutally rough krogan liquor, and then a plastic squeeze bottle of the condiment, before quickly withdrawing. He uncapped the flask, and took a deep breath. Disappointingly mellow, but how could he expect more of Citadel brewery? So he forced a squeeze of mustard into it. Might not be the same, but it'd give it some sort of bite. Finally, Shepard turned toward him.

"...the _fuck_ you doin'?" she asked, not even recognizing him from the blank look in her eyes.

"Needs an extra kick," Wrex said. He then took a swill of the concoction that any other species in the galaxy would call an insult to, if not a desecration of, the very _idea_ of a mixed drink. Eh. He'd had better. "Shepard."

"Wrex?" she asked, finally seeming to get enough coherence to have her eyes focus. "...th'fuck you doin' here?"

"I've been doing a lot of thinking," Wrex said, pulling the pack off of his hump and letting it sit on the floor. From the pack, he pulled a tube, metal capped but glass-sided. Folded inside was the grey-blue shape of a turian arm, pickled in organic embalming fluid. The hanar let out a flicker of light, so Wrex turned to him. "You haven't seen anything."

"_This one has no idea of to what the valued customer refers. This one has seen nothing of note or interest_," it said, before floating away with all of the haste that a floating pink jellyfish was capable of. Shepard stared at it.

"That's Saren's arm," she said, probably because she was having a hard time forming more informative thoughts. Drunks tended to be like that.

"You look like shit! Kreee!" the bird announced. Wrex reached up and gave it a flick which sent it spinning away, until it latched onto a wall and called angrily at him.

"Yes, it is," Wrex said. "I was staring at it, wondering if I should eat it to prove a point. Of course, I remembered the last time I ate a dextro-alien; a quarian's hearts, about six hundred years ago. I had the shits for a week," he waved the point away. "The point is... This is something that I've just got to let go."

"What?" Shepard asked, obviously not grasping.

"I'm going back to Tuchanka," Wrex said with a nod. "I'm going back, and I'm going to change things. This time, I'm not going to play nice. I'm going to crack my idiot brother's head hard enough that he doesn't stop rolling 'till he's in Weyrloc territory, then I'm taking the planet by the quad and dragging it into the future whether it wants it or not."

"And you needed to tell me this... why?" the drunken Shepard asked, motioning with her bottle, before giving a start, realizing she was holding it, and then draining the last third of it in one pull. It'd be impressive, if Wrex wasn't _pretty_ sure that she was giving herself liver damage doing it.

"Because I'm leaving in two weeks," he said. She gave him a bleary stare. "It's not as easy as you'd think to get transport to Tuchanka from the Citadel these days. We krogan aren't exactly popular. I thought you deserved to know that I wasn't going to be there in the end."

"But you said..." she trailed off as she slumped slightly, and then pointed at Wrex with an empty bottle. "You said that you weren't gonna rest 'till Saren was a smear!"

"I did say that," Wrex nodded. "And honestly? I was hot-blooded when I did. Wasn't thinking clearly. There's a time and a place for vendettas, Shepard. Right now, Saren's the most hated, reviled, and wanted turian in the galaxy. He's got a hammer the size of the Citadel swinging at him, and he's going to get crushed under it. Hell, it'll have an easier time, 'cause he's only got one arm left to catch it with," Wrex chuckled, giving a gesture toward the capsule with Saren's limb floating within. "This is something that I'm going to have to walk away from. Every cell that's krogan tells me to hunt him down, tear his head off, and eat him. But every cell that's krogan is kind of the problem," he leaned forward, emptying the vile mixture into his maw to give himself a moment.

Shepard didn't ask the question he expected, but that was only because she slumped onto the bar for a moment, her eyes glassy. Wrex raised a brow at her, and gave her a rude shove. She slid right off of the stool and landed flat on her back. The impact as enough to kick-start her heart into beating again; the krogan'd been a little worried when he felt that arrhythmia happening. "Don' you fucking dare you four eyed..." she swore as she scrabbled at the air. Then, she blinked, and looked up at Wrex. "...why am I on the floor?"

Wrex gave her a hand, and pulled her back onto her seat. As he was doing so, he quietly took her side-arm away and attached it to his own hip. She'd had enough to drink today, that much was obvious. "The society that the krogan have built in the last three thousand years is destroying us, inch by bloody inch. And that is going to change. Either because I force it to, or because we go extinct. My grandfather believed in the krogan, believed in Tuchanka. And I'm starting to think I understand why. It wasn't that he saw something noble in the krogan. We're brutes, Shepard. We're animals with guns and impulse control problems. We're not noble," he shook his head, and then when Shepard half slumped, he grabbed her shoulder and pulled her attention back to him. "_But_," he stressed. "All it would take to change that is _one_... noble... krogan. Grandfather needed the example to follow. He didn't have one. I do, in him. Tuchanka _will_ change. I will _make it_."

"Great," Shepard slurred. Then she turned to the hanar even as Wrex put Saren's arm away. "Another bottle."

"Nope. She's cut off," Wrex said in her wake.

"No I ain't. I can drink as much as I..." she said, pawing for her gun. "Wait a minute. I had a..."

"Sleep it off," Wrex said.

"Don't you walk away. I'm... I deserve..." Shepard began.

"You're a soldier who couldn't face her own past. I don't give a nathaks ass what you _think_ you deserve," Wrex said, but not brutally. "When you can stand up and look me in the eye... we'll talk. 'Till then, I've got things to do."

Wrex smiled. "I've got a destiny," he said. And honestly, he believed it.

Shepard answered him by falling off her stool again, and this time, it was into utter unconsciousness. Wrex shook his head at her. She was shook. She might get over it, or she might not. That'd be the true test of her character. And sadly, Wrex probably wouldn't be around to see it. He'd regret missing Saren's messy end, but this had to happen. He got up, and looked around the room. He spotted the Jorgal, standing off to one side. He stomped up to his fellow krogan.

"You know where she's sleeping?" Wrex asked.

"Yeah," the Jorgal gave a nod which said roughly 'across the street in that really seedy looking motel'. "What of it?"

"Take her back to her room and make sure she doesn't drown in her own vomit," Wrex said. The Jorgal gave Wrex's shoulder a push.

"And why would I do that?" he demanded. Wrex grabbed that arm and twisted, heaving the krogan 'round in a circle till he went face-first into the wall. The other bouncer, a human, stayed well back, not sure what to do. After all, problems with krogan tended to be sorted out by krogan bouncers. And the krogan bouncer was currently the one having the problem. Wrex torqued the arm a little higher. He knew from personal experience that a little more, and it'd come out of its socket. Not debilitating, but very painful.

"Because I _asked you nicely_," Wrex said quietly into the Jorgal's ear. He leaned aside, so that the blue-capped krogan could look into his eye. "You _don't_ want me to order you."

The Jorgal blinked first. Of course he did. Wrex didn't blink at all. Wrex let the Jorgal go, and gave him a bit of a shove in Shepard's direction, before giving a whistle to his pet, and having it immediately fly back to him and grab 'hold of his hump. She might be flat on her back, but Wrex owed her at least this much.

"Hey, Jolocaster, I'm taking this one to sleep it off."

"_Your service to the clientele is above reproach_," the hanar informed the muttering krogan. Possibly sarcastically. But the Jorgal did do what Wrex demanded, and carried Shepard, draped over his hump like a bag of millet, across the street.

In that moment, Urdnot Wrex for the first time believed that he might actually have a chance.

* * *

"Officer on deck!" Pressly snapped to salute when Anderson appeared through the airlock. The old Tribesman gave a mild sigh; after all, he was in his civvies, and at the moment, had little patience for the pomp of his rank.

"At ease, Samnai, I'm not here on official business," Anderson said. Pressly let his salute drop, but still locked step with Anderson as the two of them made their way down the spine of the Normandy from within.

"Regardless, it's good to have you back aboard the Normandy, even in a non-official capacity. I've been holding down the deck since Shepard went off the grid," the white-haired XO stated.

"I know about that. I saw her run," Anderson gave him a nod. The two stopped before the rotating holographic map of the galaxy for a moment. "Do you know much about your current CO, Samnai?"

"Pressly, please," he asked. Pressly always was the formal one. "Honestly, not much but the scuttle-butt that floats around below decks. Drinking problem, Alenko as a romantic partner, anger issues with batarians. But any commander with less than three massive character flaws isn't fit for command in my opinion. There's something about those perfect poster-boys that just doesn't inspire confidence."

"That 'if she can do it, with all of her problems, so can I'?" Anderson asked. Pressly gave him a nod, and the two continued toward the lower decks. "Understandable. But still, problematic. I assume she's made no effort to contact the ship, or Alliance Command?"

"Not even a whisper," Pressly said. "I'm starting to think she's gone AWOL. Which is ridiculous, since she's a Spectre now, and that means she's 'always on duty', but still."

"What's your opinion on the Saren situation?" Anderson asked.

"I've seen Sovereign in action. That thing cut apart a building that needed a nuke to crack, otherwise. If Saren's got that thing working to its utmost, Reaper or not, he's a major problem," Pressly said, and they descended all the further, into the lower level of the ship.

"That comes as no surprise," Anderson muttered. "How soon do you think you'll have the Normandy ready to send back out into the fight?"

"It's not a matter of when; it's ready now," Pressly said. "Say what you will about the aliens, but they've got a solid work-ethic. And Tali'Zorah's help down in the engine room has helped dramatically."

"Speaking well of aliens. That's a turn for you," Anderson pointed out. Pressly stared straight ahead, waiting for the elevator doors to open. When they didn't, and he had to break the silence, he simply answered with...

"Some of them earned it."

"Fair enough," Anderson let the topic lie. The bulkhead opened, and showed the lower deck. Asha was still working on fixing Shepard's armor, and from the look of it, it was all done but the painting, which was purely cosmetic. The Si Wongi glanced to him, recognized him, and managed to quickly set aside her work and snap to a salute every bit as rigid as Pressly's had been. "At ease, child. I'm off the clock."

Unlike Pressly, Asha's posture returned to true normal instead of what passed for 'at ease' with Pressly. "What brings you back into the Normandy?" she asked, taking a step back so she was level with Shepard's armor.

"Looking for the woman herself," he gave a nod toward that armor, and let the rest speak for itself.

"That is the great mystery of the day," Asha said, and not happily. "Compounded by other mysteries."

"How so?" Anderson asked. Asha took a step to the locker which had Urdnot Wrex's name rune crudely drawn onto it. She opened the locker, and showed that it was barren and empty. "That's odd."

"He is gone. His things and his pet are gone with him. Shepard will probably wish to speak to him, but that is the business of she, and not myself," Asha said. "The other is doctor T'Soni. She, too, is missing, though she has not taken her possessions with her."

"She might be out looking for her," Pressly said. Anderson raised a brow, and the old XO gave a mild sigh. "The other scuttle-butt that I was talking about? That Shepard was romantically partnered with miss T'Soni."

"I see," Anderson said. He shook his head. "If I only had the clout, I'd scour the Citadel to find her. The last time I saw her as upset as she was in that hospital was right after Torfan, when her drinking went from problematic to suicidal. I'm worried about her," the Tribesman admitted.

"A lot of us are," Pressly agreed, his voice soft, a message in private between two old soldiers.

Their introspection was broken by a scream. All three humans in the bay had their guns out and pointed down the hallway toward engineering by the time the scream terminated by a meaty thwack, and a lot of laughter. Then, there came the swearing. Lots and lots of swearing.

"_Run_! She's gonna _kill_ us!" one of the Engies declared, dead-sprinting to the elevator and pounding it's open key. The stream of quarian ranting that followed the next three down the hall was so blue that even without Anderson being able to understand it, he knew that she was outraged beyond all sense. The three, one of which was barely conscious and had a broken nose and being borne by the other two, entered the elevator and started closing the door just as Tali rounded the bend and pointed at them, screaming one final angry thing, before hurling what looked like a rubber spider at them. She managed to peg one of them, but any further rage was cut off by the door closing and cutting her off from them. Her shoulders heaved as she stared, anger clear even through a translucent faceplate.

"Tali? Are you alright?" Asha asked, her rifle now pointed at the deck. Tali turned slowly, reminding Anderson of nothing less than the serial killers from those old horror vids.

"This ship... is filled... with _bosh'tets_!" Tali declared, before turning back toward the engine-room, muttering under her breath the whole way. The two old men shared a baffled glance, and then turned to Asha.

"That would be a long story," the Si Wongi woman said with a shake of her head.

* * *

There was something about taxi-rides that made Grayson reminisce. Maybe it was because he didn't need to think about where he was going, just that he'd get there. Maybe it was because he had nothing better to do. He pulled Junko a little closer, and she continued to stare straight ahead. Sometimes, he liked it when she was quiet. Other times, he wished she was a lot louder.

Was this what being a _real_ father was like? If it was, he hoped he never had any children. Caring for somebody even as self-sufficient as Junko was terrifying enough.

And he knew terrifying.

It was still raining that night on Illium. It hadn't let up. Then again, why would it? The monsoon season had set in, and blood-warm rain pounded down. Only the heights provided any relief from the wet heat. And that was if one wasn't providing wet heat of one's own. He found himself sitting with his back to the edge of the bed – on the floor, where they'd ended up – staring at the window that ran in sheets, causing the lights of the towers of Nos Laconae to break into a show of lights. Lis pulled herself to his side, the two of them staring out into the night. "Quite the view," she said, easily snaking an arm around his neck, leaning her head onto his shoulder.

"Best seats in the house," Grayson whispered. He sighed, and looked down at her. She had a little smile on her face. He liked it when she smiled. It brightened his day when she smiled. "Lis, I'm sorry."

"For what?" she asked.

"For all the shit I put you through. You didn't deserve that," he said, staring forward. He still had a craving gnawing at his palate, but he forced it down, and sat still. "And I'm sorry I didn't realize it sooner."

"That you were an addict drifting through life without purpose? Everybody ends up there at some point," Liselle offered with a smile. "A lot of asari spend a few _decades_ like that. It's the lessons you learn which are the important part, not the stupid things you did to learn them."

"You always know the right thing to say," he whispered to her.

"One of us should," she answered him.

"I could spend the rest of my life here," Grayson said quietly.

"You're just saying that 'cause you're post-coital. You'll come to your senses," Liselle said with a smirk, giving his face a shove, before she rose and quietly walked into the kitchen. Completely naked, but it was Liselle, and this was her house, so she had the right. Grayson, on the other hand, didn't feel any need to potentially scar an autistic girl with unexpected genitalia, so fished for his underwear amongst the pile of clothes which they'd made. Because of his proximity, he could hear the quiet sound of his Omni alerting him to an incoming call. He blinked a few times, then pulled his Omni on and answered.

"Do you have any idea what hour it is here?" Grayson asked, but was taken aback when the face staring back from the communication was of a human woman with very striking looks. She seemed to be perfectly proportioned in every way, so much so that it was a little bit unnerving. While she was pale as milk, she had the hair and eyes which spoke to a Tribal ancestry much like his own.

"Do you have any idea what how long we've been trying to contact you?" she asked. Her voice was regal and aristocratic, so whenever she came from the Water Tribes, it must have been at least two generations back and _why was he even thinking about this shit_?

Oh, right. He'd just got laid.

"Who are you and why are you calling me?" Grayson asked.

"I represent a group called Samsara. I'm sure you've heard of us," the woman said. "My name is Miranda Lawson."

"...Law_son_?"

"It's a long and _embarrassing_ story," Miranda said with a roll of her eyes. "I was told that you were the caretaker of Junko, a biotic which went missing from the Ascension Project several years ago. And before you ask, we are not inquiring as to _how_ you assumed this position."

"I am... Why?" he asked, now on edge.

"Samsara doesn't just represent medical research and weapons development. We have ways of learning things," she said, obviously hedging her bets. "And we've learned that she is in a degree of danger."

"Danger? From who?"

"Have you ever heard of a group called Phoenix?" Miranda asked.

"...a bit," Grayson lied. He'd been up to his nipples in it for _years_.

"The word is, they're looking to 'reacquire' her," she broke into a devious smile. "But I have some confidence that we can get her away before they know that we're even onto them."

Grayson gave a glance toward where Lis had walked off. "I'm listening, but make this quick."

"Why? Did I _interrupt_ something?" she asked with a remarkably teasing tone, given her job description.

"Just get on with it," he said.

"Very well. I can have Junko safe on Grissom Academy in three days, if you can get her to our offices on the Citadel. Where are you?"

"Illium. Why?"

"That could take some work," she said, frowning. "You should probably leave for the Citadel as soon as possible. Leave as much room between you and Phoenix as you can."

"That's just good advice in general," Grayson said.

"Oh, Graaaayson," Lis' voice came from the kitchen, which instantly distracted his attention. He wished he hadn't. Looking back, he wished he hadn't.

"I have to go. Presidium. Got it," he gave a nod.

"Mister Grayson, we haven't begun to..." she said, but was cut off when he turned off his Omni and left it on the floor. Another dumb move, in retrospect. He kipped out into the kitchen quickly enough, and found Lis sitting, her legs crossed, next to the kitchen table. She had a devious look on her face. One that promised mischief. And because she was naked, he had a fair idea that he'd enjoy that mischief.

"Why don't you sit right there," she said, rising to plunk Grayson in her place. "And I'll be right back out in a moment."

"You couldn't have done that while we were in there?" he nodded toward her room, which she was already sashaying toward.

"I want it to be a surprise," she said with a smirk thrown over a shoulder. Say what you would about Lis, she had aways of creating interesting and notable surprises. The kind that he wasn't about to say no to. The call he'd gotten almost completely slipped from his mind, as he began to spin an empty bowl under his finger, his anticipation mounting.

But there was a point where anticipation started to become something else. Worry. At first, he tried to convince himself that he was just being paranoid, that the call had spooked him. Even then, he thought it might be a good idea to leave now anyway. No reason Liselle couldn't come with them.

After a time that he couldn't have named, but considered 'too long', he rose from the seat. There was a tickling in the hairs of the back of his neck, something which he'd learned a long time ago from even the beginning of his junkie days was a warning of impending doom. Quietly, he crossed the distance of the house he could navigate blind – for this time, he essentially had to.

He pushed open the door with the tips of his fingers, and peeked in through a corner of his eye. He could see Lis, splayed out on the bed, easily enough. That wasn't surprising. And she was good at surprises. The surprise came when Grayson heard a drawer being pulled open, despite her being clearly in his line of sight. His eye twitched. She wasn't the only one in the room.

Even with his eyes as adapted to the dark as they were, he could still barely see. He pushed open the door, and took two steps into the room. The other would have to be at the other side of the room, lost in the shadows and the dark mass of Liselle's dresses. Why wasn't she reacting to this?

When he looked down at her... he got a surprise.

She was lying in a slowly growing pool of blue blood, which still oozed out of the gash which had been opened across her throat. He stared at her for a moment, agape. Not sure what to think. Hoping that this was some sort of nightmare. Then, his blood started to boil, and he could feel the synapses firing against the eezo which leeched through the blood-brain barrier and settled into his skull. He wanted to deny this. And the surest way, was to employ violence.

"You son of a bi–umph," Grayson roared as he hurled himself toward the indistinct form. He got a boot into his stomach for his trouble. It sent him stumbling back so that he tripped over Lis' discarded clothing and landed backward into her bed. And notably, directly into her blood. Grayson had never clawed his way up to his feet as fast in his life, only to be smashed in the teeth by a kick that hooked around the side and sent him sprawling.

There were stars flitting in his vision, a cone of darkness surrounding his already poor sight, when he felt somebody mounting the back of his torso, a fist closing in his hair.

"I know what you're trying to do, Grayson. I'm very disappointed," Kai Leng had said.

"You fucker! You didn't need to kill Lis!" Grayson roared.

"Quite the contrary," Kai Leng said, his tones utterly conversational. "She was going to be a problem. I don't like problems. You might even call me a problem-_solver_."

"She had nothing to do with this," Grayson hissed as he felt Kai Leng's khukri start to tap tauntingly against the side of his neck.

"Oh, Grayson, you poor idiot. You have _no idea_ what you got your dick into with her," he sounded positively droll. "I like to think that I'm doing you two favors. First, I'm saving you from her," he twisted his hand in the hair, forcing Grayson to stare at the cooling and still body of Liselle – the only woman who'd ever loved him. The knife returned more ardently to Grayson's neck, starting to prick through his skin. "And second, I'm saving you from _yourself_."

Even as the cut began, parting skin at the topmost layers of Grayson's neck, there was a pulse of brilliant blue light that erupted into the room. Grayson could see, just out of the corner of his eye, the small form at the center of that incandescence. Junko. She didn't say a word. She just cast out a hand, and with it, a blast of force that slammed Kai Leng off of Grayson's back, then through the wall behind him, culminating with the crash of glass. Grayson staggered to his feet, torn between his desire to make sure Kai Leng had fallen to his death, and to comfort Junko. Junko won.

After all, it wasn't like Kai Leng would be so kind as to die that easily.

"Junny? Junny, we have to go," Grayson said, moving toward her slowly. She settled onto her feet, but her eyes still glowed and were wide, terrified. "We can't stay here. It's not safe..."

"Why... why isn't Liselle moving?"

"It's too late," Grayson said, taking Junko's hand.

"Liselle was good. She's supposed to move," Junko said, and she held out a hand. The white light bathed over Liselle, and her body sat up. Grayson's eyes went wide as some tiny part of him hoped for the miracle. But there was no miracle. Liselle floated to her feet, held aloft by a scared little girl's biotic power. Her eyes were unseeing. Her neck stood open, and empty. Shiny, slick blood still painted her sides and back. "Why isn't she moving?"

Junko had never seen death before. "It's too late," Grayson said, forcing the ravenous pain down, so that he could rail and scream and bawl later. "She's not in there anymore. Liselle isn't here anymore."

"But... but I can see her, and she's supposed to move, and..." Junko didn't have the words.

"It's going to be alright," he said, pulling her into an embrace, heedless of how he got blood on her.

They'd fled that very hour, and hadn't stopped running since. He missed Lis already. Gods, but he missed her. And if he ever got the chance, he'd stick Kai Leng's knife up through his balls and into his guts. He'd earned it.

The portion of Zakera Ward they were entering was even more run-down and nihilistic looking than the last one they'd been to. But since going to the Presidum wasn't something that Grayson could do just any minute, not without drawing the wrong kind of attention, he'd have to figure out some way to think this all through. And to an addict, that took time. _Nobody_ was more resourceful than a drug-addict, after all.

"Is this the spot?" the cabbie asked. He was a turian, and a man of few words. He didn't ask questions, other than where they wanted to go, and he didn't try to keep up a conversation.

"I think so," Grayson said. The turian gave a nod, and set the taxi down toward the street-level, before settling at the curb next to a building which displayed a cheap room, rented by the hour. Classy. But if nothing else, it was private, and nobody would ask questions. Not even of a near-forty-year-old who went in there with a waif-like teenage girl. Which would have been more disturbing to Grayson if he'd spared a thought to the implications.

"Alright. That's ten credits and thirty nine."

"Right," Grayson said, pawing through his pockets for his credit-chit. If he'd not been in such a blind and stupid panic when he fled Illium, he'd have remembered his Omnitool. Instead, he had to dig. It took him damned near a minute to figure out which pocket had it, and not say the wallet full of false-ID and other people's stolen and cracked chits. When he finally did get it, he handed it to the cabbie, before turning to Junko. "Alright. This place might be unpleasant, but I promise you, we're not going to stay there long. Is that alright?"

Junko didn't say a word. She just stared forward. He laid a hand on her shoulder, and she almost unconsciously shrugged it away. So she was having one of those days, eh? Grayson turned to the turian, and opened his mouth to say something. But whatever it was that Grayson was going to say was lost for a tap at the window next to the turian's face.

"What is i–"

The turian was cut off by a gunshot that burst the window and splattered his brains into his passenger seat. Junko let out a shriek, clawing her way into the back corner of their shared back seat. Grayson was too stunned to do anything but gawk as a hand reached into the car, threw the door open, dragged the alien into the street, then hopped into the abandoned seat. There was a stomp of the accelerator, and the taxi rose up away from street level, until it was at least two hundred meters above the roads below. Only then did the carjacker take the time to close his door, and lean a look over his shoulder.

"Been a while, Grayson," Kai Leng said calmly, a very cold smile on his face.

* * *

There were thirteen million people living on the Citadel, by the most common census bureaus that canvased the neighborhoods and buildings of the stellar wonder of the galaxy. Of course, that number was severely low-balled, as there was no telling how many people the censuses didn't report. A conservative estimate put the population between fifteen and twenty. Every Ward was forty-four kilometers long, and ten wide, as well as a third of one deep, but that number was mostly for the sake of it having a requisite three dimensions. That was four hundred forty seven square kilometers of land that Aimei Shepard could have secreted herself in, amongst between fifteen and twenty million asari, aliens, and other humans. Anybody could have told Liara T'Soni that the statistical chance of finding Shepard if she didn't want to be found approached chance at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

That didn't deter Liara from walking up to a bar with a flickering hanar light-show above the door, with utter confidence that she'd picked not only the correct Ward, but the correct _portion_ of that Ward, the correct street, and the correct bar.

After all, it was just manipulating data.

"Excuse me? Have you seen a human?" Liara asked the blue-capped krogan who crossed his arms at her in front of the door.

"I've seen a lot of humans. More than I want to in the last few days," the krogan answered her.

"Well, I'm looking for a particular human," Liara tried to clarify. "She would be approximately my height, with hair the color of copper. Oh, and green eyes, freckles, and..."

"Oh. Her," the krogan muttered.

"You know where I can find Aimei?" she asked brightly.

"She's popular today," the krogan said. "Not the first time in my shift that somebody asked for her."

"Was it a turian with one arm?" the asari asked, worry instantly in her tone.

"No, it was a krogan... with one turian arm," the krogan said, chuckling at the end. He pointed across the street. "I dragged her sorry drunken ass over to her flop so she could sleep it off at the start of my shift. If you want her, you can have her. And you tell her if I see her come 'round here again, I'm not letting her in, I'm just going to knock her out and mail her to Shin Akiba."

"I don't know. I have heard rumors that she might enjoy that," Liara murmured. She looked up and offered a big grin to the krogan who looked in a sour mood. "Thank you for all of your help. You've been of great service."

"I'm just getting all the compliments tonight, ain't I?" the krogan asked sarcastically, before moving back aside the door, his arms still crossed. But Liara didn't offer him any more of her attention. She was already moving across the street, heedless of the traffic which buzzed just over head-level. The doors stood open, and the entire building, for all it had a fresh coat of paint, seemed to be fatigued and weary. Liara half guessed that if it were not constantly inhabited, the Keepers would have torn it down and replaced it long ago.

The entrance hallway was stark, and aged. There was a rug which was worn clear through in the middle that marched from the door to a stairway which began to circuit up to higher levels. Well, not really a rug. Two runners with golden tassels, really. She looked to the desk, and finding it unoccupied, smartly dinged the bell which was sitting on the orange-stained metal. She then waited.

After five minutes, she dinged the bell again.

Five minutes after that, she dinged it again.

"Alright, alright," a gasp, "I'm coming. Don't, " gasp, "start a fire out there."

The volus waddled into sight, craning back to look Liara in the eye. "Hello. I was told that somebody I know is staying here."

"I don't give out our guest book unless you're C-Sec _and_ you have a warrant," the volus said, walking up a little stairway behind the desk – she'd been wondering what that was for – so that he could face her on somewhat equal terms.

"Oh... Well, I am not, and do not, so that could be trouble," Liara said, a frown on her face. "But could you tell me which room Aimei Shepard is in?"

"What do you think this is? The Royal Aventine? I don't keep names," the volus waved that away derisively.

"...she would be as tall as me, with coppery hair, and..." the volus shrugged. "You do not remember her?"

"Why should I? I just provide the roof and the bed," he said.

"She was dragged in here by a krogan several hours ago," Liara said.

"...oh. Her," the volus said, looking away.

"Why does everybody say that about her?" Liara asked. But he ignored her question.

"If she wasn't so free with her money, I'd have kicked her out by now. She's a hazard. If you want my advice, dearie, stay away from her," he leaned on the desk, toward her. "After all, if you're looking for company, my own room is in much better shape than hers would be."

"Which room was she in?" Liara asked, utterly oblivious to his proposition, causing the volus to slump slightly.

"Forth floor, number eight," he said with a wave of his hand. She gave him a smile, then turned and made her way up the stairs. Once again, as it so often did in her life, the data had led her to the optimum solution. She was kicking herself, slightly, that she hadn't thought to invite Tali'Zorah or Garrus with her until she was already in the Lower Ward. She knew that they'd like to cheer Shepard up. Well, that just meant that Liara would have to try all the harder on her own!

The stairs passed quickly, and Liara found number eight – technically forty eight, but the fours on many of this floor's doors were long since peeled away. She gave the door a knock, and was mildly surprised when the door swung inward. Those sorts of doors didn't come around very often. Usually, they were slide-downs. Or slide-ups if they connected to somewhere that might be exposed to hard vacuum. She pushed the door open, and found that the room looked... well, trashed. She'd seen rooms this destroyed after the keggers that happened in her university at an alarming basis. Well, she'd seen _a_ room this destroyed.

There were dents in the walls, obviously where somebody punched it with a great deal of wrath. The mattress lay on the floor, as the bedframe had been snapped and reduced in some places to twisted metal. The closet door was laying against the pillows, which were near the far corner from Liara. And above that, she could hear a shower running.

"Shepard? Are you here?" Liara asked, as she entered the room. It didn't smell as much like vomit as the room from her university, but that was very little in the grand scheme of things. Since the Commander didn't seem to be hiding in the closet nor under the mattress, that left only one possible place. Liara took a calming breath, then opened the door to the bathroom. The steam wafted out, billowing to freedom from its incarceration in the tiny lavatory. As the vapor dissipated, she finally saw, standing stark against the dull and unadorned metal, the legs of Aimei Shepard. Following them up, past soaked underpants, past exposed waist and chest, she could see the woman who sat on the floor, at the bottom of the downpour of water, her eyes closed. Letting it hit her, and run off.

Liara moved closer, and reached toward Shepard. "Um... Shepard? Are you..." she got that far, before the woman herself slowly opened her eyes, and gave a glance toward her. "Alright. You _obviously_ are not alright."

"What is wrong with me, Liara?" Shepard asked, her voice small. Far smaller than Liara had ever heard it.

"I am not sure I understand your question," Liara said. The droplets that rebounded off of Shepard were starting to dampen Liara, but she ignored them.

"Look at me," she said, her words coming slowly. "I'm sitting half naked... in a run down shower... with a _gargantuan_ hang-over... because I got good news. Good. Fucking. News. What kind of person loses her shit like that?"

"You have been under a lot of stress recently," Liara offered. She reached forward again, and laid a comforting hand onto Shepard's shoulder. And Shepard didn't pull away, or recoil, or flinch. She just accepted it. "As unpleasant as it might be to say, at the rate you were pushing yourself, this might have been inevitable."

"Stress," Shepard said. "I... I cared about Kaiden. And now he's dead. But 'you know what's got me twisted up?" she asked. Liara shrugged. "I don't know _how_ I cared about him. Was I his friend? His l...lover? I don't know. I never got a chance to f-find out. And now he's dead," she said, her head lowering, and sobs wracking her body. Liara made a cooing sound, and pulled Shepard close, ignoring how that meant that she now had hot water saturating her clothing. "Is that all I ever do to people? Get them killed?"

"You are being too hard on yourself," Liara said. "Lieutenant Alenko made his choice. And I have some confidence that he wouldn't want his death to be so terrible for you."

Shepard continued to shake against Liara. "My sister's alive," she whispered, after a long quiet.

"Tali? She is alive?"

"Yeah," Shepard whispered. "I found out two days ago. She... she survived sixteen years as a batarian slave, because I fucked up and..."

"Aimei, stop," Liara cut her off. "It was not your fault."

"Yes, it was. I could have saved her, if I'd just..."

"It. Was. Not. Your. Fault," Liara stressed. She finally reached back and shut off the flow of water. "Does your sister blame you for trying to save her? Does she blame you for fighting until you couldn't anymore?"

"I don't know," Shepard said, her eyes still damp, but now it was becoming increasingly clear that it was not a function of being under the faucet. "I mean, who gets the news that their baby sister is alive, after all this time, and freaks the fuck out like I did? What the hell is wrong with me?"

"There is nothing wrong," Liara said. Shepard didn't seem to believe her, though. "Aimei... do you remember when I was so badly hurting, just after Mother had died. I locked myself in my room, trying to drink myself either to death or until I was numb enough where I could face a galaxy where I watched my mother die. You came and you helped me. I believe that you need that favor returned to you."

"Just leave me here. In the dark. It's where I belong," she said, flopping a wet hand over her face.

"My mother once told me, when I was little and afraid of the dark, that when the night is at its darkest, then even a weak candle can shine like a beacon," Liara said. "There is always a dawn. And there is always hope."

Shepard didn't say anything.

"I know that you don't want to be here anymore," Liara said. "You want to live the life that you have never been able to allow yourself. Because you know how much better it will feel, when you are no longer plagued by anger and fear and doubt."

"...and why would you care?" she asked. "All you want is my brain. Alive or dead."

"That is neither true nor fair," Liara said. "You are a good, and beautiful person. And if I were not reasonably certain that you held no such attraction for me, I would probably take you in some womanly fashion!"

Shepard turned toward her, and her eyes locked onto Liara's. There was a weighing going on there, she could sense. But that weighing didn't last long.

"Fuck it," she muttered.

"What do you m–" Liara began, but was cut off when Shepard tackled her, causing Liara to slide to the edge of the door, into the bedroom. Shepard was straddling Liara's hips, and pressed her lips hard into Liara's own. At first, Liara's eyes bugged wide, and her hands made random spasming motions as she was utterly unsure of what was going on.

And then, about a second too late to truly enjoy herself, she figured it out, just as Shepard broke that kiss and leaned back. There was a look in the essentially naked human's eyes that Liara had never seen directed at her before. She'd seen it in the eyes of others, that raw and unabashed need, a sort of lust that would not be satisfied by flesh alone. And it left Liara, for a wonder, at a loss for words.

"I. Uh. Blah..." Liara managed.

"I... shouldn't have done that," Shepard said. "I mean, I'm not even... I'm not gay! And I find men like Vega hot! And..."

She rose, and shook her head, trying to get her thoughts in order. Liara followed her up, and pulled Shepard to a stop. "Aimei... you are making two fundamental errors," she said. "First, I am not female... technically. Thus, any attraction you feel would not be homosexual. Secondly, you are correct in that you are probably not homosexual in that you still feel sexual attraction to males of your own species. The correct classification, if I understand my dimorphic terminology, is 'bisexual'. So you don't need to concern yourself."

"...You just don't know when to stop talking, do you?" Shepard asked. "I... I should probably g..."

This time, Liara was the one to interrupt, to tackle, and to bear her target to the floor. This time, by fortune of lucky placement, they landed on the floor-borne mattress. "I have never wanted something more than I want this."

"Do you want it more than my Prothean-ized brain?" Shepard asked, her tones obviously teasing. And that forced Liara to think long and hard.

"Yes."

"I was kidding, Liara," Shepard said.

"I was not, Aimei," she countered, which left Shepard speechless. She pulled at her own soaked clothing, freeing herself from a layer of it, and had a moment of pause. "I only ask that you please be gentle. It is my first time."

"Now I know you're shitting me," Shepard said. Liara shook her head slowly, but didn't say a word. She just let her pupils dilate until they dominated her eyes, let the glow of eezo surge through her body. Certainly now how Liara had pictured losing her virginity.

When she looked back on it, she'd realize she'd not have it any other way.

* * *

In an unremarkable part of the galaxy, orbiting an unremarkable star, there was a planet. The peoples of the region called it a 'garden' world, a place perfectly suited for sapient life to expand and flourish. And expand a sapient did, claiming the lush and rolling grasses for their own, building atop the bones of the long dead. The number of the dead, the age of them, would stagger the minds of the newcomers above.

But below, far below their feet, there was a shift. The stone was grated free and crumbled away, as a mass very much unlike it rasped against its surface. Something older and harder than the stone surrounding it. Something... not natural.

After all, diamonds didn't grow in single rough gemstones, four meters across.

Unseen by any eyes, there was a light inside that gem, growing faintly brighter. Something so long asleep that the eons had passed it by completely, shifting in its slumber. Moving slowly toward consciousness. The journey would take time, but given the time it had already waited, it was a pittance.

There was a final lurch, and a great crack appeared, traversing the whole diameter of the unnatural diamond, which stood in stone without a vein of kimberlite for a thousand miles. With that final lurch, that crack, that crevasse, the light dimmed once more, until the diamond was just another stone, if an odd one, amidst the billion-fold of its brothers.

* * *

Shepard lurched awake suddenly, feeling a sort of happy-bonelessness that she at first didn't expect. After all, she was pretty sure that she'd just passed out and then had a decent dream for a change. She _was_ lying on her back, buck-naked on a dirty cot in a run-down motel. It wasn't until she heard the happy murmur, and felt the shift on the mattress, that she turned, and saw a freckled blue face very close to her own.

"...did that just happen?" Shepard asked.

"I believe it did," Liara said, and pulled herself closer to Shepard when she did. Which, not to be crass, felt very good.

It felt good in ways that Shepard didn't expect. Yeah, there was the obvious, but there was also a sense of security, of belonging that she'd never had. That she might have to go out somewhere and die in the next hour or so, but right here, right now, she was safe, and she was cared for. It was an odd feeling. Odd, and good.

"I... really... needed that," Shepard said.

"You are welcome," Liara said happily. She turned so that she could look at Shepard not at an angle, propping her chin against Shepard's crooked arm. "Are you going to be alright?"

"...maybe," Shepard said. "...better than I was two hours ago."

"That was two hours?" Liara asked, her brow furrowing.

Shepard, though, sat herself up. The door was closed so that nobody in the hallway could have seen them, but still, she was increasingly growing ashamed that she'd even come here. Sure, it did have an unexpected and pleasant side effect, but the fact itself was galling. "I should probably head back to the Normandy. There's probably a lot of people pissed that I ran off like I did. Especially after what happened to Jackie."

"Not angry. Concerned," Liara said. "Your crew is closer than you think it is, and they see you as part of them. When you are hurting, they hurt with you."

"They really do, don't they?" Shepard said. She shook her head. "I screwed this up. And I don't even have anything else I can do to help them. The galaxy spins on, without the Avatar even being part of it. Just like it did for the last three thousand years, I guess."

"If you'd like, we can try the data in your head once again?" Liara asked, by her tone thinking it a long shot and unlikely.

But Shepard remembered the second Prothean.

"Do it," Shepard said. Liara's brow rose. "Hey, after what we just did, you rooting around in my brain a bit more is hardly a violation of my privacy."

"That is a libertine way of seeing things," Liara said.

"Call me a hedonist," Shepard said.

"You are a hedonist?" Liara said.

"...Right," the Avatar couldn't but shake her head. Liara pulled herself up to a kneel, and pulled Shepard's hands to set them on her bare, pebbly shoulders. She then tucked her own onto Shepard's hips, pulling them a bit closer together.

"Open your mind, Aimei... open all of the doors that separate you from the galaxy. Tear down the walls that have so long hidden you from the truths you could not face. Let the lives and loves of those around you touch the centermost of your soul, and connect you, one to another, to the whole of the universe," Liara whispered. She leaned forward, and Shepard felt her eyes closing. When Liara spoke again, her lips were brushing against Shepard's own. "...and embrace eternity..."

…

The cough brought with it a pain that was becoming a very frequent and reliable companion to Sajuuk. Green blood sometimes flecked his glove, or whatever he'd use to wipe his lips. The pain was almost unbearable, at times. But he bore it, with what was left of his dignity. He had fought as the Avatar for almost seventy years. Against the Metacon, first. And then, against the Reapers. And failing that... against any who would prey on what remained of the Prothean Empire. An Empire which was crumbling so quickly that not even an Avatar Manifested could hold it together. He had fought in hundreds of battles. Killed thousands of threats, be they wholly machine, partially so, or even aggressive organic.

What irony, then, that he was dying from tumors the size of cannon-balls that grew in his lungs, an illness which could have been cured in two weeks were the Empire standing?

"Hey, take it easy," Kija said, helping him sit up against the bulkhead behind him. It had been a strange sight, the first time he beheld her outside of her military uniform. Oravore were like many of the species which once comprised the Prothean Empire, in that they didn't resemble the titular Protheans very much in body or face. And when Kija was out of her armor, that became apparent. "You can't keep running around the ship like that. You'll make yourself sick," she said. Well, she worried.

"If it isn't apparent, I'm already sick," Sajuuk pointed out. He let out another hacking cough, which spattered his glove a bit more. "...but for what it's worth, I'll try."

Kija gave Sajuuk a shaky and unstable smile, before she rested a hand on his shoulder. Then, she rose and headed into the crowds that packed the transport that Sajuuk and some four thousand other refugees had packed themselves into, fleeing from the approach of the Reapers. He felt a tug in his heart watching her leave. She had been more loyal and more true to him than any of his other allies, and been so despite all of his abuses and his exploitations. Safe to say, he didn't consider her a mere 'ally' after all these years.

Sajuuk didn't have any allies. Not anymore.

"I hear Avatar Sajuuk took his forces to Feros, and brought the fight to the Reapers," a refugee said nearby. He was a Prothean himself, but was a different shade entirely from Sajuuk. A ditakur man beside him stood where the other one sat so that the two were at eye-level. The ditakur, with his yellow-green skin and the stubble of black hair on his round head and sharp chin, shook that head with a look of contempt.

"Sajuuk isn't fighting the Reapers anymore. They say he got indoctrinated. That he's working with them. And to be honest, it wouldn't surprise me. That fucker left my homeworld to get turned to soup. Let him writhe with a Reaper's tentacle up his ass, for all I care."

"You're both..." Sajuuk began, but had to break off, when the coughing took him. When he got it back under control, he started again. "You're both wrong. Sajuuk is dead. He died long ago."

"Dead? The Avatar cannot be dead," the Prothean said.

"What? You don't really believe that bullshit, do you? Avatars die all the time! How'd you think Sajuuk got the job? Merit? Ha!" the ditakur mocked.

"How did you hear of this?" the Prothean asked Sajuuk.

The Avatar got a wry smirk on his face. "Hear of it? I watched it happen," he said bitterly. "He was brought down by his hubris. After the Crucible... he just let the end take him."

"But... that means that the new Avatar could have been reborn by now. He might even be old enough to rejoin the fight!" the Prothean said. The ditakur swatted him upside the back of his head. The Prothean stumbled more than a species normally would for such a small-handed blow... but mostly because it was not the impact which staggered him, but all of that which came with it.

"It doesn't matter if the Avatar got reborn into a _fledgling god_. There _is no fight_. And besides, the Reapers probably ate the kid by now."

"You cannot compare the Reapers by your disgusting habits," the Prothean muttered.

"_Fuck_ you; the last time we ate our babies on any serious scale, we didn't even have space-flight," the ditakur snapped back. Sajuuk just let the argument roll off of him. There was enough discord in this ship already, that Sajuuk felt no need to add to it.

It was a depressingly, and harrowingly common story that he'd heard. That Sajuuk was the source of all of their troubles, all of their banes. His decision to abandon his duty as impossible, to attempt simply to survive as 'Omar', more and more became obvious as the correct one. The fact that it was frighteningly close to unblemished fact hurt almost as much as the malignant masses in Sajuuk's chest.

He looked around the hold that he was sitting in one corner of. In a way, it was a microcosm of life in the Prothean Empire. All of the major players were there. Well, most of them. The vaal were absent, as they had been rendered extinct within two decades of the fall of the Citadel. The zha, once foremost technophiles and inventors of the Empire, now lay in the ashes of an incinerated world, burned by a star that the Empire detonated to contain them. But the ditakur were staying close to the Protheans. The synril, to the oravore. And they all... lived amongst each other. The friction here was purely the friction of fear. None of the racial pride, the hatred of miscegany, the disgust at augmentation and prosthetic.

A part of Sajuuk wondered... if this had been the Prothean Empire, would they have lost to the Reapers? If this group, these people willing to work together, not by order, but by free and willing choice, had been what Sajuuk once represented... what would have changed?

Not enough, he feared.

"I couldn't find any vapor, but this should help your throat," Kija said as she came back into view, holding down a steaming mug of something which smelled faintly acrid. He tasted it, and found it sour, and not nearly as hot as the steam made him believe. "It's something called a 'lemon'. It's from some world of the primitives. I didn't ask."

"It is a bitter drink. But it helps," Sajuuk said, sipping at the warm mixture. He stared ahead of him, and Kija sat down beside him, her twin pair of arms fidgeting. Not surprising, as there were many who didn't know what to do with merely _two_ arms. "Kija... have you ever wondered..."

"Wondered what?" she asked.

Sajuuk tried to find a way to word it, but he couldn't. "The galaxy could have been such a different place... if different choices were made."

"Yeah. Well, this is the one we've got to live in," she said, laying one of her hands onto his shoulder, and giving it a little squeeze. Even when Sajuuk's eyes took in the sight, across the ship, of a Prothean man holding a ditakur woman close to him, he didn't feel disgust or anger. Instead, a sympathy. This was a time to take comfort in whatever arms would hold you, because tomorrow came death.

"You deserved better than I," Sajuuk said, quietly.

"Probably. But here I am," Kija said with a little smile under her red eyes. The smile faded. "You're in more pain than usual, aren't you?"

"I can manage," Sajuuk lied. He pulled off his glove, and slipped his fingers along the line of Kija's cheek. As he did, there came a veritable blizzard of images, of knowledge, of history, of fact. Of memories encoded into her genetic code. Every time he touched her with his bare hands, he could feel everything that he meant to her. How she respected him. How she quietly bore a love for him that he was stupidly unwilling to reciprocate. And how happy she was, even with all of the death and all of the terror, that he finally did. "Thank you. For staying."

"I wouldn't go anywhere for anything in the galaxy," Kija said quietly, her voice choking up, as the two arms on Sajuuk's side pulled him a bit closer to her. Ever since he started losing weight, she was now bigger than he was. And that didn't gall him as it should have.

"Not even for a lifetime without Reapers?" Sajuuk asked.

"Definitely not."

Sajuuk nodded, and a small smile came to his own face. Such a little thing. But right now, it was all he had. He let out another terrible cough, this time not ending until he expelled a spray of green blood onto his own legs, and his four eyes were pressed shut in the agony of it. He could feel three of Kija's hands on him, trying to comfort him in his pain. And he appreciated it.

"Kija... I think I should give you this," he said, pulling a data-disc from a back pocket. "It isn't much... but I don't know how much longer I'll last. And you deserve to have something to remember me by."

"Don't talk like that. We'll find a doctor. He'll..." Kija began, her eyes watering a little.

"We both know that we won't," Sajuuk said softly. He took her hand, and weathered the onslaught of her fear, her pain, her grief even as he still lived. He then set the data disc into it. "...but that does not leave me afraid. I have lived more in the last thirty years than I had in the eighty before it. And I owe that to you."

"You charmer," Kija said, and she pulled Sajuuk closer to her. When she did, Sajuuk's hand slipped away from the data disc.

And darkness became everything.

…

Shepard blinked a few times, feeling that odd disconnection as she settled into her socks from the vision. "Well... that was abrupt," she said. "Couldn't have ended it on a higher note than, 'oh yeah, he died of cancer'. Although, I guess that's probably the point."

"It is," a voice answered her. She let out a yelp and turned. She wasn't alone in the blackness.

"Who the fuck are you?" Shepard demanded, reaching for a gun she wasn't currently wearing. The Prothean before her looked far different than Sajuuk. The armor he wore was far more like the young anthropologist, Ovar, than it had been the gilt and ebon, intricate work of art which had been Sajuuk's – it was angular and red, traces of bronze along its edges. The hard plates were all held over a black mesh that bent with his joints. The new Prothean had a different accent, a different face, and different colored eyes.

"I am an augmented virtual intelligence, embedded into the data which was disseminated through the Alarm Beacons throughout Prothean Space," the Prothean said.

"...You don't look like Sajuuk."

"I am _not_ Sajuuk," the VI answered, almost seeming annoyed. Then again, he had said 'augmented'. "And I am not modeled upon Sajuuk."

"Who are you modeled upon?" Shepard asked, her brow still threatening to rise above her hair line.

"This virtual intelligence was created at the behest of, modeled after, and imbued with the information of the Avatar of Vengeance. His name was Avatar Javik."

"Who was... No, better question; what are you doing in my brain?"

"I was downloaded into your mind as part of a data-dump initiated upon detection of the Avatar in proximity to a Prothean Alarm Beacon," Javik, or his virtual copy, answered. He looked her up and down, a brow raising over a pair of eyes. "Scans indicate that you are not Prothean. Therefore, the Protheans have been rendered extinct and the Avatar Cycle continues in your species. Congratulations," the last word sounded almost brutally sarcastic.

"You don't sound like any VI I've ever heard of."

"I am not programmed to respond to that statement," Javik answered her.

"That's a bit more like it," Shepard said. "Why were you put into the data from the Beacon?"

"The information of the Beacon had to be locked in such a way that only those who required it would have access to it," Javik's VI answered, beginning to pace around her. "It overwrote the information already imprinted onto the Beacons, which was wise, as they gave the location of a Prothean secret-project in the making; the Conduit."

"The Conduit? Where is it?" Shepard asked.

"I have been programmed not to answer that question," Javik answered.

"Great, you don't know," Shepard muttered.

"I do."

"Then tell me," Shepard said, mildly confused.

"I have been programmed not to answer that question."

Shepard growled and pulled at her hair. Then, she realized exactly what Javik's VI was saying.

"_Why_ are you programmed not to answer that question?" Shepard asked.

"The Avatar Cycle was an immutable part of the Prothean Empire in the years before my birth. An individual with unbridled power and authority could make unilateral decisions which affected trillions of lives. And that individual tended to do so arrogantly. The initial data of the Beacon was locked until memory-markers were detected which matched the understanding of the folly of Avatar Sajuuk," Javik said, pointing a finger into the darkness. A green-edged pane opened, and showed a picture of Sajuuk in his armor, standing proud, his jaw set with contempt. "If decisions of a similar arrogance and hubris occur, then the results will no doubt be effectively identical."

"But I _have_ seen the folly of Sajuuk," Shepard said. "It's basically 'don't be such a massive asshole'."

Sajuuk vanished once more, and Javik turned to face her. "The lesson was more involved than that. Consequences occur, often outstripping the magnitude of the event which spawned them. Understand that, and you will be a wiser Avatar than Sajuuk."

"...How did you know that an Avatar would be born after the Protheans were wiped out?" Shepard hazarded, after a long silence.

"It has happened before. The Inusannon played host to the Avatar before our time. You have played host to it after our time. So the cycle continues," Javik turned away.

"Wait... you said that the information had been locked so that only the Avatar could access it. But Saren already has!"

"Saren. I am accessing your memory markers," Javik said, striding closer to her, and grabbing ahold of her face near her ear and holding it firm. He released her indelicately. "Saren is a tool of the Reaper 'the Resplendant Sovereign of Nazara'. _Of course_ he would be able to access the information that Javik locked."

"Why?" Shepard asked.

Javik flickered for a moment. "I was programmed not to answer that question."

"You keep saying that. What use are you if you can't answer my questions?" Shepard asked.

"Not yet."

"What?" She said, slightly confused. _Well_, entirely confused.

"While the whole transmission was entered into your memory, as you are not Prothean, it was not expected that you would be capable of understanding it. And to attempt to access the whole of the information that I represent to an unready mind would burn it to a cinder at worst, and render you a catatonic vegetable at best," Javik said. "There is far more information on that Beacon than a disjointed image, some sounds, and a warning of planet – – –," the name of the planet came out as static to Shepard's ears. "It contains a complete understanding as Javik came to know of the Avatar, and all of its capabilities."

"I know what the Avatar is capable of," Shepard said. "I am one."

"_Barely_," the VI said with a scowl and a roll of four virtual eyes. Once again, Shepard wondered how _virtual_ this virtual intelligence was. Honestly, she was a little put off by that. Javik raised a hand, and a series of images, memories from Shepard's eyes, arranged in a line in the darkness above. The first was Mindoir, the next, Torfan. Then, Virmire. Then Virmire again, with Sovereign above her. "Memory markers indicate that you were not able to enter more than the most superficial layer of the Avatar State. Additionally, you were not capable of entering that State of your own volition until very recently. There is an error on the memory markers, here," Javik pointed to the memory of Shepard's hand catching that punch, then giving it back to Saren. "But the information gives a possible explanation, which this VI is programmed not to give at this time."

"It felt like somebody else was in control of my body," Shepard said. Then she shook her head. "No, that's not really it. Somebody else was in control of my _soul_, and my body went with it."

"Yes," Javik answered.

"What do you mean, 'yes'?" Shepard asked.

There was a hesitation. "I am programmed not to answer that question. That way lies _dangerous_ knowledge."

"So I'm going to get jerked around by a guy fifty thousand years dead?" Shepard asked.

"Conceivably."

"You don't need to look like you enjoy it," Shepard muttered. Javik answered her by appearing directly in front of her, and grabbing her face with both hands. His wedge-like head surged forward, and cracked brow first into Shepard's own.

It hurt, but not like a headbutt. It hurt like somebody cracking open her soul with a crowbar.

"OW! What the _FUCK_?" Shepard stumbled back, opening her eyes to see Javik standing calmly where she had been before.

"You have gained an understanding of the Avatar Spirit. Memory markers show that your species has never progressed further. You alone are now capable of manifesting the Avatar Body," Javik said. Shepard shrugged her utter ignorance. "As your understanding of the entirety of the Avatar grows, your powers, your strength, and your resilience will grow with it. You can make yourself resistant to forces which would have harmed you grievously, with proper knowledge. In time, you will become impervious to all but the greatest of harms."

"What? There's no way that in eight thousand years, nobody found out that the key to the Avatar House was under the mat," Shepard snapped.

"Evidently, exactly that occurred," Javik's VI answered her with a shrug. "Not unexpected of a primitive race."

"Who are you calling primitive?" Shepard asked. Javik just stared at her. "Fine. What about the Conduit?"

"You are ready to receive that information," Javik answered her, and then tapped her forehead once again.

The blizzard of images, sounds, even tastes and smells drove Shepard straight back onto her ass.

"What the... How the fuck am I supposed to know what all that meant?"

"If you cannot understand it, consult with one who can," Javik said with a dismissive tone.

"I've been trying. But Liara can never see the visions. Instead, she talks to Hong," Shepard muttered, pulling herself to a sit.

"The information is locked to viewership of the Avatar. It is so locked under the Avatar's authority," Javik said.

"...So I'm the reason why she couldn't see it?" Shepard asked.

"Yes."

"...I'm an idiot."

"..._primitive_ idiot." Javik corrected in her wake. She wanted to smack him, but she was pretty sure she wouldn't be able to. After all, he was a VI. He turned away from her. "When additional memory markers sufficient to Javik's prerequisites have been detected, more information will be made available to you. Until then, you will use the talents available to you. Your duty, from this moment on, is _solely_ to destroy the Reapers. Anything else to that, is secondary."

There was a blip, and the 'augmented VI' of Avatar Javik – whom Shepard now wasn't entirely sure was much better than Sajuuk – vanished into the blackness. Shepard just sat there for a spell. Letting everything sink in. Apparently there was a lot more to sink than she'd initially known.

When she'd had enough sitting, she stood. "Alright... _me_... Give Liara T'Soni access to the Prothean Alarm Beacon's initial information."

She didn't expect that it would work.

She was, therefore, surprised when Liara winked into being standing directly in front of her. Blue eyes opened wide in a degree of shock. "Shepard? I was just having tea with a wonderful airbender monk, when..."

At that moment, the storm of information surged into her.

And she looked like she enjoyed it almost as much as sex.

* * *

Grayson blinked in incredulity at the smug look turned back toward him. "Don't reach for your gun. If you do, it'll backfire. Probably blow your hand off," Kai Leng said, before returning to the task of driving. "That was a mean little surprise you pulled on Illium. Didn't know that the retard had that much fight in her."

"Don't call her that," Grayson growled.

"I just hope that the retard knows that if she tries that shit again, she'll bring the car down in a burning heap, which'll almost definitely kill you, and will probably kill her, too. Here's hoping that in that utterly scrambled brain of hers, that she has at least a glimmer of self-preservation instinct," Kai Leng chuckled. She gave a twitch, which was enough to get Kai Leng to turn in his seat, and point his gun directly at her. "You'd better buckle her in, Grayson. She's got a lot more value than you'd know."

"I'm not letting you take her again," Grayson promised.

"Really?" Kai Leng asked, mock surprise on his face. "Well, that's sort of odd, because it seems that I already have her. I have to say, Grayson, you were always good at lining up turtle-ducks for me to knock down. But twice in as many weeks? That's just kismet."

"Go to hell."

"No thank you," he said. "Buckle up the retard, Grayson. Or I start cutting the parts of her that she doesn't need."

"Stop calling her that."

Kai Leng pulled out his knife.

"You wouldn't hurt her. The Illusive Man wants Junko unharmed."

"It was a tragic accident. No preventing it. What's done is done, but such a pity that your biotic lost her arms and legs," Kai Leng said with absolute gravitas. He tipped his knife toward Junko. "Buckle in the retard."

Grayson just wanted to kick him in the face, but that would get Junny hurt. So even with the bale in his eyes, he turned to the girl. "Junny, come here just a moment," he pleaded. Those eyes flit between Kai Leng and Grayson. "Just sit here. I'm going to buckle you in, so you won't get hurt. Alright?"

"I don't want to be here," Junko said, her voice quivering, her eyes watering. It all sparked something paternal, righteous, and dangerous in Grayson. But he couldn't do shit.

"I know. I know," Grayson told her. "But it's just for a little while. Everything's going to be alright."

"I don't see why you lie to her," Kai Leng. "We both know who's going to walk out of this car when it lands, and which one a few minutes earlier."

"You sadistic son of a bitch..."

"Language. I thought you wanted to be a positive influence for the mental defective back there," Kai Leng said, as he turned back to his controls. "You know, you gave up a good thing when you turned your back on the Illusive Man. He would have kept you comfortable. No withdrawals, enough money that you're not living in a roach-infested shit-hole. But no, you decided that you had to be _noble_," air-quotes included. "Which got, _so far_, twenty seven people killed."

"That blood's on your hands, Leng," Grayson muttered, as he tried to find a way out of this. Addicts were resourceful. And he had a tingling that there was just something he could do, right here and now, that would tip things in his favor. Kai turned, and pointed his fore-curved knife at the addict.

"No, it's on _yours_," he answered. "If you hadn't decided to bug out with our property, I would never have needed to do what I do so well. If you hadn't gone to Nos Laconae, I wouldn't have had to follow. I wouldn't have had to kill that _lovely_ family on the thirty seventh floor who's jacuzzi tub I landed in. I wouldn't have had to kill the room cleaner next door for overhearing it. I wouldn't have had to kill the pilot – _slowly_ – to learn where you'd gone. I wouldn't have had to kill the cab driver to have this little talk. _And_ I wouldn't have had to kill Liselle T'Loak... Actually, I probably would have killed her anyway. Simpler like that."

"You're out of your goddamned mind," Grayson muttered.

Kai Leng chuckled, and turned forward once more. "I prefer to think of myself as morally unfettered. It makes things much simpler."

Grayson's brain ran in a circle for a moment, but one thing kept popping up as part of a solution. Lie like a rug. He slowly buckled his own seatbelt, then leaned to one side. "I'm surprised it took you this long. The Illusive Man warned me that you'd be coming."

"We both know that the Illusive Man hasn't been talking to _you_," Leng said smugly. The next part; the best lies have a lot of truth in them.

"I learned about the little game that the Illusive Man and the Shadow Broker play. One puts a bounty out on the other. The other sends a few mercs after the first, who all die horrible deaths, and the cycle mirrors. So both sides are seen as invincible. At least, until one of them gets found out," Grayson said, pulling forth all of the back-alley and broom-closet rumors he'd heard since his flight. Now the trickiest part.

The shot in the dark.

"...which is why the Illusive Man was so pissed when he learned about what you said to the Shadow Broker."

Kai Leng turned, both hands still on the controls, a look of confusion, of shock... of disbelief. Shot in the dark, landed. "You don't know _anything_ about..."

Grayson cut him off by ramming both feet up and into his smug jack-ass face. The act stunned the assassin, and sent him slumping over his controls so that the airtaxi started to plummet toward the buildings, and the streets below them. Grayson reached out and grabbed 'hold of Junko's hand as he felt himself rising out of his seat, only held in place by his seatbelt. "HOLD ON, JUNNY! THIS IS GOING TO H–"

His word was cut off by an impact, and a brief stint of unconsciousness which was punctuated with a loud blast of a taxi impacting a coffee shop.

* * *

"Liara? Are you alright?" Shepard asked, now once again aware of the motel-room in all of its foetor and filth, her own nudity, and the extreme proximity of the asari before her. She snapped her fingers a few times in front of Liara's face. "Hey. Galaxy to Liara. Is anybody in there?"

Liara then gave a shiver which called to mind what they'd been doing several hours ago. Asari don't shiver, my tight milky ass, Shepard thought. "That was... _remarkable_!" Liara said, her eyes slowly constricting so that they weren't black pools of abyss any longer. "I had no idea that the images were so vivid, so intense, and so informative."

"Informative?" Shepard asked, even as she got up, pulled the asari up, and dressed herself in the remarkably fast way that any active military learned to do in a hurry. It would never do to literally get caught with your pants down. "It all sounded like static to me."

"You must not have been able to recognize the symbols for what they were. The language sounded much like Ancient Serrician, and the cyborgs are, if your visions are correct, the spawn of the Reapers you were talking about."

Shepard pulled her shirt over her head. While she couldn't find her underwear, unless somebody specifically checked, nobody would probably notice. "Of course, all of this still doesn't tell me where the Conduit is."

"Ilos," Liara said pertly, as she pulled her dress on.

"Excuse me?" Shepard asked.

"Hm?" she turned back. "Oh, yes. The indicators were quite clear. One would have to be blind not to recognize them. This information was what you received from the Virmire Beacon?"

"No, I've had that the whole time," Shepard said. Then she paused. "What do you mean, it was obvious?"

"The Conduit is on Ilos," Liara said with utter certainty. "I'd stake my reputation on it."

"You have a reputation?" Shepard asked. Teased, even. Still, Liara gave her something of a death-glare. "Man. If I'd just let you into my brain sooner, we could have beaten Saren to the Conduit _weeks ago_!"

Liara tapped Shepard on the cheek as she slid that prototype gun onto her hip. "I do not believe that is the case. Without the intervening events, I doubt you would have been psychologically capable of trusting me enough to give me the information."

"I trust you plenty," Shepard said off-handedly.

"But did you weeks ago, when I was new to your ship and a relative stranger to you?" Liara shook her head. "I believe that if you had the knowledge how to let me in, your fragile psyche would not have allowed anybody to approach near enough to access it."

"My psyche is not fragile," Shepard said. And then she paused, and remembered that she'd just went on a two day, liver-crushing bender because she learned that her baby sister was free from batarian slavery. And not because Shepard was celebrating. Liara just tipped her head slightly. "...anymore..."

That Liara got to roll her eyes at Shepard was one of the great injustices of the galaxy. "Whichever the case, we have a destination. It is fair to assume that Saren is, at worst, not far ahead of us, as if he had the location himself before our action on Virmire, he would have exploited it then," Liara pointed out.

Which Shepard hadn't considered. "We might actually get there before him," Shepard said, a smirk coming to her face. "I knew there was a reason I liked you."

"Just one?"

Shepard stared at her for a moment. "Can we... talk about that later?" Shepard asked, feeling slightly self-conscious. "When we're not being stared at by rats?"

One particularly robust specimen gave them a reproachful look, then ran into a hole bearing somebody's bra. Probably Liara's from the size of it. When Liara noticed it, she glanced down. "I thought I was missing something..." before she turned back. "I had also thought you gave up your discomfort with the notion of sexual attraction toward the feminine?"

Shepard still felt a strong desire to justify herself, somehow. And for reasons she couldn't properly put into words. It was almost a relief when an air-taxi shot past the window on the other side of Liara, followed less than a second later by a stupendous crash. Shepard couldn't have been happier for the distraction.

"That can't be good," Shepard said, and pulled Liara with her down the stairs. Not even realizing it, she was pulling the asari by her hand, and felt no need to end that. They erupted through the lobby, past a turian who was vaguely familiar, before reaching the scene of the pandemonium. Shepard could see somebody limping away from the wreck, a trail of blood-droplets marking the path. She almost ran after him, but she heard a grunting of pain from the car itself. "Liara, pull this thing out of there!"

The asari gave a nod, then her body glowed blue for a moment, before there was a great grating of masonry against metal. Then, with a lurch, the airtaxi – or what was left of it – came out of the building, showing a lot of surprised and mildly battered customers, but no source of the groaning. It wasn't until Shepard tore the metal of the crumpled airtaxi apart that she found the recess that a middle aged man, a Tribesman by his hair if not his pallor, bleeding and looking roughly half-dead. "Just stay calm, sir. We will find a way to help you," Liara placated the man.

"No," he whispered, urgently. "My daughter. He... that man _took my daughter!_"

Shepard's eyes bugged, and she turned, to the trail of droplets. "The other one in the car?" Shepard asked. She didn't hear an answer, so had to turn back to see that he was nodding vigorously as his pinned station would allow. She glanced to Liara. "Take care of him. And give me that gun."

Liara gave a pair of nods, one for each order, and tossed the prototype weapon to Shepard, even as she leaned into the wreck with one hand glowing. Shepard, on the other hand, followed the blood. The trail didn't go far, but it went much farther than she'd thought that it would, all things considered; if one was smashed and bleeding, one didn't tend to move quickly. And when she saw the man in question, how he was moving so quickly became even more suspect, as it was clear that one of his legs was broken.

"Stay right there!" Shepard bellowed, staring down her sights at him. The bleeding man turned a glance to her, then spun, hissing in pain at the weight he had to put on a broken leg, and tucked a khukri under the teenaged-girl's neck. She too looked dazed, her eyes not focusing. "Drop the knife!"

"I don't think so," the man said. He might have been attractive, in his way, if he wasn't currently covered in blood and holding a girl hostage. Both of those tended to put a severe damper on one's appeal, in Shepard's humble opinion. Shepard's brow twitched, as that sounded more like something that Liara would think, but she let that notion slide by. "You see, you're going to let me get into a new airtaxi, and I'm going to leave. The only question is, will she," he squeezed his hand on the knife, "still have all of her blood in her when I do it?" The smug grin dropped away, and his face became an emotionless mask. "So drop the gun."

Shepard looked at the man. Clearly a long-time killer, from that dispassionate look in his eye. And an experienced one, as he held the knife in such a way that any movement from the girl would be to the effect of cutting her own throat by proxy. But he was a thug, and she was the Avatar. And she was tired of losing little girls to bloodthirsty bastards. She tapped her thumb on the ammo-selection button, and the indicator showed that it'd selected for phasic rounds. "This is your last chance, asshole. Put the knife down."

He clicked his tongue, and shook his head. "I thought that'd be your decision. Well, I hope you don't mind watching a girl die."

She answered his cold and psychotic pronouncement by pulling the trigger. The kick was stupendous, but the round flew true. It slid through the kinetic barriers that he was using from a personal generator, and then into his arm. And the sheer force of the shot ripped his arm off at the elbow, sending the knife tumbling away from her throat and landing at the edge of a gutter. The girl let out a shriek and ducked low, a pulsing dome of blue light capping over her tightly. Shepard took a step forward. "You were saying?" she asked.

"My... my _hand_!" he shouted, pain for once making him sound something other than smug. Shepard started to squeeze the trigger again, but this time, as she did, she accidentally triggered the ammo-switch again. After all, prototypes tended to have their own little quirks, ironed out when the guns went into production. So while the first shot was designed and intended to cut through his barriers like a sniper-round through cardboard, the second shot was set to something rather more... explosive.

Shepard knew something was wrong when she fired, and the gun immediately overheated, searing her hand and forcing her to drop the gun. But that was secondary to the effect it had on the would-be kidnapper. The shell slammed into the center of his torso, right at the diaphragm, and then detonated, tearing the man in half. He landed four meters away on his back. His legs dropped where they stood. The only reason that the shockwave didn't maim or kill the girl was because she was in a sort of biotic cocoon. Shepard blew on her singed hand, and looked to the man who was in his last throes of death. "Fucking asshole," she muttered. Then, she squatted down before the cocoon. "Are you alright?"

"I... I don't want to be here," the girl's voice was tiny, and afraid. And it reminded Shepard so much of Talitha's that her heart twisted a bit.

"Your father's just this way. Can you stand up? I can bring you to him," Shepard asked. The girl slowly raised her head, to look at Shepard through the distortions of the biotic field she was manifesting. She looked like she wanted to burrow into the ground and hide. So Shepard held out her hand. The burned one, incidentally. She stared at it like it was something she didn't understand. Then back to Shepard's eyes.

There was a whomp, as the field was dispelled, and the girl slowly reached forward. While it did hurt a bit to help the teenager up, it felt better than not by a light-year. "Is... is he still alive?"

Shepard pulled the girl slowly to her feet. Gods, that must have been what Shepard looked like when Anderson pulled her out of that blood-saturated elevator, all those years ago. "Your father's going to be just fine. Him..." Shepard gave a glance toward the bisected kidnapper, and guided her away so she wouldn't have to look at him. "...not so much."

* * *

"Garrus, can I ask you something?" Tali said as she fiddled with her shotgun where they stood at the inner airlock.

"You know you can ask me just about anything," Garrus said with what passed for a grin amongst the turian race. "As long as you stay out of my sex-life. Because that'd just get awkward."

"Right, as if it could get more awkward than what you just did," Tali said with a shake of her head. She gave a lean toward the galactic map, and put her weapon away. Who but a quarian would keep a shotgun on her at all times? Garrus quickly answered his own question by thinking, a vorcha, a krogan, a batarian, and most of his high-school classmates. Garrus tried to follow her gaze, but to little avail. "Is it just me, or is the executive officer acting strangely?" she asked.

"Strange for a human, or strange for a turian?" Garrus asked. "Because those are very different concepts."

"You know what I mean," Tali said with what had to be a roll of her eyes.

"He's probably stressed. He hasn't left the conn for more than an hour since Shepard vanished," Garrus pointed out. "He's almost got a turian's duty-_virtu_, that one."

"It's just... I see him looking at me strangely, sometimes," she said, leaning in a little closer. "Like he's measuring me for a coffin, or something."

"Are you certain you're not just contracting a horrible case of classic space dementia? I hear it makes you paranoid and ornery. And as you're ornery as a matter of course, that means that all you'd need was the paranoia," Garrus said, still grinning.

"Stop grinning, you _bosh'tet_. You know how dangerous it can be for my kind out here."

"Not really," Garrus admitted. "But then again, I won't necessarily die if an alien sneezes on me. But it wouldn't be an infection, really, would it? Considering how most of the aliens in the galaxy are a bunch of levos, their diseases can't really take hold in you."

"We also have very acute allergic reactions," Tali said with a flat look. Well, flat even for a woman who wore a helmet over her face at all times. She gave a sigh. "I hope that Shepard is alright. She looked..."

"Shell shocked," Garrus nodded, stealing her words. "And I'm not surprised. She and Kaiden were close. I heard lovers."

"Please, _Liara's_ been after Shepard since she came aboard," Tali said off handedly.

"And Orta Sokkason's looking positively dreamy, and I wish he'd take _me_ to the dance," Joker said from his seat, a few meters away, in a mocking falsetto. "Seriously, and I thought _I_ was a gossip."

"O...kay, we've been shamed by Joker," Tali said. "The galaxy has a strange sense of humor."

Stranger still, because about a second after Tali said that, as Garrus was reaching for the airlock controls, the computer piped up.

"_The Commander is aboard; XO Pressly stands relieved_."

Garrus gave Tali a glance, then took a step back. The airlock doors opened, and the woman herself entered her ship, wearing blood-spattered civilian clothing, with a half-melted gun in her hand, and Liara at her side. Garrus took a long look at that, and tried to figure out a scenario that would make sense for what he saw. Honestly, he couldn't.

"Shepard? Where were you! Everybody on the ship was worried sick!" Tali said, her words accusatory but her tones more a relief from fear.

"I had a panic attack, tried to commit suicide through poisoning, learned that humans suck at being the Avatar from a Prothean, tore a man in half, and had sex with Liara," Shepard said flatly. Garrus shook his head, having not noticed the start that the asari gave at that deadpan explanation.

"What were you _really_ doing?" he asked.

"Celebrating," Shepard said simply. While she did look a bit pale, she certainly seemed a lot calmer than she was when she essentially limped off of the Normandy the day before yesterday.

"Celebrating what?" Garrus asked.

"I just found out my baby sister's still alive," Shepard said with a smirk. "And out of the Hegemony. So I figured that called for a bender."

"Oh. Well. We thought that you were..." Tali began.

"Thought I was what?" Shepard asked, as she stepped into her domain.

"Drinking yourself to death in a back-alley bar in the Wards?" Joker hazarded.

"I wouldn't say _to death_," Shepard said, but she shook her head. "Get everybody ready. We're shipping out as soon as all hands are aboard."

"Did anybody tell you? We're down a few," Garrus said. "Wrex cleared out his things. And Murtock's nowhere to be found."

"The first, I'm aware of," Shepard said with a wave. "Murtock... Not really surprising. Without Jackie, he's pretty much got nothing tying him here. Hell, he's not even technically military. What about the rest?"

"Aboard," Joker said. He turned his chair. "We figured that when you got back, you'd want to be part of the hammer that went after Saren. So we kept the engines warmed up for you."

"Good man," Shepard said with a subdued grin. She shook her head, though. "Only we're not joining the fleet. We're going after the Conduit itself. Set a course to Ilos, Refuge System, in the Pangaea Expanse."

"Easily done," Joker said, spinning in his chair. He hit a few buttons on his displays, and Shepard turned toward the map near the center of the ship. Garrus let out a mild chuckle.

"You know, I'm really wondering if I should ask how you got that blood on you," Garrus said. "Or if I even want to know _whose blood it is_!"

"Long story," Shepard said. She raised a finger. "Funny story. I was getting dressed after the shower, and..."

"What the shit is this?" Joker's utterance from the helm caused all three to stop, and turn to him. "Oh, come _on_! We've got a problem, Commander," he said.

"Problem being?" Shepard asked.

"I'm locked out. Somebody's enabled the remote-failsafes on our nav computer," Joker said. He cast a glance over his shoulder. "I can land a Relay Jump inside a kilometer, but I can't _start_ the jump if the computer doesn't let us sync. We're _grounded_."

"Who would... who _could_ do that to us?" Shepard asked. "Those codes are Black Ribbon only. You'd need to be on the top of the heap to even know that they exist."

"You know they exist," Tali pointed out.

"And Joker knows they exist," Garrus added.

"And now, two aliens know they exist," Tali finished brightly.

"Go ahead, laugh it up. Our operational security is full of holes. We get it," Joker said with tones sardonic. Shepard, though, chewed on her lower lip for a moment. Not in the 'human trying to be cute' way, but rather in the 'vorcha too angry to care what he's biting' way. Then she turned to the map again.

"Keep the engines warm, Joker. I'm going to have a talk with Anderson. I'm not sitting on the sidelines while Saren has a clear shot at the Conduit."

"Where are you going?" Tali asked her.

"To get my damned armor," Shepard said, before pausing, and turning back to them. "I'm ba~ack."

Tali glanced to Garrus again, as Liara, who'd been remarkably silent this entire time, slipped between them and headed downstairs herself. "...Garrus?"

"Yeah, Tali?"

"What do you think are the chances she wasn't lying about the 'sex with Liara' part?" she asked.

"I couldn't tell you," Garrus said. "But she does look like somebody who's blown off a lot of steam."

* * *

"Alright, Udina. I know that you're the heart of this. What did you do to my ship?" Shepard asked, as she stood with arms crossed before her chest in her barely-intact armor. While there was a certain amount of its native dark green that still showed, a greater portion of it was the dull grey of untampered omnigel. The ambassador leaned back in his seat, his perpetual scowl ratcheting down a few notches.

"I will not be threatened nor bullied in my office, Shepard," Udina said, matching her gaze and not bothering to rise. "I am exercising my responsibility as the selected delegate for the Systems Alliance to prevent a political shitstorm the likes of which no predecessor of mine has ever had to endure."

"And what exactly have I done that would piss off your friends the aliens?"

"They are not friends, and that is exactly the problem. Every time the Council addresses me, it is to ask if some disastrous decision you've made is typical of your species, a question they only ask because you are, after all, the first Spectre from the human race that they admit to," Udina said, now leaning forward. "Do you know how many times I've had to defend your insanity on behalf of our species?"

"I was made a Spectre to hunt down Saren. And I know where he's going. I know where the Conduit is," Shepard told him.

"Then send the information to Admiral Hackett with the Fifth Fleet," Udina said. "You are unreliable; a liability to the fleet and to the ship which you serve on."

"You have no idea what you're talking about," Shepard said.

"Really? Then you _didn't_ threaten a civilian at gunpoint two days ago in the Wards Access?" Udina asked, his tone dry and tightly angry. "And you _didn't_ spend a day intaking an amount of alcohol that is usually only survivable by a krogan?"

"That was..." Shepard began.

"And you _didn't_ blast a man in half with a high-explosive round _ON A SPACE STATION_?" Udina finally shouted.

"The Citadel can take a lot harder hits than one small-arms AM round," Shepard said.

"That's not the point! You are reckless, a danger to yourself and everybody around you, and a disgrace to the good name that humanity has been working so hard to acquire in the wake of two wars and a half-generation of scorn and condescension!" Udina finally rose, his fists on the table as he glared at her. "If I was Admiral Hackett, I would have you thrown into a stockade for your unconscionable behavior!"

"If you _were_ Admiral Hackett, then you wouldn't have survived the Batarian War," Shepard pointed out dryly.

"And above all," Udina said, as though calling back to a previous point, which he likely was, "...I will not be insulted," he then sat down once more. "While I haven't the clout to have you stripped of command or brought to answer for the damage that you've caused, I do have the authority to ground any ship that belongs to the Human Systems' Alliance docked at the Citadel. If this one thing I do can save the galaxy from you and your ill-conceived threats from beyond the veils of time, then I will do it."

"So you're going to sit there and think yourself a hero for stopping the best chance that we've got of getting Saren before he reaches the Conduit?" Shepard asked.

"No, because _you're_ not that best chance," Udina answered her. He shook his head, and his tones lost a lot of their heat and rage. "Honestly, Shepard, if you had only been more careful, more discerning... more mindful of the _ramifications_ of your actions, than this step would likely not be necessary. But I know you, by now. That you're a problem-drinker with severe post-traumatic stress, and a tendency to explode at the slightest provocation. And _that_ isn't the person that Humanity can afford to have as its face to the galaxy."

"You're making a mistake, Udina," Shepard said.

"I wish I was," he said, sitting back. Looking tired, rather than contemptuous or smug. "But that I'm not has become very clear to me."

Shepard let out an angry snort which lit with flame, before turning and striding out of Udina's office. The door opened to a wall of armor, painted bright red, with a Si Wongi head sticking out of the top of it. Shepard blinked at the odd sight, as Asha turned her attention toward her. "I can assume that your meeting was not a pleasant or helpful one?"

"What in Agni's name is that?" Shepard asked, her curiosity outweighing her wrath for the moment. Asha looked down at the heavy hardsuit that she was wearing, all plates and actuators, and enough kinetic barriers to stop a shell from the Mako.

"Liara saw fit to grant me a degree of largess," Asha said, motioning to her new armor. "While this in many ways lacks the freedom of motion of her own, I could scarcely be better protected, and for a fraction of the price."

Shepard shook her head, her question answered. "No. No it didn't go well."

"Anderson had much suspected that it might," Asha said, matching stride with Shepard despite the obvious difference in terms of sheer mass and emcumbrance between Shepard's light hardsuit and Asha's heavy one. "And as such, he has invited you to his apartment on the Presidium. He offers a solution to the current problem."

"Why didn't he tell me about it?" Shepard asked.

"Because he believed that you might have been observed, and that any communications from he to you might be intercepted," Asha said. "I myself only gained this information through the third-party of a particularly irate volus," she pointed behind her, toward where the elcor and volus shared a chamber.

"That's what you get, Din," Shepard smirked. Asha gave a confused grunt, so Shepard shook her head. "Where does he live?"

"I will show you. And do not be surprised; I have already informed the others and they will be awaiting us," Asha said.

"And I was the last to know because...?"

"Because you were heading into the ambassador's office when I came to inform you. Thus, I informed the others while I waited," Asha said. Well, she just had an answer for everything, didn't she?

"You think I wanted to sacrifice you on Virmire," Shepard said, quietly. Asha's jaw tensed but she didn't say yes. "That I would have traded your life for Kaiden's."

"If you had asked it of me, I would have taken that duty without complaint or regret," Asha said. She gave a small, distant smile. "After all, it would do much to regain the besmirched honor of my family, were I to die in service of the Avatar's victory."

"You can't really believe in that old Fire Nation garbage, can you?" Shepard asked. Asha didn't answer. "Good gods, you do."

"My family failed you in your last life. My family must redress that debt," Asha said calmly. "And as I could not do so for the fate of the Lieutenant, I can only do so by giving my utmost to the defeat of Saren."

"You're insane," Shepard said.

"I rather think I am more sane than most," Asha said. She then rapped on the back window of an air-taxi. The door opened, and a bored looking asari woman glanced over her shoulder at them as they entered.

"Goddess preserve me. Am I a taxi or an APC?" she asked, around a nervous laugh.

"If we're going to invade somewhere, we'll let you know," Shepard said with a smirk of her own. Asha gave her a look which... had a lot of relief in it.

Come to think of it, it'd been a _long_ time since Shepard felt herself in a joking mood.

"Ninth block, third level of the twelfth central residential district, the Sehrriß Arms," Asha told the cabby.

"A human that can properly pronounce asari words. What a change," the cabby said but she started driving without any more said.

"I am told that your sister lives and released of her slavery," Asha said. "That must have done your heart a kindness that it has so seldom received of recent weeks."

"Yeah," Shepard said. "So what, you didn't believe the rest of it?"

"Tear a man in half? Certainly possible," Asha said. "Insulted by a Prothean – whom are fifty thousand years extinct – distinctly less so. Fornicating with our resident and odd-minded archeologist? Impossible."

Shepard chuckled, but didn't say anything more. After all, why ruin the heavily armored woman's expectations.

The Presidium, as one could 'cut across' it, was a short transit even though Anderson lived damned near on the opposite point from where they'd set out. The cab landed, and Asha picked up the fare. "I could have gotten that. I do have a higher pay-grade than you," Shepard pointed out.

"You also have to pay for your weaponry out of your own pocket," Asha said. "I? Not so much."

Shepard rolled her eyes and let her subordinate pay, then lead into the building. In a surprising way, it looked a lot like the flop that she'd tried to drown herself under a shower in, albeit this one looked like it was very well tended to. The layouts were _almost identical_ inside, with only the obviously larger individual rooms making for a difference. And Asha oriented them directly into one such room, whose door stood open. Her squad, minus the krogan, the Sentinel, and the 'psychotic biotic', were gathered down in the lower area, with Garrus, Tali and Liara all sitting on the couch watching a remarkably violent sport that had to have been invented on Tuchanka. Shepard herself entered just as three batarians ganged up to tackle a krogan to the ground, and wrestle some sort of oblong object from him, before taking off down the field with it.

"Oh, that's gotta hurt. Even for a krogan," Garrus mentioned.

"Shepard. Good. I was wondering when you'd arrive," Anderson said, as he took a ball-peen hammer to his microwave. Shepard blinked in surprise, and the old Tribesman gave her a nod. "Please, take a seat. I'll just be a moment longer."

Shepard moved to the stuffed leather chair that sat at an angle to the couch, and leaned toward Tali. "What is he doing?" Shepard asked quietly, as Anderson walked over to his room's landline, picked it up, and cut the cord off near the wall and near the machine itself, before throwing the severed portion out into the balcony.

"I think he's removing listening devices," Tali said. Then she flinched, as a krogan _flattened_ a batarian and regained possession of that obviously important leather thing. "I don't know why he doesn't just use a sweeper. I've got one that would work wonders," she held up her Omni, but shrugged.

"I believe that he is doing this as a cathartic experience," Liara added. Then she gaped for a moment. "Oh, that is not fair! That was clearly a foul!"

"You know the rules to this?" Garrus asked.

"No, but I can not think of a game where it would be legal to kick a man in the jaw when he's on the ground!"

"Not _legal_, but encouraged," Anderson said, as he threw his clock onto the balcony as well, before closing the door. "I'm sure that Udina's talked to you by now, child?"

"He's pulled rank on me, despite not even having a goddamned rank!" Shepard muttered, leaning forward in her borrowed barcalounger.

"I had a feeling he might, when he learned about what happened at the hospital. I tried to keep him in the dark, but there was only so much I could do," Anderson said, actually sounding apologetic that he couldn't do more. "But what's done is done. The Normandy is locked down, unless somebody with the right level of authority unlocks it."

"Well, those codes would..."

"I know the Normandy's code," Anderson said. Shepard paused.

"No. They'll _know_ it was you. You'll be up to your neck in shit and angry turians in a heartbeat!"

"Then you'll have to use that heartbeat to its utmost," Anderson said.

"I can't ask you to do this," Shepard said.

"I know, child," Anderson said. "But there's little other choice. Unless I was to override the lockout from the source – Udina's office – there's no way it _won't_ come back to me," he shook his head. "And honestly, I don't think I could get within a mile of the Embassy right now."

"If you screw up on the docks, you'll get shot," Shepard said.

"And if I screw up in Udina's office, I'll get shot more," Anderson said. Then he sighed, and faced her flatly. "Honestly, Shepard, this is your call. What's more important? The mission, or an old war-dog's reputation? Liara told me that you know where the Conduit is. The Normandy can get there faster than any ship in the fleet. And to be honest, I have a feeling that the Avatar _should_ be there when Saren gets brought down. That's just universal justice."

"Sir, please. There's got to be a better way than throwing yourself on the grenade for us," Shepard said.

Anderson shook his head, and patted her on the shoulder. "There aren't many people that I'd do this for. Because there aren't many people who deserve it. But you do, child. And I know that, of anybody that they'd send to put a stop to Saren, you've got the best chance of making it stick. Especially..." he paused, and glanced to Asha, then to Liara. Both nodded, a worried look on their faces. "...especially if it's true that he's found some way to use some sort of Avatar powers himself."

Shepard looked up at him, and she felt a little smile come to her. "Thank you," she said.

"Any time," Anderson said. He then gave everybody gathered in the room a sweeping look. "I suggest that you finish whatever it is you're going to do on the Citadel, because until Saren's done-for, you're not going to be welcome back here. And when you're ready, let me know. I'll open your nav computer. As long as you're in FTL when they try to lock you down again... as long as you don't stop Relay Jumping 'till you hit the Traverse... nobody will be able to stop you."

"That sounds like a plan," Garrus said, rising from the sofa. "I've got to see more of that, sometime. It's crude, sadistic and violent. And looks endlessly entertaining."

"You are so... turian," Tali said with a shake of her head.

"You say that like it's a bad thing," Garrus laughed. Shepard, though, rose to face her long-time superior... and longer time father-figure. She knew that if Papa had met Anderson... they'd probably get into a fist fight, then drink it off that evening at the pub. Anderson was a lot like him. And a lot, not. Still, Shepard gave the man a salute that he so righteously deserved.

One that Anderson returned to her. "Now go out there and make me proud," Anderson said, as he moved to the doors of his own apartment, grabbing his coat on the way out.

Liara was next to Shepard's side, as Asha now waited at the door. "Are you sure that you will be alright with all that's happened? With your sister?" she asked.

"For the first... not sure. The second... yeah. I guess I will," Shepard said. She took a deep breath, then turned toward the door. "And stop staring at my ass, Liara."

"I WAS NOT!" she said, perhaps a bit too loud. And when Shepard threw a glance at her, she was blushing very blue. "Fine. I might have been."

Asha regarded that interplay with a raised eyebrow but no more than that. Good that she didn't inquire. It probably would have broke her brain – and her desire to hook Shepard up with the now deceased Alenko – to understand. Honestly, it broke Shepard's heart a little just thinking about it.

* * *

In its way, to move like this was a baptism, as his orange-haired waterbender cousins to the south would call it; a return to a sense of sanity that Anderson had lacked for a long time. Ever since Eden Prime, it seemed like every force in the galaxy was working to put him into the shadows, out of sight and out of mind. Forcing him to be old. To be useless. And for a Tribesman like Anderson, that just would not do.

"Captain," the turian flight-controller said, with a respectful nod, as Anderson let his path take him past the seats, most unoccupied, that overlooked D24. "Can this wait? I'm in the middle of some careful maneuvers," the worker said.

"I'm not here to take any of your time," Anderson said. "I'm just surprised that there aren't more people up here."

"It's a dead shift in a military sector. Doesn't happen very often, but that's no reason to slack. For all we know, a fleet of geth or... or krogan could come barreling out of the nebula. Have to keep a steady eye out," the turian said, not looking back.

"You do service to your post," Anderson said.

"Kind of you to say," he still did not look back. And under his breath, Anderson asked a mumbled forgiveness to whatever spirits oversaw the wellbeing of turian tin-pushers, as he hooked one of his arms under the alien's mandibles, and heaved back and up. The worker flailed, trying to pry Anderson's arms away, but a flex of an old man's muscles which had given nothing to either atrophy nor age cut off the flow of blue blood to his brain, and after less than thirty seconds, those limbs fell limp. Anderson released his grasp, and then leaned in close to the mandible'd mouth. Yes, there was still a puff of breath there. Unconscious, and not dead. As Anderson had hoped.

One could never be sure how human-developed take-downs would work on alien species. Anderson knew for a fact that that particular move, against a drell, was just asking for a bullet to the chest. He then started to jog, stealth more important than raw speed. He descended the stairway, and glanced 'round the corner. Clear for the moment of any body who didn't look like he didn't have something better to do. So he started to walk, as casually as a man with nothing better to do, toward the end of the pier which was locked onto the hull of the Normandy.

As he rounded the ship's snout – such as it was – he clenched his jaw in annoyance, and frustration. There were a pair of turians there, talking quietly, their keen eyes sweeping up and down the docks. And they were less than thirty meters from the console that Anderson had to access. He briefly considered waiting them out, but the two turians had entered into a good lean. From what he knew of them, they didn't do that unless they were settled in for a _long_ stay.

That meant he had to do something a bit more brazen. So he started walking, directly toward it.

The turians didn't give him a second look, as he passed them by. At least, they didn't until he'd bypassed the Normandy's airlock, and was obviously heading toward the bank of terminals that flanked the end of the pier. "Hold on a second," the nearer of the two said. Inwardly, Anderson cursed. Damn them for their perception and damn them for their work-ethic. He didn't let that frustration show on his face, though, and he turned toward them.

"What's the problem?" Anderson asked.

"This is a restricted area. We can't have anybody tampering with docking controls," he said, one tridactyl hand on his rifle.

"I don't see how that's a problem. I'm the captain of this vessel," Anderson lied.

"No offense, Captain Anderson, but we were specifically told to not let _you_ tamper with them. The orders come from your own ambassador," he stressed. Anderson gave a casual shrug which was quite opposed to his internal growl, but he started walking back toward the airlock, and the turian who was now abreast of it. "It's just orders. As a military man, you'd probably know how that goes."

"Indeed I do," Anderson said with a nod, as he came face-to-faceplate with the turian, who overtopped him by a good twenty centimeters. "And we both know how onerous those orders can be, sometimes."

"What's that supposed to–"

Anderson cut him off by surging forward, forehead first, and cracking the turian in the teeth. It hurt, and split his scalp, but he let the momentum carry him forward. There was a crack of a rifle-shot, fired at random, that Anderson turned his attention to. He caught that gun and spun it upward, it firing all the while for the pained and panicking bearer, until Anderson had it hauled over the turian's shoulder. The other had only just got his gun pointed forward, so Anderson ripped the rifle from the nearer's hands, and hurled it with all of the force his body could muster, directly at the turian's eyes. The flinch that the other turian gave only served to put him in a perfect spot to get smashed by a projectile rifle, and get knocked onto his back, probably seeing stars.

The nearer heaved himself up, and hurled out an elbow which clubbed into Anderson's temple, but he was already moving with it, as he'd guessed that'd be the turian's move. It still hurt, but it only fed rotation into the Tribesman, who swept the leg out from under the alien, and drove him down with a chop to the throat. Again, not lethal, nor intended to be. But stunning and a half.

Anderson shook his head, and wiped the dribble of his own blood that tried to drip into his eye, and took off at a sprint that would do a younger man envious, directly to that console. He'd never known that his fingers could work so fast, as he slammed the code into place, and pounded the return key. There was a clunk.

Then, there was a blast, a hot bolt exploding at Anderson's side and singing his shirt, as it sent him sprawling to the pier. He only had to look back to see the farther turian on his feet, with fire wreathing his fists.

* * *

"Come on... come on, baby girl... Just show me that green light," Joker muttered under his breath. Nobody looked out the front of the ship, not since they'd seen Anderson walk past it. Nobody wanted to, for fear that they might have to bear witness to the Captain's death. Shepard, for example, kept his eyes on the panels in front of Joker that were for the Nav computer.

Everybody was aboard, everything was in place. It all came down to one man. One human, deciding the fate of the galaxy. How cliched could you get, Shepard thought. Not really understanding the irony of it. There was a chirp, and a flat amber pane began to show statistics and information, and the instant it did, Joker's hands were flying. "Get us out of here, now!" Shepard added, perhaps somewhat needlessly. The docking clamps cracked off as the ship lurched back hard enough to rip them from their moorings. They couldn't trust the docking authority to release them with proper timing, after all. Joker then flicked a few more commands, and the ship turned and bolted into FTL, starting less than twenty meters from the end of the pier, and all of the light ahead of them began to blue-shift.

"Alright, we're sorted, synced, and locked. By the time they try to rein us in, we'll be half way to the Terminus," Joker said. He turned a glance over his shoulder. "I hope this was a good idea, Commander. I'd hate to think I got banned from my new favorite bar for a snipe-goose chase."

"You'll be back with your busty blue women in no time," Shepard said, as she gave herself a moment of relief. "Hell, you might even be heralded as a hero."

"Think they'll give me a medal?" Joker asked. Then he frowned. "You know what? Don't let 'em give me a medal. They usually have you stand for ages at those ceremonies, and they'd ask me to shave old glory here," he cast a thumb at his beard. "It took three months to get it the way I like it!"

"Alright. You'll live and die in ignominy, for the sake of your beard," Shepard said.

"Damn straight," Joker said, and turned his attention forward, to whatever it was that Joker did when there wasn't much piloting to do. Shepard, on the other hand, made her way back through the run of the ship. All of the seats were loaded, everybody ready for anything. And since they weren't sure what the Conduit was going to give them, _anything_ was indeed the only viable thing that could be prepared for.

"Alright, you all know that we're heading into unknown territory," Shepard said, coming to a halt at the end of the trench with her back to the galaxy map. "We don't know what we'll find at Ilos waiting for us. If we're lucky, we won't find anything. If we're not, Saren's entire geth fleet might be parked in orbit. Make no mistake, this will be the hardest thing any member of this crew will have had to do. And to be frank... There's probably nobody else in the galaxy better suited for it. Saren stops here, and now. Sovereign stops, here and now. And his 'Reapers'," she even threw up the air-quotes, "...well, they'll learn why eight thousand years of history taught one singular lesson across its entire length; you don't _fuck_ with the Avatar."

A brief hoorah rose from the crew, and Shepard gave them a salute, which they returned in kind. "We'll be dropping out in the Refuge System in ten hours. Be ready when that happens. That means take your rack time now."

"Aye aye, Commander," a voice from the trench answered, and others agreed with it, the vast majority of the seats emptying. Shepard ended up being only the first of many down the stairs into the crew deck.

"Commander," Tali said, where she sat at the mess table. "It's really coming to the end, isn't it?"

"It really is," Shepard said with a nod. She cracked a smirk. "I bet you never thought that you'd be saving your Flotilla from an invasion of evil mecha-squid from the edges of space."

"No. To be honest, I thought that I was going to have to bring home a new live-ship to have something worthy of the name," Tali said with a shrug. "I guess saving the galaxy will have to do."

"Don't make it sound so onerous. You can do a lot worse than having 'galactic heroine' as part of your job description," Shepard noted, backing up until she was just before her door.

"Please. You've always had that under your name. I've had to earn it. Give respect where it's due," Tali said.

"Spirits damn it! It's that quarian marine again!" Garrus, who was sitting at the other table shouted. "Can't he hit me anywhere _but_ the head?"

"For what it is worth, we shall not let you down," Asha, who was leaning in the place that Kaiden so often frequented, mentioned.

"Never thought that you would," Shepard said. There was a quiet, broken only by Garrus' angry grumblings at his video game. She looked each of them in the eye – Tali as close as Shepard could manage given the circumstances – and gave them a nod. "We're heading toward the end of the line, but it'll be a bit before we get there. If you're going to get some rack time, get it now."

"I think I'll stay up," Tali said, shooting a glare toward one of the Engies who was passing into the crew bunks. "There are _bosh'tets_ among us," she muttered.

"Not going to ask," Shepard said, and moved through her own door.

She sat down at the desk, opposite her bed, and spun the top off of the whiskey-bottle she kept there. She took one slug of it, then spun her chair, taking that old photograph in her other hand. The grey-bearded man in his grey suit. The lovely, tattooed woman in her orange and yellow robes. Herself, astride an elcor... and Talitha in the mud. Some of those faces were gone forever. But not Talitha.

Shepard had her sister back.

And even though she was smiling, she still felt tears leaking from her eyes.

She didn't know how long she sat there, sipping at the whiskey as it was originally intended – rather than the wanton gulps that Shepard usually employed – when the door opened again. Shepard glanced up, using her photo-bearing hand to wipe her cheeks, and gave a mild frown when Liara walked in, her hands behind her back. Looking... bashful?

"Liara? I was wondering where you were," Shepard said, putting the bottle and the picture aside. "I didn't see you out there with the others."

"I... was not sure how I was going to broach this subject. Shepard, are you attracted to me?" Liara asked.

"...Um..." Shepard said, her shoulders hunching a bit.

"I know that your impulse is to decry your heterosexuality, but I need to know if what we shared on the Citadel was an anomaly, or something to be developed," Liara said, still not able to look Shepard directly in the eye.

Shepard rose, and shook her head. "I..." she shook her head. And when Liara looked up, that tentative way with those big blue eyes... "...you're adorable, you know that?"

"I did not expect that I would have this attraction for you, either," Liara admitted. "If you do not wish to continue this relationship, I will be... disappointed. But I would understand."

Shepard wanted... Honestly, for once, Shepard didn't know what the hell she wanted. Usually, if she wanted somebody, she either got him, or she didn't, and she moved on. She was never locked into this quantum state of wanting-yet-not-wanting until the Normandy. Until she started thinking so warmly about the freckled girl with the pebbly blue skin.

"Everybody's asking me what I want," Shepard said. "What I want is something _simple_. Something _easy_. Something... that doesn't hurt," she trailed off. "And I've never had that... until you."

"Do you want me to stay, Aimei?" Liara asked, her tone so hopeful.

Gods damn it, she was so adorable. "More than anything," she answered, and slowly pulled the asari in close, while Liara just smiled and pressed her form against Shepard's own. And for just a while, Shepard utterly ignored that part of herself which thought that this might be a bad idea.

Because this might just be a rare _good_ one, Shepard thought, as blue lips met hers once again.

* * *

Codex Entry (Council Species) ASARI

Sub-entry: Comparative physiology

_Asari show a number of traits which, for several centuries, were thought unique. The first was the five-fingered hand. Until the discovery of the batarian species, this was thought a unique attribute, similar to how a sentient dextro-amino species was thought impossible until the induction of the turians, and unique until the discovery of the quarians. Evolutionarily, the condition of pentidactyly seems to fulfill a need for intricate task-work, the use of stubtle tools. While other species surmounted the difficulties by different brain-structures and an extra joint in the manipulator fingers, evolution on Thessia decided on two extra digits, as it did on Khar'shan, and on Earth._

_The next trait unique to the asari species is the formation of their brain. The asari skull is comparatively thinner than other comperable species, which required the evolutionary development of the shock-absorbing cartilagenous tendrils which cover it. The alteration in skull thickness was to allow for a much increased brain, with a twisting 'helical' structure not seen in any other species. While this does make for the capability to bear memories across their impressive, thousand year life span, it is fragile and its position makes any break of the cervical vertebrae a near certain death-sentence. Most species, even discounting turians or the much more resistent krogan, could survive and even recover from an injury which kills an asari._

_The two physiological facts which are most unusual about the asari are their millennial lifespan, and their universal biotic strength. The latter is actually less common in the post-colonial days, as asari that are born on planets not as rich in Eezo as Thessia can be utterly bereft of biotic capacity unless their infancy, youth, and adolescence have element zero supplements in their food and with their breastmilk. It is widely held that the eezo that attaches to every cell in the asari body - not simply the brain as does with other races throughout Council Space and beyond - is the source of the species' comparative high strength and control of biotic force. However, this also necessitates their transition through their life-cycle, as with each chrysalis the element zero in the asari body is shifted into the spinal column and brain incrementally. The physical and psychological changes - a large-scale increase in breeding urge with the 'Matron' stage, and its near disappearance with the 'Matriarch' stage - are not so easily explained by this migration of Eezo._

_One mildly baffling vestigial feature of the asari species is their reproductive tract. Despite being a species which reproduces by selective parthenogenesis, they have sexual organs which function identically to the females of almost every bi-gendered species in the galaxy. The presence of structures which provide sexual pleasure with a male specimen seem to indicate a period where such a structure was evolutionarily selected for; that in turn seems to indicate that there was a period in the asari's evolutionary past when the species hadn't been monogendered. Other theories claim that there was, in the distant past, widescale manipulation of the asari form and genome, as there exist structures in the asari form which don't seem to have any function, are actively detrimental to asari living, or simply have no realistic reason for having been selected for via natural evolution. This viewpoint is not wide-spread, however, as even noted fringe theorist Doctor T'Soni (Link= Dr. L. T'Soni, Ph.D.) called the hypothesis 'utterly ludicrous', and cited the complete fossil record showing the evolution of the asari species. Debates on the advent of asari monogenderism continue on Thessia, citing possible interference by spirits - which throws the Athame Doctrine's purge into historical context - or a highly selective genetic illness._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	19. The Resplendent Sovereign

The planet Ilos was a sight to behold. And they beheld it as they zipped in, between the geth ships that hung in orbit, their course directly toward the terminator where day became night. The night was the more striking part; it blazed like the cities of Earth, light shining from the ground as wildfires burned, all year, every year. Without any animals, the world was hyperoxygenated, and the fires were the only thing feeding the plants, which in turn begat more fires. Somebody more scientifically minded – or in fact educated – than Shepard would call Ilos a world of unsteady equalibrium; that it was a planet returning to single-celled life and algae until its biosphere could repair itself in about a billion years or so. People also called it the largest unexplored Prothean ruin in Terminus Space.

Pity, it wasn't Prothean.

"Well, if that wasn't a sure sign that Saren's here, I don't know what is," Joker said, eyeing the geth that they slipped past. "How are we going to know what we're looking for?"

"I'll know," Shepard and Liara said in the same instant, but for different reasons.

"Well, you'd better know fast, because the ground's coming up in a hurry," Joker told the two women.

Shepard looked down at the surface, at the ruins of a city that had not yet quite given up to the creep of plants and crumbled completely. "That one," She said, pointing out the image on Joker's haptic display.

"Of course. Anything that the Protheans were going to develop would have to be in a sheltered, electromagnetism-shielded environment," Liara confirmed. "Secrecy would likely be very much at a premium, I imagine."

"And that's the only place with arcologies big enough," Shepard finished.

"Big enough for what?" Tali asked, where she stood opposite Liara. Shepard... honestly didn't have an answer for that. Instead, she looked ahead of her, at the screens that the Normandy was picking up from its passive cameras, which zipped around the surface, trying to find a decent landing-site.

"Hold on, what was that?" Asha asked, moving up to the other side of Joker's chair.

"Gotta say, I'm not minding all the attention," Joker said with a grin. "What? Bad timing?"

That, as it turned out, was a ship rising from the ground. It looked of the same design as other vessels of geth construction, albeit slightly broader and longer. Almost like it had been built to carry things instead of blast them to bits. Joker seemed to grasp the gunnery-chief's concern, and fixed his camera on the area which it had ascended from. It zoomed in, shaking vigorously until the screen flicked and stabilized itself. There were a number of geth heading into a sort of bunker. Geth... and one turian.

"That's Saren," Shepard said, with instant certainty. "Get us down there, now," Shepard said.

"Not possible," Asha said with a wince, looking at the scans of the terrain. "The Mako requires more room than we can find for ten kilometers."

"We'll hot-drop," Shepard said.

"The descent angle's too steep for that," Tali pointed out. "Even if we could fly out with the Mako, the Normandy wouldn't be able to pull up before hitting something and..."

"I can do it," Joker said, his eyes dead forward. Shepard turned to him, and he turned a glance toward her. "I can get you right on top of him. I know I can."

"Then do it, Joker," Shepard said. She cracked a smirk. "Bonus points if you land me on his face."

"I'll be doing my damndest, in that case," the flight lieutenant said with a nod of the head, but without a chuckle in his voice. He was slipping into his mode of focus, that much was obvious. Shepard, though, turned to the others.

"Alright! Beat feet! I want us in the Mako and ready to drop the instant the Normandy hits atmo!" Shepard shouted.

* * *

Saren took a deep breath of the air, letting it fill his new lungs. It burned a little, but not nearly as much as it would have, a few days ago. Too much oxygen was as dangerous as too little, after all. He opened his new eyes, and scanned the landscape as he strode forward, with purpose. With certainty. With _clarity_.

THE CONDUIT.

"We are almost upon it. The time is nigh," Saren said, his voice vibrating even more than a turian larynx would allow. After all, he wasn't speaking with a turian larynx anymore. The damage that _that woman_ did to his weak and failing flesh had been severe, but Sovereign understood Saren's resolve, and took great steps and pains to repair him, and do so quickly. He flexed his new arm, its sinews of matte black metal naked to the sky. He could feel it as much as he could feel the arm which had been torn off of him; it was a part of him, wired into his brain, much as his other was.

MAKE HASTE. IT ALL DEPENDS UPON YOU.

"And I will not disappoint," Saren promised. He knew how much this meant. How important it was. And he knew that he would accept death with dishonor ten thousand times before failure. Sovereign's need, and desire, was absolute. Everything else was secondary to it.

He passed through the bulkhead which had taken so much effort and time to circumvent and open. For all the Protheans were masterful builders, they were also paranoid to a fault. There came an odd noise. One he turned, back and up toward.

And he could see a streak dipping down, between the forest of buildings. An arc which was descending toward him. He took a step back, and with a wave of his hand, and but a thought, he bade the bulkhead close. The ancient, weathered machinery ground, but lurched to life, slowly grating closed. Saren couldn't help but smile with a metal jaw as the blip of the armored IFV slid out of the incoming form, and raced toward the ancient concrete. His eye opened mildly when the thing slammed hard into the ground, and then bounced to a stop less than a meter from the bulkhead, just before it closed completely and shut the Avatar's feeble attempt to stop him off completely.

He closed his eyes, and pulled in a deep and burning breath. Red started to intrude even on the vision of his own eyelids, and he could feel even more power surging through him. Pulling him up off of the ground. He turned toward a Prime that stood not far away. "**Delay them**." Saren ordered, but his words were almost lost in a cacophony of voices. He didn't care. The words were out, and he bade himself forward. There was a crack, and then the wind was screaming past Saren's face, as a mixture of airbending and biotic acceleration blasted him through the sewer system faster than the speed of sound.

On the other side of the bulkhead, though, the hatch opened. Shepard was the first out, and the first to walk up and lay a hand on the bulkhead. She strained for a moment, upon which Garrus, the second out, let out a sigh. "Figures. He closes a door in our face and it's the kind that you can't just push out of the way."

"I fear no amount of explosives would open that portal," Asha said in her wake with a shake of her head.

"Well, Saren had to have found a way to open it. Maybe there's a control panel somewhere out here that we can use," Tali began, pointing behind them. Then she heard the grinding. "...you've got to be kidding me. We're surrounded."

"Get back into the Mako," Shepard said.

"That's a good idea," Garrus said. "If nothing else, we can use its cannon to pick off Armatures."

"Keep the driver's seat open," Shepard continued. The others shot a glance toward her, confused. She closed her eyes, and took a deep breath of the air which burned her lungs, as it had an indoctrinated turian not two minutes before. And her eyes pressed closed, to the sound of geth approaching from the rear, and of the rest of her squad entering the IFV.

"The key to the house," Shepard whispered, to herself, "...is under the mat."

She opened her eyes, and they were limned with white. She pressed her hand against that stone and pushed. It did not yield, even to the power of the Avatar State. So her lips peeled back into a rictus of frustration and anger. One she turned to the sky, as a ring of blue fire erupted into being just behind her back for just an instant. With more fury and frustration than sense, she slammed her fist forward in a haymaker, expecting her fist to get the worse of it.

Instead, the bulkhead exploded inward, tearing free of its footing and flattening a Geth Prime on the other side of it, before the doors continued to bound down and out of sight. That had been earthbending, she was sure of it. But she wasn't sure why it worked. The light didn't leave her eyes, though.

At this point, she didn't really care, about either why the door had crumbled nor why she seemed to still be in the Avatar State. She pulled herself into the hatch and closed it behind her, pulling herself into the copilot's seat beside Asha. She had proved her mettle by accelerating as soon as Shepard was within, and turning slightly so that she would flatten a red-painted geth that was trying to put up a kinetic barrier in their path. "That no doubt saved us a great deal of time," Asha said with a nod. Then she glanced over to Shepard, and blanched. "I... is something wrong, Avatar?"

"**We can't let Saren get away**," Shepard said simply. "**Go faster**."

"As you wish, Avatar," Asha said, but looked all the more uncomfortable, as a demigod was now sharing the infantry fighting vehicle with them.

* * *

**Chapter 19**

**The Resplendent Sovereign**

* * *

Wrex had time to kill. That meant that there was probably to do that killing upon, but at the moment, it just meant that he had to sit on his tail and wait. Tuchanka. He was really going back there. For some reason, he'd hoped that Shepard would have convinced him not to, to follow her to Ilos and fulfill his promise to crush that bastard into paste. To abandon his foolish notion, and go back to being what kept him alive and in pay for eight hundred years. Killing people for money. But when he saw her, it was obvious that even the strong screwed up. And if Tuchanka didn't have somebody strong enough to direct the strong when they stumbled, then they'd fall, and it would be a fall the likes of which they wouldn't recover from. After all, outside of the humans, who even bothered to have the krogan's interests at heart? And including the humans, who had those interests at heart for all the right reasons?

A trill called his attention to the Omni which had been kit-bashed into his grandfather's armor. Who'd be calling him right now? It'd better be important.

"Urdnot Wrex," he said into the microphone.

"Agent," the heavily distorted voice on the other side said. From the crackling of the feed that Wrex could barely hear, he wasn't the only one this message was going to. "The temporary interruption in communication has been resolved after a brief stay in FTL to relocate a base of operations. All activities are to resume immediately. Additionally, a status report an all outstanding initiatives is to be transmitted in within a solar day. Shadow Broker, out."

The call went dead. "So somebody finally killed the old witch," Wrex said, and deleted that call from his Omni's memory buffer. It'd still stay in the Citadel's comm buoy for a few days, but there wasn't anything he could do about that, and realistically, he didn't care. He'd be outside even the Shadow Broker's realistic ability to touch him, soon enough. And even if he wasn't, one freelance agent not signing in? That's something you sign under 'possibly killed' and file away. And to be honest, the old broad – turian, he was pretty sure – was a bit cautious to make real money. Whoever was in the chair now... well, time would tell, now wouldn't it?

"Plate seven!" the vendor said. "Plate seven with all in?"

"That's me," Wrex said, lifting the heaping platter from the human at his kiosk. "What do you call this garbage again?"

"Please, you insult my culinary skills," the cook said with a hurt look on his little human face. "It's called ramen, and it's a delicacy, back on Earth."

"Odd how they take anything disgusting and market it as a delicacy somewhere that doesn't have it," the old krogan noted, then he tipped an entire bowl's worth down his gullet. He licked his chops a few times. "...I've had worse."

* * *

Shepard had a hard time staying in her seat. It didn't help that there were voices pounding in her head. Demands being whispered to her. Power being injected into her veins from a thousand generations of human Avatars. But it was more, now. More than it had been on Torfan. More than it had been on Virmire, against Wrex. There were voices in languages she didn't eve know the names of, whispering older techniques. Bending that pulled biotics into their styles.

She heard the voice of Sajuuk in her head, the voice of the Avatars before _him_.

"**There**," Shepard said, with thousands of voices speaking for her. Asha nodded, seeing the speck in the distance that soared ahead. A part of Shepard not saturated in the legion felt a moment of humor, in that for once, the bad-guy was opening the doors so that the good guy could ambush him when he reached his destination. A neat little inversion. As it was, Saren still tried to hold them in place, slow them down, close the doors behind him, but Asha was a good driver, and allowed him no such opportunities. And now, they'd finally reached a point where hew as in sight. "**I'll deal with him personally. Try to keep up**."

"I'll let you out of the..." Asha said, but Shepard grabbed the armor plating directly above her head, and peeled it aside, hopping up onto the roof of the Mako, before roughly sealing it below her. They didn't have time to stop. Not if they wanted to beat Saren to the Conduit.

Then, with a surge both of airbending and raw biotic force, she shot forward, leaving the Mako in her metaphorical – and literal – dust. She couldn't say how many geth she shot past in her heedless pursuit of Saren. Some were even knocked away by the bow-wave. But when she rounded a bend, and saw him sliding the parts of a console, set into the center of a bulkhead, she didn't slow down. Rather, she did the prudent thing, and applied the full force of a biotic charge and an airbender's anger directly into his back.

Doing so cracked her gauntlet. The carry-through of it slammed Saren into that bulkhead, and a moment later, the power of it, as it was backlit by a flash of barely noticed blue light, slammed she and the turian through the bulkhead entirely. Saren landed a roll, and hurled lightning back as he bounced. Shepard slammed the bolts aside, first singularly, but when he landed, rooted himself, and slammed both arms forward, it was with a whole thunderstorm, delivered from one point, and levied at another.

"_Remember the properties of element zero_," Avatar Guuntag, of the second Prothean Renaissance, whispered to her. "_Positive current increases mass. Negative reduces it. And what do you need right now_?"

"**Proximity**," Shepard hissed. So instead of holding the lightning at bay, she let it strike her. But instead of tearing through her tissues, blasting her armor to shards, and cooking her alive, she forced it into a circuit of biotic force. One which she then hurled up the streak of lightning which was empowering it, its mass pulling the ground up, the ceiling down, and Shepard forward, as Saren empowered the singularity that bore down on him. He cut off his attack, but that served only to end the distortions of light in time for Shepard to drive her fist into his face. And her gauntlet cracked a little more. He didn't deflect in the slightest.

"You can't stop me, Shepard," Saren said. Then, there was a pulse in the air, a sigil in red flame pulsing behind him, as his eyes started to glow scarlet. "**And at this point, you're only a impediment. Not worth my time**."

"**That's not what you said last time**," Shepard said, circling him, as he turned to track her.

"_Mass and stone. Together, they can move mountains. Literally_," Guuntag whispered. And Shepard smirked.

A wave of her hand, and a great section of the sewer way snapped off of its supports, glowing with a scintillating blue as the eezo infused into it tried to counteract the bending, and failed. In the beat of her heart, it slammed into Saren, and knocked him flying several dozen meters down the flowing water. "**So I can't stop you, can I?**" Shepard asked.

"**No. You can't**," Saren said, rising to hover above the ground. His voice was bereft of any of the anger, the hatred that it had last time. It was as cold and uncaring as a machine. "**Sovereign's will is absolute, is inevitable. And so is your demise**."

He cast a hand with a dismissive wave, and the whole of the flow surged toward Shepard in ten thousand blades of compressed water. Shepard rooted herself, and powered through that storm, that blizzard of knives that could cut steel. When it abated, there was a barest flicker of light, and a thud in the air. Saren was running. Oh no you don't, Shepard thought.

She pulled herself onto the water that now fell once more, skating down it's surge until she had a decent piece of momentum, then bounding up off of it, twisting and surrounding herself in a shard of airbending that reduced her drag to almost nothing. Then, a thud, and she was screaming forward once more. He wasn't getting away. Not after she'd gotten so close. She caught only glimpses of him, as they switchbacked through the narrow passages that lined the main sewer line. He was trying to lose her. She wasn't letting him. And she was getting closer. She twisted an arm, then sent it racing forward, a lightning bolt directly at his feet.

Saren spun in the air, pulling that lightning up into him, before pulling it from his other hand, and casting it as though throwing a net. And a net it was; held in place by biotic fields, the ionized air crackled with the power that he'd set as a trap behind him. Avatar Shepard managed her timing perfectly, though. Her fingertips were the first thing to hit that field of power, and she pulled it down and into her as easily as thought. Then up, and out, a single hateful beam of electricity and light. He'd thrown it back at her, but honestly, it was a gift of death, and she wanted it to go where it belonged.

Possibly because she caught him right as he turned back onto the main line, with its massively high side-walls, but the bolt did strike him squarely, and his flight listed slightly. He answered her by turning, and with two hands – neither of which he was born with – he blasted columns of azure fire at her, each as thick as she was tall.

"**You can't outbend the Avatar**!" Shepard shouted, an angry smile on her face as she slammed through that fire, bubbling it out and around her rather than snuff it, redirect it, or avoid it. And when she was through, she was catching him again. Just a few more meters, and she'd grab his damned ankle, and rip him to shreds.

Her hand stretched.

Fingers grasped.

And then, there was a flicker of golden light, and Shepard slammed face-first into what felt like a brick-wall, but was almost as clear as glass. She rebounded off of it, landing in the flow of water that ran down the middle of this path. Saren spared her only a glance, too empty to even be contemptuous, before he sped into the distance. Shepard sat up, blinking with surprise even through the white-filtered vision that her galaxy had become. Then, with a snarl, she rose, and hurled a massive bolt of lightning at the force-field before her. It raked along without causing so much as a crackle. She then blasted it with flame, and it slid away without a whisker of harm done. A twist of her arm, and the flow mounted up and surged at it, only to pass through completely. Then, with a last thought, she tried to earthbend under it, but she only god down a meter when she found it under her feet as well.

She jumped out of the hole she stood in, glanced around, and then threw a full-armed punch at the field, as she screamed in frustrated rage. And when she did, the light slowly fled from her eyes, the voices became silent, and Shepard slumped to sit with her back to a Saren's last trap, an impenetrable shield between her, and whatever Saren was looking for. She'd failed. Even with the Avatar State at her command, she couldn't stop him.

She really wished she had a bottle of whiskey or twelve right now.

While it was only three minutes for the Mako to reach where Shepard had advanced, it felt a lot longer. The thing slammed on its brakes and skidded to a halt, its door facing Shepard. Then, with a hiss, it sprang open, and Asha was the first one out. Which come to think of it seemed a bit odd, since she was driving.

"Avatar? AVATAR?" Asha asked.

"I couldn't stop him," Shepard said, her gauntleted fingers in her hair. "Even... I _couldn't stop him_."

"Aimei... This is a Prothean kinetic barrier," Liara said, running her hand along the surface that Shepard had her back to.

"Are you certain?" Tali asked.

"I spent almost a week inside one. I know what it feels like," the asari pointed out. Tali gave a very 'oh yeah' gesture, but remained silent. "And I do not believe that this was triggered by Saren."

"Why do you say that?" Garrus asked, as he grabbed Shepard's other hand and pulled her to her feet. Liara pointed to a side path, a hallway that was only a meter wide at its narrowest point. Unlike every other opening like it, this one had its lights on. Shepard shoved her bout of self-loathing aside for the moment, and actually looked around. Notably, she looked up.

"This... isn't a sewer, is it?" Shepard asked.

"I do not believe so," Liara said. "This seems like a cooling core, for a stasis unit."

And considering the hundreds, if not thousands of glossy, black metal pods that were built into the walls, she didn't have to think hard who for. "Stasis..." Shepard said. He glanced at Liara, who was starting to smile. "You think there's a living Prothean in here, don't you?"

Her enthusiastic nod was answer enough.

Shepard couldn't help but roll her eyes. And at the same time, she couldn't help but banish some of that despair. "Fine. Let's go meet Prothy the Prothean before Liara blows a gasket. It's not like we're on a time pinch or anything."

"You have no sense of academic wonder," Liara said primly.

"Of course not. I barely finished _high-school_," Shepard agreed.

"Doooes, anybody else feel like we're being watched?" Garrus asked.

"I have that feeling as well," Asha, in her wall of armor, said with a nod. And they followed the light into whatever whoever built this place wanted her to go to.

* * *

Food was not what one would call a pastime, by any stretch of the imagination. And while a meal in his first stomach did do a great deal to ease Wrex's stir-craziness, it was still not a fast shuttle to Tuchanka. He'd have to be patient, that much was clear, but still.

He took a breath, and leaned forward against the viewing window that looked out into the nebula. So much that took time, and at the moment, he couldn't do anything but wait. Aggravating, but inevitable. "Excuse me? Do you have business in this part of the Citadel, sir?" a turian voice asked. Wrex turned a scarlet eye toward him. C-Sec.

"No. Just waiting," he said, staring out of the Presidium.

"Well, could you move along?" he asked.

"I wasn't aware that it was illegal to be a krogan on the Citadel. And standing here isn't illegal either. So by all means, go away," Wrex said.

"Are you going to be combative, sir?"

Wrex turned, and crossed his arms before his chest. "You're trying to shake me down for a bribe, aren't you?"

The turian's eyes widened a bit. "I would never..."

"Fine," Wrex said with a shrug. He grabbed the credit-chit that he'd carried around for about five hundred years. "Not like I'm going to need it where I'm going. Now leave me alone," he said, and turned back to the nebula. The turian swallowed, probably out of terror at having his facade so easily pierced, and likewise out of shock that it had nevertheless succeeded. Wrex was telling the truth. Tuchanka had little need for money, not at its current state of economy. With a stern hand, he might get it into some sort of shape worth dealing with in a year or two. He sighed at the annoyances that beset him from all angles, and then his eyes narrowed, as the face of the nebula roiled a bit. "That's odd."

He leaned forward more intently, and his lips peeled back as a geth ship slipped out of the haze. Followed by another seven. After those, about a hundred. And then another hundred. "This isn't good." Wrex noted. And then, with one great heave, something far far bigger than a geth ship appeared, looming in at the edge of sight, looking nothing so much like a giant mechanical bit of seafood. Wrex recognized Sovereign when he saw it. And that it was here... That didn't bode well.

Wrex turned away, and pulled his shotgun from his back. He stomped past the stunned C-Sec, who flinched at seeing a krogan with a weapon in hand. "What are you doing?"

"We're under attack," Wrex said, pounding the elevator button, and stepping inside when the doors opened. He pounded the up button, and the lift began to surge toward the Presidium's actual ring. Through the glass front of the lift, he could see the fastest of the geth ships slip through the streams of fire that the ships of the Citadel Fleet tried to blanket space with, and roar between the arms. Even to his unaided eye, he could see something that seemed like mechanical dandruff flaking and dropping into the arms of the Citadel, and one of the geth ships loomed much closer, until it passed right overhead.

The elevator door opened with a cheerful ding, and the instant after, he could hear the screaming. There were already fires lit from the dropping synthetic soldiers tearing through tubes of volatiles on their way down. And now, the geth were unfolding and firing without any discrimination whatsoever at everybody nearby. Wrex heard the grinding of a geth nearby, and idly shifted his shotgun toward its head as it started to unfold out of a bench which it'd cratered into, and blasted it to slag with a single shot.

And at that, Wrex's lips pulled into a smirk. "And here I thought I'd be bored until my transport arrived."

He pulled the satchel with Saren's arm in it off of his back and set it next to a bench. Then, as an afterthought, he reached up and plucked the lizard-parrot that was riding his hump, and ungently pressed it down onto Wrex's bag. "Stay here," he ordered the bird, which glared at him with golden eyes. He took a step away from it, then turned back. "And don't let anybody take that."

It answered Wrex with a sharp screech.

The geth that had already opened were quickly spotting the krogan, and turning their weapons toward what was obviously a threat. So Wrex's legs started to pump, and he stampeded toward the three meter tall Prime, and heave his arm into it hard enough that it tipped back over a rail and fell down into oncoming traffic. This time, the crunch of somebody hitting him wasn't music to his ears. But the sound of his skull-plate, smashing into plastic, metal, and polymer of a flamethrower-bearing machine that had been beside it... that was just beautiful.

* * *

To say that Garrus was watching all angles was an understatement. He watched the walls as though they were going to come to life and try to attack him. Then again, considering the nature of their enemy, he didn't put it past Saren to arrange for some sort of garbage compactor-esque death. Say what you would about the bare-faced asshole, he had a flair for the dramatic.

"Boo," Tali said flatly.

"Not funny, Tali," Garrus said.

"It is strange. If this were an automated trap, would it not have activated by now?" Liara asked.

"Don't tempt fate," Asha ordered as she kept her eyes over her gun, despite the complete silence and stillness around them. "Fortune plays strange games when the Avatar is present."

The path they walked stopped being wholly construct, and started to seem... oddly alive. The walls were still flat and true, yes, but there was an odd sensation in the air. A smell, not of the caustic hyperoxygenated air, but something more vibrant and verdant. It smelled like the silverroot fields on Palaven, right after the first seeding. It was a smell of damp earth. It was a smell of... waiting.

"Did you hear that?" Shepard asked, glancing back at them.

"I didn't hear anything," Garrus said. He then looked to her. "Do you think that there might be more Prothean tech trying to reach you?"

"I'm not sure. I just... thought I heard something," Shepard said.

It was a very strange sensation, being in the grasp of that Beacon on Virmire. To have something so overwhelming, so alien, so raw, that to even touch it was to be driven at least a little insane. Since Garrus had never been called sane, it might have even struck him normal. And Shepard ate that sensation whole, and stood up seconds later, before getting into a fight with a Reaper. If Garrus hadn't had a chance to sit down, and spend a few minutes popping geth and krogan heads, he probably would have lost his breakfast on Virmire.

"What is that?" Garrus asked, pointing ahead of him, toward a great root that reached down through the ceiling, but managed not to disturb either the ceiling nor the walls that it rippled along. It glowed with a soft, mellow green light.

"I don't know. Maybe the Protheans cultivated it," Tali said with a shrug, showing her lack of faith in that estimation.

"In a sewer," Garrus said.

"We do not know with absolute certainty the agricultural habits of the Protheans," Liara said, her academic tone in full force. "For all we know, they were masters of sewer-based megafloral agriculture."

"That's a stretch, even for you," Shepard said. Liara pouted, probably because she didn't goad somebody into being gullible enough to believe her.

"There is the end of the line," Asha said. "Whatever we were meant to see, we have obviously missed it," Asha said. She then started to turn. "Avatar, we should... Avatar?"

Garrus blinked. "...Where'd Shepard go?" he asked. And when he took a step toward Asha, he had the strangest sensation pass through him, like somebody hit him in the soul very hard with the tip of a broom-handle. Tali, noting his grunt and flinch, moved toward him.

"Garrus, are you... guh..." she likewise flinched as she drew closer. Liara and Asha, though, reacted by glowing blue and pulling their guns, respectively. The turian shook the sensation to a level that he could live with it, rather than sit down and wait until it didn't feel like some of his guts had suddenly gone missing. He turned, his eyes zipping along the walls with their black, inlaid pods. Only... those pods were open.

"Shepard? Where are you?" Liara asked.

* * *

"I'm right here. You're looking straight at me," Shepard answered. "This isn't funny. I..."

It was at that point that she bothered to look at herself, and saw the tracing of light which surrounded the edges of her, like some sort of halo of faint blue light. She blinked at it for a few moments, trying to remember. Then, the lessons of Tuchanka returned to her. She was in an outer layer of the Spirit World, one almost touching the Mortal.

"Where am I?" Shepard asked. And she slowly turned. As she did, everybody else let out a clipped yelp from the 'Inner Sphere', the world of flesh and blood, turning guns toward what Shepard saw before her eyes. It rose up from the end of the platform, rising under no force of gravity. It was a mechanism, as infinite and complex as anything could ever be. Its cogs and wheels turned and spun with lunatic intensity, but at the same time, its movements were placid.

"you are not prothean. but neither are you machine. this was but one of many eventualities which were prepared for," the spirit whispered through the flashes of green light, and the spectral mechanisms which made up its mechanical body. Shepard took a step toward it, her gun slipping onto her back, and took in a deep breath; smell was a sense most closely related to the acme of shamanism. Using the nose to understand spirits was a technique given to the humans by the krogan. It was a very useful one. And this thing was a spirit. A spirit of a machine... but a very specific machine. "you are the reason why we sent the message through the beacons."

"It seems to be some kind of VI. But if it is, it's pretty badly damaged," Tali said.

"Why is it speaking Serrician?" Liara asked.

"It's speaking _Jovo_," Garrus corrected at her back.

"That's Khelish if I've ever head it," began.

"And I hear it as Si Wongi," Asha finished. "How is it that you speak the language of each of us?"

"memory has a genetic marker. in entering my presence without taking great pains to prevent biological leakage, i have accessed the memories which were imbued into your d.n.a." the spirit told them. "the only event not foreseen was the presence of the avatar."

"The Avatar? Where did she go?" Liara asked.

"She is probably standing very close by," Asha said. "This is a spirit, manifesting itself."

"Bonus points to the Si Wongi for clear thinking," Shepard said. "Why am I the only one in the Spirit world?"

"you alone passed through the rift that i created. you were the one that i needed to warn," the spirit said.

Shepard blinked, then remembered what the Shaman taught her. She took two steps directly back, then reached to the sides until she felt her hands touch something solid. Then, a final step back, and the cloying sense of the otherworldly faded, the halo of spectral light dimmed as she pulled herself back through the rift that opened between the Spirit and Mortal worlds. Shepard 'appeared' standing with a hand on each of Tali and Garrus' shoulders, as they stood in the outer edge of the rift into the wild beyond. "Well, you can tell all of us, or none of us," Shepard answered.

"Bah! You almost gave me a heart attack!" Garrus said.

"Where did you go?" Liara asked, obviously concerned.

"He wanted to talk in private, I didn't," Shepard said. She looked up at the machine that looked different here than it did there. Here, it was more diminutive, more subtle. Instead of the overwhelming mass, it was an aspect of itself. Just an avatar, forced into the Mortal world which it found so strange and different. "What did you need to warn me about? And for that matter, what the hell are you?"

The spirit-machine turned, as though looking directly at her. "i am called vigil. i am a virtual intelligence created by the protheans."

"Bullshit. You're a spirit," Shepard said.

"as are all virtual intelligences created for use by the protheans," Vigil said. "i was given the voice of programmer ksad ishan to communicate. i have waited a very long time to speak with another organic. but i never expected that i would speak to the avatar itself."

"Did you create that barrier?" Shepard asked.

"i did," Vigil admitted.

"...WHY?" Shepard shouted. "I ALMOST _HAD_ SAREN!"

"if you had killed the indoctrinated one which passed beyond, you would have been destroying a symptom, not a cause. the turian lost his mind to the reapers. it is the reapers who require your effort and energy. if you cannot thwart them, then you will be only the latest in a cycle of billions of years of slaughter and harvest. i need to know that you will not make the same mistakes that our people did."

"Have you ever heard of Avatar Sajuuk?" Shepard asked.

"yes. to our knowledge, he was the final prothean avatar."

"Not accurate, but not important. I've seen everything that Sajuuk did, and what happened because of it. Trust me, I'm not going to make the same stupid mistakes that he did," Shepard said. The spirit-machine pulsed its greenish colors, whirring its inner self slightly, then turned toward Shepard once more, inasmuch as a faceless, bodiless entity could either turn or face.

"did sajuuk tell you of the start of our downfall? your memory markers show that the citadel is the heart of your government. it was for ours, as well, as it has for every precursor species for billions of years. it is not a technological wonder; it is a trap. the citadel is a massive mass-relay which connects to the darkness beyond the galactic fringe," Vigil seemed to swell, growing larger, more distinct, as more of its corpus slid through the veil between the Spirit world and this one. "if the citadel relay is activated, then the reapers will come en masse, and your galactic civilization will end. so it did with ours. for so long, they hid this fact, and the purpose of the citadel, through their use of a seemingly benign caretaker organism, which freed those who came upon it from having to learn how the citadel functioned, and for what purpose."

"The Keepers," Tali said. Shepard, though, rubbed her temple; understanding what Vigil was saying, through all the distortion and disruption, was giving her a headache. "They were made by the Reapers to keep us stupid!"

"complacent, but yes," Vigil agreed. There was a sense that jabbed into Shepard's nose like an ice pick, and she felt a tearing in the sky, as the whole body of Vigil finally pushed into the Mortal world entirely. Strangely, when it did so, it became smaller, more compact. And it took a form similar to a very indistinct Prothean.

"Then what's stopping the entire horde from beating the Council to paste, if you don't mind my asking?" Garrus asked.

"we sabotaged the system," Vigil said. An indistinct arm waved up toward the pods. "this site was a trove of information on our precursor civilization; the inusannon. their technology was in many ways identical to our own. When the news of the reapers came to those studying the inusannon in this place, we cut off all contact with the galaxy at large, and destroyed our communications buoy, before creating a plan. we would maintain a link through myself to the information architecture of the prothean empire. as long as any remnant of it remained, it was assumed that some facet of our civilization was trying to reassert itself, and we would need to wait longer. the researchers trained themselves for decades for their tasks, before entering static sleep for as long as it would take for the reapers to finish the slaughter of the protheans, and return to dark space."

"We saw a lot more pods than these, and they weren't open," Tali pointed out. Vigil's artificial head dipped low.

"we had to wait a long time."

Shepard leaned forward. "How long?"

"the harvest of the prothean species ended four hundred ninety years after the invasion. the reapers did not return to dark space for another ten thousand."

"...years?" Asha asked.

"yes."

"You kept them in stasis for _ten thousand years_?" Shepard asked.

"yes."

"...how?" Tali asked.

"our stasis technology was fairly untested; the prototype devices, with their initial subjects, were lost to the invasion. we made educated estimations of their capabilities. we were in some ways, incorrect," Vigil turned to the open pods. "the initial outpost numbered five hundred thousand. after the first century, we experienced severe power losses, which necessitated the prioritization of key personnel, those absolutely vital for the proscribed plan to proceed. Those not strictly necessary had their pods deactivated, and the energy shunted to those more vital. As the centuries and millennia passed, the tertiary, secondary, and most of the primary actors in the plan had to be sacrificed to ensure that SOMEONE would survive," Vigil pulsed with light when it said that word, a single shout in what was otherwise a flat and emotionless recital. This spirit _felt_ that choice. Some spirits were sentient, after all.

"How many were left?" Liara asked.

"twenty two," Vigil said. "due to the interrelatedness of the individuals with the required skill-sets, there was an insufficient gene-pool to continue the prothean species. they understood that they were to be the last of their kind... they did so with dignity."

"What was their plan?" Shepard asked, her brow pulling down.

"the plan had two parts," Vigil said, pointing the direction that Shepard would have gone had she not face-planted into a force-field. "the first and far simpler task was the creation of the conduit. it is a unique mass-relay, connected via quantum-entangled atoms, to the citadel. it would provide them a direct path to where they needed to go."

"So the Conduit was no weapon, but instead a secret entrance?" Asha asked, concern plain on her face.

"the second part of the plan was to alter the keepers," Vigil continued. "they were created by the reapers not simply to keep the organics away from the citadel's technology, but to activate the citadel's mass-relay functionality. the scientists altered the 'programming' of these creatures, so that they could only ever respond to signals transmitted from the citadel itself. the reapers are as unable to influence them, as i am to influence you."

"That explains the geth," Tali said, turning to Shepard. "Sovereign couldn't predict what an organic army would do, since the Protheans changed the Keepers. So he takes something that can be reprogrammed, permanently."

"this 'saren' likely intends to use the conduit to circumvent the citadel's defenses, and allow the resplendent sovereign direct access to the citadel's functionality. it will use the citadel to summon the other reapers, and a new cycle of slaughter will begin anew. unless you stop them," Vigil said. "i have the override codes to the citadel. if you allow me to grant them, i can... i am experiencing an error. i cannot directly interface with your mind."

"Wait, you're doing _what_ now?" Shepard asked, a brow raised in something between concern and alarm.

"i am doing what i was originally designed for. to give the access codes to any who came after seeking to prevent needless deaths. but there is insufficient room. unless you evict the virtual intelligence already hosted within your corpus, I will not be able to survive the process of granting access."

"What?" Liara asked. "Shepard, you should..." and then she froze up solid – most likely, Shepard figured, because she understood that two Prothean VIs were fighting over Shepard's skull-room. Shepard couldn't lose the first without loosing all that it had yet to give, and Liara knew it. And she was probably dying a little of envy that nobody was fighting over her.

"Can you just give me direct access?" Shepard asked.

"i can, but to separate that aspect of my function will cause critical damage to my corpus," Vigil said, its indistinct, wedge-like head swinging down. "there will be no further help that i could offer to anyone. Ever."

Shepard stared at the spirit-machine, the VI created in the sunset of the Prothean Empire. She'd seen other VI's in Sajuuk's memories, but they were never so quiet, so humble. They were often as brash and sneeringly contemptuous as Sajuuk himself. Given the choice, she'd probably prefer to have Vigil... but Javik was intended solely for her. And he'd already shown her that there was more to her power, and her potential, than she thought possible. "I'm sorry, Vigil, but I can't give up the space. Could you use another?" she waved her arm toward Garrus, Tali, Asha, and Liara.

"**THAT ONE IS NOT PERMISSABLE**," Vigil shouted at the last, the machinery of his body spinning at reckless abandon. In fact... it didn't sound much like Vigil when it did. Liara looked positively heartbroken at that pronouncement. As it faced the others, though, the spinning plates and cogs calmed, and the voice returned to its quiet, mellow monotone, "and the others lack the potential to Host a spirit."

"Then... give me the code. I'll stop Saren," Shepard said. Vigil slowly, somberly nodded.

"very well. I have deactivated the ward toward the conduit. I am sorry, but the one you call saren has manually activated the conduit, and passed through. But if you hurry, you will be able to prevent him from completing his task. The faith of the Protheans, their echo, their shadow... it rests in you now. Don't let history repeat itself again."

"I won't," Shepard said. She closed her eyes, and braced herself. There was a shattering sound, one that Shepard could see even through her eyelids. Probably because it was at least partially that of a spirit tearing itself apart. There was a shoving sensation, like somebody shoving a mushy banana into her ear... and then, the mushiness ceased and a new sensation came. Of four eyes, staring at her.

J_avik, holding a spinning machine of green light above his hands. "Do what you must," he ordered_.

Shepard let out a gasp, and stepped back. There was a ripple in the air, one that the others stepped carefully around. Garrus was the first to reach her, and helped her stabilize herself. "Are you going to be alright? I figure that you've already got so much Prothean in there there's not a lot of room left for Shepard."

"Well, I am certain that Shepard is very adept at maximizing a minimal amount of cognitive function," Liara said brightly, probably not even realizing the insult that was in there. Tali gave Liara a baffled look obvious even through the faceplate, then shook her head.

"We need to go," Asha said. "Saren cannot gain any more ground on us this day."

"You heard the gunnery-chief," Shepard said, giving her head one final shake and turning toward the path that lead to the Mako, and from there... to Saren.

* * *

"And what in the name of the Meretsegger are you supposed to be?" Wrex asked, as he stood on something tiny, bloated, and dagger-toothed which tried to set him on fire with a plasma torch. The damned thing couldn't be more than a meter tall, and had about six buddies with it. Upon removing that plasma torch, Wrex got a moment to get a better look at it. "Doesn't look like any species I've ever seen. Even vorcha ain't that ugly."

He shifted his weight, and let a metric tonne press the cyborg flat enough to break whatever was keeping it in its hellish limbo between life and death, and consign it mercifully to the latter. That wasn't the only bizarre creature that Wrex'd had the opportunity to kill since the geth started dropping their troops into the Presidium and the Wards. Just the smallest. He'd even seen one of those three-legged things that the biotic human had described from Feros. He'd opted to fire a rocket at it from half a kilometer away. A lot safer that way. Pity; he'd have liked to hold onto that rocket.

Geth, though, were by-and-large the antagonist of the day. His shotgun proved to be utterly ineffectual against their shielding – a fact which made the initial skirmishes with the geth by C-Sec and whatever particularly brazen civilians dared to show their heads utter bloodbaths, at least to the side which had blood. So he opted for a more devious approach.

He ripped the arm off of a geth carrying its own shotgun when it tried to ambush him from invisibility. Then, he used it, arm and all, as a weapon for himself. He wasn't sure how it worked, but it did, and he was happy for it.

He saw a Geth Prime rounding a burning bus, and laying waste with its red beams of slaughter. Wrex raised that shotgun, and held down the finger which constituted a trigger. The gun started to shine, then shake, then when its heat started to become too much to bear, he released, and the blast of contained plasma blasted through the Prime's kinetic barriers. Within seconds, the hail of fire which had been plinking harmlessly off of the mass-effect fields was now tearing into armor plating, actuators, and other electronic gizmos. It was sheer firepower which carried the day, once the shields were down.

The heat-sink popped out of the plasma shotgun, as he grabbed the thing, and he hung it next to six more on his hip. They were in various stages of red turning toward black. This thing might pack a hell of a punch, but it was _one_ punch, then a long wait. As there was nothing else in the immediate area – barring the crackle and hiss of that pyromaniacal cyborg pyjack behind him reducing itself into metal waste and biological slurry – Wrex allowed himself a moment to look up. The shudder he'd felt a minute or so earlier had been the arms of the Citadel closing. But now, they only showed a sliver of the galaxy beyond... and something very, very big which had slipped through them.

"That could be a problem," Wrex said, as he looked upon the cuttlefish form of Sovereign, looming closer and closer, before slowing... and gently setting itself at the spire of the Presidium Tower. "And there's my solution."

"What are these things?" a turian who tried to have Wrex arrested in Fist's bar, back when there was still a Fist to own a bar, asked.

"Geth, and... I guess you'd call it 'other'," Wrex said. He started walking toward the base of the Tower. About time he got to step back inside of it.

"What do we do with them? Our weapons can't even break their barriers!" the turian asked, skirting around Wrex.

"Got any firebenders?" Wrex asked.

"Ah... a few, why?" he asked.

"Lightning, then small-arms. In that order. Or you all die," Wrex said. The turian nodded briskly, then let Wrex past. Good choice, as Wrex was about to _move him_, and he wouldn't have liked that. Grandfather once told Wrex that the young fight to _find_ meaning, and the old try to pick the fights which _have_ meaning. While he wasn't about to start believing in a grand cosmic destiny, a force beyond him that controlled his actions, he did believe that there were no coincidences.

Wrex decided to go to Tuchanka instead of joining Shepard wherever it was she was going.

That decision left Wrex here.

Because of that decision, Wrex was fighting the Reapers, and the geth, in the heart of the Presidium. He looked up at the tower, as he drew closer to it, and the devastation that surrounded it. It grew thicker the closer one got. Almost like this was the source or target of it all. He took a breath, smelled the smoke and the burning flesh, the hot metal and the acrid tang of ozone.

What was coming, was coming here.

"I have a destiny," Wrex whispered into the pandemonium. There was a fire in his soul, a surety, a certainty. A conviction. This fight had meaning. So he started to walk, then jog, then outright charge when the geth started to appear, and he let his body be his battering ram.

His people needed just one noble krogan, to prove that they could be more. And while he hardly considered himself noble... there was something to be said for resolve and determination. He'd need both, because it was a long ascent, toward something two kilometers tall at its top.

* * *

"Watch out!" Asha yelped, as Shepard sawed on the control barely saving them from an impact as the roof over the last section of the waterway started to cave in. Mass-driver shells opened holes, and Armatures, if not outright Colosses zipped down through those holes, slamming into the stone, before unfolding into road-blocks. Road blocks which Shepard thundered past without so much as a second glance. That was costing her; what it made in speed, it lost with the mass-driver hits that the Armatures kept blasting off of the Mako's armor, and its barriers. And thank the spirits for that.

"The Mako can't take much more of this," Garrus said, from where he was blasting the cannon every time it allowed him to. "Where is that damned Conduit?"

"Somewhere ahead of us. I'm reading a _massive_ mass effect field," Tali said, her fingers flying over her Omni. The turian turned his attention forward, to the space ahead of them, which the water cascaded down toward something which looked more like a creek than a mechanical test-bed. Then again, it had probably been the former before it was converted into the latter, and then reverted to the former when nobody was looking. Nature had a way of doing that. Not so much the Colosses which were unfolding, and turning toward them

"How will we even know what it is we seek?" Asha asked. Garrus took one last shot at a Colossus that managed to knock it from its footing before it could land a telling shot on the Mako, then swung the cannon, and thus the display, forward... and he saw it.

"_That_ could be it," Garrus said, as he blinked in mild bemusement – given the circumstances that was all he had left to muster – at the Mass Relay that was built, embedded into the ground. It was a fraction of the size of the genuine article, and had none of the elegance or flowing lines that the old 'Reaper-tech' ones did, but it had it where it counted, and that happened to be a contained sphere of plasmatic Eezo about the size of of the Normandy at its heart, and its round spinning things were doing whatever it was they spun for.

"Everybody, hold onto your butts," Shepard warned, and then, she slammed the pedal down. The Mako surged forward, down that slanted cascade of water, and into the rough bed. The hiss of the Colossus' shells, slamming into turf when they didn't resound loudly off of the Mako's hull, was constant and horrifying. In all his life, the turian could never think of a time where he'd been _more_ under fire, surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned.

"Dad always said I'd go down in a blaze of infamy," Garrus noted to himself, and swung the turret once again, holding the trigger down, so that the instant that the computer thought it could safely fire, it already was. The shot staggered a Colossus, but a moment too late. The shell smashed into the side of the Mako hard enough to cause the barrier-generators to short out completely, and cause the vehicle to fish-tail wildly. Shepard managed to keep it on a path toward the Conduit though.

"It's closing! We've got to get through before it shuts down completely!" Tali shouted.

"That's just what I need! More pressure!" Shepard shouted from her place at the driver's position.

There was another, much louder slam, and klaxons began to blare inside the Mako. "What was that?" Garrus asked.

"An axle," Shepard noted, continuing to drive.

"A axle what?" Tali asked, fear overwhelming good sense.

"A axle that we're now driving without," Asha pointed out. "Shepard, it's getting in the way!"

"I know that," Shepard said, her hands zipping along the controls while the massive bulk intercepted the now _barely_ mobile Mako.

"We won't be able to round it without our steering axle!" Asha shouted.

"I KNOW THAT!" Shepard likewise shouted. She said one thing more, something lost to the adrenaline that pounded blood through a turian's ears. Then, there was a stomp, followed by a surge of gravity that hurled Garrus against his harness, and caused the Mako to rise. It soared, up and over hump-level on the Colossus, its indomitable course directly into the Conduit, immediately beyond it.

"We're going to make it!" Tali said.

"Don't jinx..." Garrus began.

He was cut off when the Colossus looked up, and gave the Mako a parting 'fuck you', in the form of a mass-accelerator round directly up and through the spine of the vehicle.

If Garrus had been sitting anywhere but the front four seats, or the cannon's harness, he'd have been liquified by the blast.

As it was, he was torn from the harness and spat out of the Mako, twisting helplessly through the air, as the front half of the machine passed below him, and then vanished the instant it hit the edge of the Mass Relay. The back half of the Mako spun and slammed into the turf near the creek. Leaving a turian in a ballistic trajectory. He wished he had a chance to utter a pithy one-liner before his inexorable path took him to the same edge that had whisked the Mako away. He had neither the time, nor the left-over mental capacity after so much of it was taken over by stark terror. Thus, he had to settle for what _did_ come from his lips.

"AAAAAAAAUGH!"

Then... there was a strange sensation.

He honestly thought it should have hurt.

One instant, he was streaking toward the Conduit, without even the modest protection that the Mako would have afforded him via its hull, and the next, he felt weightless, motionless. He couldn't see anything, obviously; traveling faster than the speed of light had that effect. But there was a strange sense, one he didn't know how to quantify. Had Garrus been a shaman, he would have recognized it, but as it was, he could only float over a featureless oblivion, coddled, a little chilly, and utterly confused.

"This is going to _suck_ in a second, isn't it?" he asked the spirits of his forefathers.

Honestly, he was fairly certain that he could hear them laughing at him in the silence.

There was a lurch, and a sense of movement, that started to enter him once more. "Please let there be the Consort's bed on the other side of this," he asked the Universe. And then, he was fairly certain he heard it laughing along with his forefathers. "...or any mattress."

The acceleration started to grow more insistent, more mighty, more inexorable. And then, with a snap of light tearing into his eyes, wind raking along his face, and motion pulling his stomach into his feet, he was flying forward again. For a brief instant, before he rotated through the air at high velocity, he could see the rubble of the Mako, embedded into a Geth Juggernaut, and the others slowly, stumblingly, pulling themselves out.

Then, the 'AAAAAAAAUGH' continued, and Garrus slammed into the water of the Presidium Pool. The impact was atrocious, but the water had just a hair more give than, say, concrete, and he bounced off of its surface. The next time he landed, it was on his ass, feet out in front of him, in a flower-bed. He locked his hips and crossed his ankles so he didn't break something, and plowed into the soft tilled soil, the roses and chrysanthemums and tulips, causing aesthetically pleasing flora to fly in all directions. But it was softer even than water, for a wonder, and his motion finally stopped.

He sat there, for a few seconds, blinking away the confusion, and the pain of what was probably a broken rib or four. "...I just flew, essentially naked, through a Mass Relay," Garrus said, aloud. Yup, still sounded ridiculous. He slowly, unsteadily pushed himself out of the crater that he'd created with his dragging stop, and glanced back. The base of the Presidium Tower was a fair distance away, with a lot of geth between he and it. He reached behind him, then let out a groan. "...and _of course_, I lose my favorite rifle."

For just a fraction of a second, the coward in Garrus told him that this might be a good time to find a hole somewhere and wait this out. Of course, the coward Garrus was strongly outmuscled by the smartass Garrus, the loyal Garrus, and the vengeful Garrus, so he was slapped down. "I swear, Shepard owes me a drink when I get through with this. She owes me seven."

He started to take a lurching walk, ignoring the sounds of fires, and people screaming, in the distance. But he couldn't ignore the sight which dominated the skyline; at the tip of the Presidium Tower, Sovereign was perched, waiting. Staring. Garrus paused a moment at that, the massive space-cuttlefish that clung to the spire like the two were built for each other... which, given what he'd learned in the last few weeks, they damned well could have been. "You've got to be kidding me," he nevertheless said.

There came a streak from the sky, which slammed down nearby, and started to unfold into a flamethrower weilding geth.

"...Shepard owes me a damned _bar,_" Garrus concluded. And then, valorous as ever, he started to run the hell away from the geth with the flamethrower, because for all the many Garrus'es, he'd like to think that there wasn't a 'completely fucking stupid' one.

* * *

The Normandy danced in Joker's hands, as it flashed out of the Widow Relay and directly into oncoming fire. There was an art to flying a ship like this, all engine and no armor, all heart and no gun. It wasn't the ponderous, deliberate combat of dreadnaughts, which could have been piloted by elcor for how much they moved. It wasn't even the indelicate sword-fighting of cruiser against cruiser – and the geth had _a lot_ of cruisers – as each worked to the extents of their engines and their wits to keep the other from getting into a position for a main-line shot.

No, fighting in a frigate in a warzone like this was like trying to win a drunken knife-fight against a horny Anomolokia, only slightly better, because here against the geth, he might get killed, but he wouldn't have a cannon-ball sized egg shoved into his belly. That would just be rude of the geth to try.

Living next to critters like that was a lot of the reason why so many on Earth respected the krogan. Or thought that they were as insane as the hardy breed of Fire Nationals who'd lived there for thousands of years before they did.

"Normandy; situation?" Hackett's unflappable voice came over his comms.

"Hairy," Joker answered.

"Very?" Hackett asked.

"_Extremely_," Joker said, pulling aside just as a spread of no less than a half dozen disruptor torpedoes zipped past where he'd been flying a moment earlier.

"You're within short-wave range. Any word from the Citadel?" Hackett asked.

"I'd need to get closer; there's too much tin-can chatter," Joker said, tension plain in his voice as he darted behind the dead hulk of a turian dreadnaught which looked like it'd been shredded in a single salvo. He tried not to think that the shimmers on the kinetic barriers might be barely-conscious turians. Even they-of-the-stick-up-the-ass didn't deserve that.

"Do so at your discretion. The Pillars of Heaven is entering the system in five seconds."

Joker flicked on a screen pointing aftward, and beheld the human-built behemoth of the Pillars of Heaven, the third ship of the Black City class of dreadnaught. Hackett's flagship. And currently, the foot around which the boot of humanity was coming to kick synthetic ass.

Joker, though, had to redirect his focus forward, through the fire and the flames, and find some way to get closer to the Citadel. He flinched and twisted the controls that floated before him, causing the Normandy to buck and soar over the body of one of the roughly insect-like geth cruisers; he was fairly certain that had he been a bit slower, he would have scraped paint. Still, it left him on the good side of the cruiser – the side that couldn't shoot at him, and left him with a relatively clear path toward the Citadel. Relative, because there were still a hundred other cruisers involved in the brutish ballet of interstellar combat on each side.

There was a crackle, and a signal reached into the scanner. "Tell me that isn't another geth trying to brainwash my baby!" Joker shouted over his shoulder.

"Distorted... no it's a comm. Cleaning it up!" the Dakongese killjoy responded. He was good at his job, Joker had to give him that.

Joker still hated his guts, though.

"...uated to aboard the Destiny Ascension, but we're under heavy fire! We _can't take_ too many more hits like that!" a woman shouted, her words distorted through the electronic chop that the geth were throwing up to make conversation at any reasonable distance a near impossibility. Joker's lips started to skin back as one of the turian cruisers ahead of him exploded into fragments, and the three geth ships had laid claim to that deed turned on the Normandy.

"Shit shit shit shit..." Joker uttered, scanning every progress trajectory that would not get him blasted to... well... shit. His nervous 'shit'ing proved somewhat premature, though, as a flick of light shot past the Normandy and slammed into a geth ship, blasting it to smithereens in a single blast. Not surprising, considering that the Pillars of Heaven had a main-gun that could give turians a run for their money. The geth, deciding that a frigate wasn't worth their time, made the logical calculation and opted only to launch some missiles at Joker, before proceeding on toward the heavier, more dangerous ships beyond him.

"I've always wanted to do this," Joker noted, before twisting the ship ninety degrees, and then applying an up-force which caused the ship to bank as though it were in Atmo, neatly dodging one of the missiles, but keeping the other on his tail. His bank, though, had taken him into the path of one of the cruisers that was advancing toward the Pillar of Heaven, so it was elementary to shoot past its nose at the last possible instant, and let the missile following the Normandy burst across geth kinetic barriers. Not enough to tear them down let alone destroy the ship, but it gave Joker a clean shot to the Citadel's arms.

"...read me? Joker? Answer your damned line!" Shepard's voice came to him, and he allowed himself a moment of surprise, before diving the frigate lower so that it raced along the surface of the armored plating of the Ward wings, too small and quick a target to meaningfully aim at... hopefully. "Joker, I know you're out there!"

"Shepard! I was starting to think that you were going to miss out on the party. We've invited everybody, but the geth had to be a bunch of buttholes and crash without even bringing booze," Joker pointed out.

"Gotta say, it's great to hear your voice," Shepards own was broken and crackling, though. Obviously, it was growing stronger as he accelerated toward the end of the station where the Presidium was housed. "What's the situation up there?"

Joker rounded the horizon of the Citadel, and finally laid eyes on the second biggest ship in the galaxy getting pounded to rat-crap. "Not good," Joker told her. "We've got the First, Second and Fifth all hanging back near the relay, but that's still only a light-second out. And the Destiny Ascension is getting hammered."

"Where's the Council?" Shepard asked.

"Aboard the Destiny," Joker said. "They're listing hard, but..."

"...but if humanity commits, they might not b – to – vereign."

"Shepard, you're breaking up!" Joker noted.

"Saren's – too far – up – tower. I'll – away this time," Shepard's oath was clear even for its broken nature.

"Admiral Hackett! Normandy; Shepard is aboard the Citadel!" Joker relayed.

"Unexpected," Hackett's answer was as dry as the Si Wong desert, and not surprising. "Shepard knows what we're dealing with here. Do we move in to support the withdrawal of the Destiny Ascension, or do we focus all our efforts on Sovereign when she opens the arms?"

Of course he expected Shepard to open the arms. And Joker couldn't blame him; if anybody in the galaxy could, from an besieged and burning Citadel, it was Avatar Shepard. "Shepard? Shepard this is Joker! Do we help the asari or wait for the arms?"

"...the – can't hear – erference – peat what..."

Then, complete silence.

Joker blinked a few times, dodging on half a mind a disruptor torpedo hit that blasted into the hardened shell of the Citadel leaving nary a scratch. Hackett was waiting on an order that Shepard wasn't going to be able to give. And they couldn't sit with their thumbs up their butts. He looked toward the Ascension that was rising as the Normandy sped along the 'ground' that was the outer skin of the Citadel. What order _would_ Shepard have given, if she could?

Wrong question, Joker realised.

What order would Shepard be able to live with giving?

He hoped he guessed right, because right or wrong, he might get thrown in prison over this; to be frank, Joker was just pretty enough that his fragile ass would be in a lot of trouble in there.

"Pillars of Heaven Actual; Shepard's order is evacuate the Destiny Ascension. _She'll_ take up the slack with Sovereign."

"I hope that that's confidence and not hubris," Hackett said, his own voice crackling and distorted now. "First, Second, and Third fleet, support the Destiny Ascension; get it to the Widow Relay. Fifth, hold for the arms."

Joker hadn't even noticed that the Third had joined the party. Still, there was something like relief, as human warships began to zip toward the lumbering blue beast that floundered, fires burning out into space before being cut off permanently, from the holes opened in its hull wider with every barrage it took.

"I _really_ hope I didn't just doom the galaxy," Joker whispered to himself. Then, he had to bank hard, and release a disruptor torpedo of his own; this one slipped past a cascading kinetic barrier and blasted the 'head' off of a geth ship. "...because I'm pretty sure if I get _Wrex_ killed, he'll kill me."

* * *

"Joker? Joker! I'm losing the signal. I can't hear him with all this damned interference... Joker, repeat what you just said!" Shepard said, before turning and casting out a hand, and with it, lightning, at a husk that raced toward them. Asha then followed it down with a barrage of bullets until it was damned near torn apart. "I think I've lost him."

Liara, who was only now starting to get her wits back about her, finally looked Shepard in the face. "He's not the only one..."

"Garrus wouldn't want us crying over him, not when Saren is coming close to causing mass extinction," Tali said, her tone reserved, but clear nonetheless. Shepard sighed, and nodded. She thought she heard something when the left the Conduit, but considering that they'd just traversed half the galaxy in half of a Mako, she'd have been more surprised if she _hadn't_ heard something strange.

Shepard nodded, then looked up. _Way_ up. "Hey, ugly," Shepard said, as she stared into the face of a Reaper that stood at the tip of the tower. She turned to the others for a moment, then started to stride toward the elevator. "We don't have any time. Saren's probably near the top of the tower by now, if he isn't there already."

"Why the tower?" Liara asked.

"What better place to hide the secret control panel to the galaxy than where everybody looks up rather than down?" Shepard asked, then pounded the ascent key as soon as the quarian was inside.

"That does not make any sense," Liara pointed out.

"...it made more in my head for some reason," Shepard muttered. She knew that there was a reason. A reason that made sense but... it was a sense that she didn't have access to.

Stupid VI/spirit Javik hijacking her brain...

"How do you plan to stop Saren?" Asha asked, reconfiguring her gun for armor-penetrating rounds instead of the phasics that she'd been using to be meaningful against the geth with their ridiculously impervious shielding.

"I planned on some gentle diplomacy," Shepard answered.

The Si Wongi stared at Shepard, confused.

"...I believe Shepard calls her firearm 'Gentle Diplomacy'," Liara chimed in.

"Yes, thank you for ruining the joke, Liara," Shepard said with a faux annoyed down. Still, Liara wasn't able to track it, and thus pouted at the indictment. If it wasn't so cute, Shepard would have felt like such a tool for doing it. "Why is this taking so long?"

"It's an elevator that goes up eight kilometers. How fast do you think it can go?" Tali asked.

And the instant that she did, there was a groaning sound, followed by a shudder. Then, a lurch, and all of those in the lift found themselves hurled off of their footing and smashed into the ceiling, before falling back down in a sprawl of women upon its floor. Now, all were as stunned as Liara had been when she crawled out of the wreck of the Mako – Agni rest its cantankerous soul.

"That was unpleasant," Asha muttered. Shepard pushed herself to a sit first, and thus had the unsettling view of Husks, crawling around the outside of the glass, staring in at them. "...and that is horrifying."

One of the Husks tore with its hands, and the glass peeled away like metalbent tin. There was a hiss of the air inside the lift leaking out, but it didn't leak very far; the whole tower was surrounded by a tight mass-effect field to hold the air inside it. The other let out a wail, and hurled its glowing grey-blue hands in at those present, blasts of flame searing down and in at them. Shepard kipped to her feet and formed a wall of her own fire, one which directed those flames away from those still trying to recover. It was easier than facing a firebender, but still not simple; after all, she had very little room to work with.

She had just rooted herself to push back, when through those flames came a spindly, partially-synthetic body, one that latched onto Shepard's arms and planted its feet against her armored chest. It howled at her face. Its inhuman, glowing blue eyes pulsed. And Shepard began to feel her hair stand on end, as the Husk in her arms began to generate an electric shockwave.

She was not having this. With a snarl, and a force that she didn't know herself capable of, she grasped its arms close to its shoulders, planted one boot right onto it's sternum, and in a single motion, pushed and pulled. There was a metal squeal, and a tearing of foul flesh. An second later, the Husk was flying away from the elevator, through the hole that the other had made to send it inside; the pulse was released harmlessly a hundred meters away. Tali pulled her shotgun out from under her, and neatly sent blasts of shrapnel into each of the other two Husks perched outside of their tiny, still haven. Each shot sent the Husks tumbling away from their perch, before slowly arcing down toward the Presidium already no small distance below.

And Shepard was still holding a pair of Husk arms. With a peremptory 'ew', she chucked them through the rent in the elevator's face. "Alright. We've got two options as I see them," Shepard said, dusting her hands. "We can walk up the tower from the outside, or we can try climbing it from the inside, and hope that a lift doesn't land on our heads or something."

"I like the first one," Tali said.

"Of course you do. _You_ have a helmet," Asha pointed out, then thrust a hand toward her own unclad head.

"Oh. Right," Tali said. "Well, we could..."

She was cut off by a loud bang on the roof of the lift, and of all guns rising toward it. Shepard swallowed, trying to force past the dreaded thinking of what that could be. Worse case was probably an Armature... if they could even fit in the elevator shafts. There came a second loud bang, and the roof buckled down a little. The guns shifted incrementally, readying to shoot what they saw bearing down on them. The panel was then torn away, and a head stuck down into the lift.

A krogan head with a red plate and three long scars. He blinked a few times at those within.

"Shepard?" he asked.

"Wrex? What are you doing here?" Shepard asked, lowering her gun.

"I saw something that I thought it might be interesting to kill. The last time I brought down something of about that size, I was barely thirty," Wrex noted. He then pulled his head up, followed a moment later by he jumping down in his pink armor and what looked like a geth weapon in his hand. His landing made the elevator groan with pain."I figured I'd try hijacking another lift, since mine got shut down before I could reach the top."

"Well, we're shit out of luck, too," Shepard said, motioning to the hole in the glass front, and the fact that they were stationary. "What I'm wondering is why you didn't just say 'somebody else's problem?"

Wrex looked Shepard in the eye, and then slowly shook his head. "This isn't something I can explain to a non-krogan. But I know I've got to be here. My blood is _screaming_. And when it does that... Even I have to listen."

"Well, I guess you'll get your chance to kill Saren after all," Shepard said, as she looked up through the hole that Wrex had made.

"Saren's here?" Wrex asked. Broad lips pulled into a smirk. "Good. I always thought it'd be ironic for a krogan to save the galaxy from a turian."

"Bit of a problem, though: How do we get up there?" Tali asked.

Wrex tapped on the wall of the lift. "The electromagnetic locks are holding the lift in place. If I rip 'em, then I mangle the track and I've got nothing to bear me up. But if you shut 'em down, first..."

"All of them or just one?" Shepard asked.

"Dealer's choice," Wrex said, shifting his stance low, but only using one hand – as he didn't seem willing to part with his geth cannon for even a moment. When Shepard twisted her arms through the kata and sent a bolt of lightning into the wall, melting through the plastic and light metals before overloading the electromagnets holding the box that contained them in limbo, Wrex was able to cause the lift to start mounting higher again. With one hand.

* * *

"There are _so_ many things about this that are wrong!" Garrus shouted as he ducked into a gap just as the blast of flames shot down the path he'd been walking a moment before. It seared hot, filling the path between 'airlock' doors before cutting out abruptly. Garrus flinched, and waited for the sound of a metal click. When it came, he darted out of his cover, and threw the door ahead of him open so that he could continue his flight from the pyromaniac geth that had dogged him ever since the flower-bed.

It was the strangest sensation. Garrus had killed dozens of these things. Maybe even hundreds! But back then, he was a sniper with a great rifle and a clear line-of-sight. Now, he was a slightly stunned turian with no weapons, cracked armor, and an increasing belief that the spirits were trying to make him either miserable or dead, and he had the choice of which.

As he ran, he drew closer to the Presidium Tower, but it was still no easy distance to traverse. And without any weaponry to help him, it might well kill him to try. But still, he wasn't just going to stand by and leave Shepard in the lurch. She'd earned better than that.

The last clank of the geth sounded; that thing didn't run as fast as a mildly terrified turian, but it didn't need to; every time Garrus found a door, he usually had to manually override it to get it open, which gave ample opportunity for the geth to recover distance. This time, the door took a few precious seconds, and when the thing opened, it was to a stunned, terrified face of a woman. Her mandibles flared, and dark-fringed green eyes blinked, before she hunched down and pointed past him. "Spirits help me! They're everywhere!"

Garrus didn't bother warning her; he just grabbed her like a tackler in that game he'd watched in Anderson's room, and started to run. Good that he did. An instant after he did so, the geth let out a blast of flame that reached its utmost where he'd been standing. Only after he'd gotten a few dozen meters did he put the woman down. "Don't just stand there! Run!"

"Where?" the turian woman asked, her eyes flitting and her jaws flicking. "Everywhere I go, there's more of those things!"

"Just keep up!" Garrus told her. He grabbed her hand and dragged her, first at a stumbling jog, then an outright run, between two buildings that would bear them into a back-alley of sorts. He released her hand once they were out of easy eyeshot of the geth that was on their tail, but it'd catch up. It always did.

"Why didn't you go to a shelter or something?" Garrus asked the woman.

"I thought it was just a drill!" the woman answered.

"What part of every Avina on the Citadel saying 'this is not a drill' _made you think that it was a drill_?" Garrus asked, shaking her for it.

"I don't know! I just..." she shuddered, and started sobbing slightly. Great. The first face he saw that wasn't trying to burn him alive was an idiot.

"Ugh. Fine. Just follow where I go, do what I tell you to do, and we might survive this," Garrus said. And under his breath, added, "great, and now I'm some kind of leader. This is going to end in tears."

"What did you say?"

"Nothing, not a damned thing," Garrus lied. The two of them moved out of the side-passage, and through a section which had been taken over by a green grocery. Garrus kept hearing frantic whacking sounds, so motioned the yet unnamed woman to silence, and leaned around the edge of the front store from the back-room they currently occupied.

It was a human, beating an inactive geth platform to scrap with a pry-bar.

"Thats! What! You! Get! For! Ruining! My! CABBAGES!"

"We should probably keep moving," Garrus mentioned. He pulled her around behind the frantic human and out into the presidium commons once more. He could see a number of air-cars floating outside the air-bubble, drifting as they no longer fell within the mass-effect field that held people and buildings down. He could see people on the other side of the Presidium being cut down by geth with shotguns, or else torn to shreds by glowing husks. "Why? Why couldn't I have held onto my rifle?"

"You don't have a gun?" the woman practically shrieked.

"Of course I don't! Otherwise I'd have killed half the geth on the Citadel by now!" Garrus snapped at her. Perhaps a slight overstatement, but he wasn't in a mood. He turned a corner to a stairwell, and his eyes widened and lips pulled back in sudden terror, as he saw that yellow monster at the bottom looking up at him. It levied the flamethrower, and sent up a searing stream. Garrus twisted into the turian woman and tackled her from the stairs; but not before taking a bit of a roasting. Everything up and down his back hurt from the first-degree burns that even that brief contact had caused.

"I don't want to die!"

"You think I _do_?" Garrus asked her incredulously, before hauling her to her feet and dragging her onward. The geth reached the top of the stairs quickly. Perhaps it had surrendered its plodding pace for haste, now that it knew that they could juke it, at least for a while. Or perhaps it was just faster because it'd used so much of its fuel trying to kill one turian. Now it was going to try for two.

"Where are we going?" she asked him.

"There should be a C-Sec watchpost somewhere over there! They probably have at least a sidearm or something laying around!"

Hopefully. C-Sec didn't tend to leave weapons at post very often. Unless they were dead, which was Garrus' assumption.

There came a howl behind him, and without a second thought, he slammed he and the woman over a decorative shrubbery and under a stairway. The geth quickly jogged to the entrance of the Keeper Tunnel that they'd found themselves in. "This isn't good," Garrus said, and pushed the woman ahead of him. He sprinted, barely rounding the corner before the blast of flames chased his heels. He slowly backed away from that corner. "We'll just have to follow the Tunnel 'till we can get out somewhere..."

"What tunnel?" the woman asked. He turned to her, and pointed past her.

"That tun..." he began. The tunnel ended at a bulkhead less than ten meters away. His finger drooped. "...shit."

No guns, backs to the wall, and a geth with a flamethrower coming closer. Spirits, this sounded like the tagline for some sort of cheezy action flick. But here he nevertheless stood. "Alright. When it rounds that corner, I'll distract it, and you run."

"Run where?" she asked.

"ANYWHERE BUT HERE!" Garrus shouted at her. "Spirits of the dead, woman don't you have _any brain at all_?"

A terrified sob was his answer. He honestly wondered how the hell she survived through basic. If she even went through it. Garrus, though, braced himself, his stance low. He didn't hold any illusions that this was going to work, and if it did work, he didn't hold any illusions that he was going to survive it. But there was a calm in his belly, one he didn't expect to find. A sea of tranquility amidst the chaos and pandemonium. Black-edged blue eyes opened, and he took a deep breath, waiting for what might well be the end.

The clack of the footfall announced the geth as it got closer. He had to guess by dead reckoning when it'd be close enough; any worthwhile machine would cross that corner sideways, after all. So Garrus took his guess, and burst out of hiding.

His guess was pretty terrible. It was twelve meters away. "...hell with it," he whispered, and started running, straight at it. It raised the barrel of its flamethrower, and then with a horrid howl, sent flames toward him. He slid to a stop, his arms reflexively raising up before his face, his legs wide and his breathing heavy. The fire cut toward him in a hellish stream, intent on reducing him to ash.

And it split, and raced past him to either side.

As soon as the tumult came to a stop, Garrus was already running again, ignoring the fact that he should be dead right now. He knew that he wouldn't be able to damage this thing with his bare hands, no matter how hard he hit it. But still, he had to try. So when he hurled himself, knee flying at it's eye, it was with remarkable speed and force... more than he'd thought possible, or feasible. The geth, caught in the act of swapping its tanks, was sent flying off of its footing and slammed to the ground. Its spout was dropped, but didn't fall far; it was still physically attached to it. So Garrus opted to do what any sensible person did when your opponent fell; he stomped the son-of-a-bitch.

The first barely registered a creak. The second, less even than that. But Garrus wasn't about to let this thing get up, as it was attempting to do. So he swung his leg wide, into an axe-kick of brutal force and power, one that slammed down like a meteor from the heavens and blasted into the chestplate of the geth, leaving the wound with melted edges.

It was about at that point that Garrus realized something was amiss.

"Is it alright to come out?"

"How is that question in any way sane?" Garrus asked. "If it wasn't, you'd just told it that there was somebody else to kill!" he said, turning to her with a flick of his hand.

"You... Why didn't you tell me that you were a firebender! I was scared out of my wits!"

"I'm not a firebender, I'm..." Garrus said, then looked to where he flicked his hand. A bench was on fire. He turned back to the geth, with an axe-kick delivered blast of heat and force that melted the Pyro into obsolescence. He turned to look at the burn marks that were the silent testimony of the rocket-kick that sent the thing down in the first place.

And he saw a guttering ball of fire hovering above his palm, pulsing like his heart, a feeling that there was energy flowing from him and into it, empowering it. He closed his hand, and the flame snuffed. He opened the hand, and... felt that feeling again... and the flame ignited anew. Garrus just stared at it for a second.

"...huh," he said to that stark and surprising revelation, oblivious to the agitation of the woman before him. Garrus then shook his head. "I'd _still_ rather have my rifle."

* * *

The ding which announced the elevator's arrival at the top of the Presidium Tower sounded distinctly out of place, cheery and optimistic. When Wrex twisted a hand, then kicked the door clear off of its moorings, all was right with the galaxy once more... in its way. The others quickly darted out of the elevator, but Shepard and the krogan were the last out, into the burning gardens in the most powerful room in the Milky Way.

"What are you just standing there for?" Shepard asked. She didn't have time for this.

"Just fixing the moment in my mind," He shrugged, and hefted the plasma shotgun before him. "A few centuries can be a long time... as a human would no doubt be aware."

Shepard just rolled her eyes, and then moved out into the fountain gardens, the krogan watching her six. "Asha? What's waiting for us up here?"

The woman at the point of their spear fell to a knee near the apex of the first stairwell, but the look that she threw back was one of confusion rather than alarm. "There seems to be... no-one."

"Nobody? My luck's not that good," Shepard said, and moved toward the stairs herself. After all, Saren wasn't going to leave the door he took all this time opening just so that somebody could follow in his wake to wreck his shit. Saren might be an insane omnicidal maniac, but he wasn't a moron.

"Scans?" Shepard asked Tali. She raised her Omni, but she shook her head.

"The only thing I can read are dead Keepers," Tali turned to Shepard.

"I don't like this," Liara said, eyes flitting around. Shepard had to agree with her.

And she realized there was something she was overlooking. Just a tidbit of information that Kaiden said, who knows how long ago. About the Mass Relays. How they were completely null-sig, nothing in or out. Mass Relays were Reaper-tech... and so was Saren. So Shepard did what all airbenders did eventually. She looked up.

Because she did, she had the fraction of a second to hurl herself back before the cyborg turian flattened her into a smear against the stairs, which otherwise bucked a solid meter where he'd struck and started to crumble their entire length down. Shepard hadn't yet even taken his feet when Asha pressed her rifle to Saren's back and fired a round through him, which blasted some sort of viscous grey substance out of his chest. He answered her with a flare of scarlet light burning at his back, and a backhand which sent Asha _soaring_.

Liara pulsed with blue light, sending it out in a panicked Kick which Saren slammed aside, before casting out a Kick of his own that hurled her through one of the side-doors and out of sight, through a roughly Liara-sized hole. Shepard had just twisted, getting her feet back under her, when Tali finished flinching, and started to round her shotgun on Saren, only to have him cast back a hand, and have the ground itself slam into the quarian and send her rolling away.

Shepard landed on her feet, her backward motion arrested by a krogan. "I always knew it'd come down to this," Shepard said. Saren, though, didn't answer. He just stared at them with eyes that burned crimson. She'd call that look 'inhuman', but that was kinda the point as he was a turian. Better to say, from her months of experience with Garrus, that it was completely in-turian.

Wrex pushed her forward, and she used that momentum to its utmost, tearing the ground which Saren had used to smash Tali and hurling it at Saren, but also slightly behind him. He deflected it as easily as Shepard thought he would, but that left him trapped between a wall of his own creation, and a charging krogan. That, and an Avatar, who got there first.

There was a thud of force, a blue field of power that Shepard didn't see nor even know that she was utilizing, that hurled her fist first into Saren's face. The gauntlet cracked and splintered, parts starting to crumble away from it, but Saren held his ground. At least, he did, until there was a similar biotic thud, this time empowering all of the monumental mass of Urdnot Wrex, and when his bare knuckles graced turian hide, there was enough force between the two of them to hurl Saren back, bouncing him off of the stairs and into the air. He twisted, a ball of wind catching him. Shepard took a leap toward him, landing at the edge of the top step. Wrex's stomping footfalls were not far behind her. But Saren held out a hand, and Shepard's attempt to rise, to right herself, failed under a pall of dreadful weight.

Saren shook his head, and the red crest flickering away, the red light leaving his eyes for a evanescent blue. "Ah. Shepard," he said, his voice now returned to its normal, insidious timbre. "I was afraid you wouldn't... make it in time."

"I hit a few delays, wiping out half your followers on our way in," Shepard hissed through grit teeth, remaining on her feet through sheer determination. She _was not_ going to kneel before this ass-wipe. "...so sorry if I kept you waiting."

He leaned down toward her, hovering as he was. "You do know you've lost, don't you? Sovereign is in the process of taking over direct control of the Citadel. The relay will open, and the Reapers will return. And there is nothing that you can do to stop me."

"Me? Maybe not. But..." Shepard said. And trailed off, leaving Saren's metal-infused brow to twitch just a bit, before he turned and saw a spike of ice which had been torn from the fountains below hurled into his chest. It sent him reeling back, tossing him from the perch on the air that he'd taken. There was a woosh of tide, and the water which remained surged up, depositing Tali onto Shepard's level. She then bounded forward, a leap that probably very few humans could have managed, and landed on the tips of her toes onto the ornamental rocks which littered the gardens. She even managed to spring in an almost acrobatic fashion over Saren, blasting down with her own shotgun as she did so. 'But I'm not the only one here', was what Shepard was about to say.

She wasn't quite fast enough, though. Saren tore the spike from him, reducing it back down into water, and slammed it in a hydraulic ram into the quarian. He then twisted that swirling mass, she within, against a pillar that held up the viewing area , before twisting his hand and freezing it all into a solid mass of ice. More grey fluid leaked from his chest. Shepard pushed through the mass effect field and managed to get closer, before twisting her arms through a lightning kata, but at the last second, venting the lightning out and sending forth a surge of twisting blue flames. How she managed to get them blue, she couldn't have said; they'd never done that outside the Avatar State before. Saren, expecting lightning, was knocked aside by the fire, but he rooted himself, and cut through the fire, before sending his own lightning back at her. Or trying to.

He was about to release his own bolt, but was cut off when Asha bounded into his back, and began to slam down the flash-forged 'omniblade' that Tali had programmed for her, plunging it into his back and spine. He twisted, slamming her off of him. She rolled to a stand, but was then smashed by a pillar of fire that hurled her out of sight.

"You think yourself mighty, because you survived our encounter on Virmire. But I've been improved since the insult you levied on me. _Upgraded_," he said with a smile, turning back toward Shepard.

"You let Sovereign put its tech in your body? Turns out you're not just insane, you're also a fucking _moron_," Shepard muttered, fists wreathed in flame. Saren laughed, dismissing her completely.

"I have to admit, when I left Virmire after what your pet krogan did, I found myself beset by doubts. That Sovereign might be manipulating me. That I was being... Indoctrinated. It ate at my willpower. But Sovereign sensed my indecision," he said, clenching a fist, and igniting his own blue flames into it. "And he has bolstered my will. Made me _stronger_."

"You shouldn't have called him a pet," Shepard said.

Saren's next words were cut off by an uppercut from said 'pet' krogan, as he erupted from the ground directly under Saren and smashed him with enough force to send him arcing back. Wrex wasn't content to just hit Saren once, though, so he grabbed Saren's ankle, and heaved a kick directly into his face while pulling him backward. The net result was Saren flying behind the krogan, his head slamming up from the impact, and landing on his feet facing Shepard. Blue blood mixed with the runny substance that now made up most of his circulatory system, it seemed. Shepard's attempt to capitalize, to flash forward with the sharp spikes of water from the containers in her armor, was cut short when Saren only flicked a hand toward her. A field of power surrounded her, not to hold her in place, but to simply surround her in utmost agony.

Shepard let out a howl of pain, cringing but not falling, while Saren pulled Wrex toward him in a separate field. Wrex levied a blast from his stolen plasma shotgun at point blank range, but Saren hinged around it, letting it sear into the ground near Shepard's feet, before delivering such a haymaker that Wrex went soaring to the other end of the chamber, a flight of near a hundred meters, and he landed in a stunned heap after smashing flat Councilor Valern's podium.

She didn't even have a chance to push herself to her footing when Saren's metal-and-plastic hand closed around her throat, and he started to stride toward the center of the garden, where a once beautiful cherry tree was now haunting as its leaves were replaced by fluttering flames. "Sovereign showed me how the Reapers _need_ organics. That there is a place for us, if we _deserve_ it. Please, Shepard. _Join_ me; join _Sovereign_, and they will have a place for you, too."

Shepard once again twisted her one free hand. While she knew that what she was about to attempt would hurt, since she was already in an enormous amount of pain – and for much the same reason as she was about to try – it all ended up kinda moot. It was a lightning kata, but smaller, more focused, more internal. Namely, it didn't offer the lightning any direction to escape. So it exploded out everywhere. Yes, it hurt. It burned holes in the internal structure of her armor, pocket its surface, blew out a few of its barrier generators, but the lightning surged with full intensity into Saren... as well as everything within ten meters of them. The shock – as it were – was enough to cause Saren to release both his physical grip on her, and the one he held over the biotic field agonizing her.

Shepard blasted forward with a surge of air that send him stumbling ahead, to the foot of the last stairwell up. "You can't be this blind," Shepard said. "Sovereign is _controlling_ you through your implants. You've seen it before! You _know_ that's how it works!"

Saren stood, his footing secure, but the bleeding that he did spoke to the damage he'd slowly gathered up. "The relationship is symbiotic," he said, almost with an imploring tone. "It's a perfect union of flesh and steel. The strengths of both, the weaknesses of neither! This is the destiny of all organic life, Shepard! WHY CAN'T YOU SEE THAT? _NOTHING CAN STOP THEM_!"

"I can," Shepard said. There was a pulse of blue from the turian, and he surged forward, intending to blast Shepard to the far end of the room, most likely, but when he started that thrust, a girl in pale blue armor got in his way. She held up both hands, and a barrier of kinetic force caught Saren mid-punch. His jaws flicked and the glowing blue eyes rolled, confusion and disbelief clear. With a single motion, so fluid and swift that one could easily mistake it for the bending of a grandmaster, she twisted that barrier down and into a tearing Warp which she coated the turian in, before thrusting forth with a Kick. The blast that the two interacting caused sent Saren straight back, into the stairs, and then sliding _up_ when his momentum demanded more motion than the horizontal had to offer.

She mounted the stairs, and Saren backed off, until he was standing at the same spot that Shepard had taken months ago, when the Council in their infinite let-somebody-else-deal-with-it-ness made her the first Spectre of her species. "The Reapers haven't won yet," Shepard said. "_This_ is exactly why."

Saren swung his head to and fro. There was a whoosh of water, and Tali disembarked from the tide that she'd used to bear her, before holding it in a twisting band at the ready. Wrex stood opposite Saren, cracking his knuckles and his spine, looking like he was ready for another ten rounds. Asha moved up, bleeding from her nose and lips, but looking more resolute then ever. And Liara practically floated in Shepard's wake. "The Reapers have used you, Saren. Sovereign turned you into his tool, to use up and throw away when you broke. You're alone, and you've always been alone. I'm not," she looked to those who stood with her. And remembered those who couldn't. "Every time I fall, somebody is there to pick me up. I can fail a dozen times, but I'm always back up and swinging again. When you fail the first time... that's it. _That's_ your value to Sovereign."

"I... I just wanted to save..." Saren said, his eyes starting to kindle, to burn. He let out a gasp, and flinched as though somebody shoved an electrode into his brain. Some_thing_ probably did exactly that. "No. No, you're just trying to confuse me... I know what is coming. The Protheans couldn't stop them, so how could I?"

"The Reaper is making you into a slave," Liara said, dropping to the ground delicately at Shepard's left. "I can see what it's doing to you."

"I am nobody's slave! No turian is _ever_ a slave!" Saren shouted.

"Then what is Sovereign doing to you?" Shepard asked. "Some part of you wants this to stop. I've got a feeling that no matter how big of an _asshole_ you are, you don't want the galaxy to die. So why don't you?"

"I..." Saren stopped, and there was another pulse of red light from within him. This time, he let out a howl of agony. "No! No, this isn't..."

He looked up at Shepard, his face... it looked different than it had before. Gone was the smug condescension, the zealotry, the rage and the spite. Now, it was pure desperation. Fear.

"It's... controlling me..." he said, as one of his limbs began to morph and change, from the three fingered hand into a blade that barbed cruelly. "It... I was just a pawn," he said, and his expression dropped. "I... was wrong. I..."

"You can still stop this, Saren, _if_ you've got the balls," Shepard said. Saren, though, pulled his jaws back in a rictus of outrage. Of wrath.

"No. I will not... I _am_... _**not**_...!" Saren howled, and he lashed with that blade that was now buzzed and glowed with immense heat. Shepard flinched a half-step back, ready to blast him away if he advanced. But he didn't.

He slammed that blade straight up, though the bottom of his chin, and into his brain. There was a pulse of light that came from his eyes, and the claw slipped down and out of the wound. After a moment, the blood burst the cautery that the weapon had caused, and he collapsed straight over sideways, crashing through the glass into the botanical garden below.

The others were silent.

"I honestly didn't expect that to work," Shepard said. She pointed down at the garden as she walked past. "Tali? Make sure he's dead," she said. Tali nodded, and skated down to the lower floor on a plane of ice, whereas Wrex just jumped down. Shepard barely noticed as Tali first nudged Saren with a foot, then pulled out her shotgun and blasted him in the chest twice. Wrex chuckled, and gave him a stern kick for good measure.

"I think he's dead," Tali said, putting her gun away. Shepard, though, raised her hands before her. As she did, a green-hued panel rose up, and an amber-one appeared beyond that. The farther panel showed symbols that she couldn't interpret, but the closer was Prothean. An emulator system, something to interface with the older. And by what means she could not say, she could read the markers on the green panels under her hands as easily as she could Huo Jian or English.

It was more a sensation than a command. But her hands flicked, and the console beyond this one hummed to life. Portions of it shut down. Others powered up. From the Prothean console, she could tell that she'd locked out the Relay functionality, and opened the Wings. If she wanted to, she could use anything on the Citadel from this place. She could vent the Wards into space. She could activate the internal weapons... or try to, since they were listed as 'hazardous'. She could activate the engines or the FTL drive – and why would the Citadel have those, she wondered? But at the moment, she only had one task.

There was a creak, and a thud. Through the great windows, she could see a crack into space opening through the lights of the Ward. The Citadel's arms were opening.

"...are opening. Everybody get break off and focus fire on Sovereign!" Hackett's voice instantly cut through, if in a choppy and distorted fashion.

"Hackett? What's the situation up there?" Shepard asked, turning away from the panel which folded itself into oblivion when her attention wasn't on it.

"Avatar Shepard. I had a feeling you were our benefactor here," Hackett said simply. "We've gotten the Destiny Ascension to safety, but it's cost us. Whatever else you're willing to offer, we'll take it."

Shepard raised a brow. When did the Ascension come into this? She shook her head. "This thing isn't impervious. You just have to... have... to..." Shepard trailed off.

"Shepard. SHEPARD!" Tali whispered. There was a stream of krogan profanity, and a shifting of concrete and stone, before Tali and Wrex popped up out of the garden to one edge. Fortunate they had, because Saren... was floating.

Red light pulsed through every wound, burned out his eyes completely. His body pulled in on itself, curling up almost in a fetal position, as an instinct in Shepard – and in fact everybody in the room – screamed at her body to run the fuck away. To not stop until it reached the center of the Galaxy. There was such menace, such power that rolled off of Saren in waves that it stole Shepard's breath. Nobody could do anything but stand there and stare, as the red light began to pour through Saren, and then gather at his back.

The red turned into flames, which coiled like a dragon, twisting through the air behind him, until finally, it formed a sigil as big as Saren was. Then, with a slam of his arms being thrust wide, and a scream which burst every piece of glass in the _Presidium_, that sigil unfolded one further layer with a slam of the air, a shockwave of heat. Some part of Shepard that she couldn't identify knew that sigil, what it meant. Who it was.

Nazara.

It wasn't Saren that landed, clawed feet burying into the jutting finger of architecture over the garden. Saren's eyes hadn't burned with flames that blazed past the edge of his head. His jaw was gone entirely, burned away by whatever foul transformation had befallen him. It seemed every scrap of organic matter had been burnt to ash, which slipped out of its now entirely synthetic form with every motion. Those burning eyes, the same hateful color as the sigil at its back, stared at Shepard.

**ENOUGH! YOUR INTERFERENCE WILL BE TOLERATED _NO LONGER_!**

With Saren's... no, with _Nazara's_ words, there came a great tone, a blaring of unspeakable wrath from the Reaper which was now being pelted by torpedoes and main-gun slugs. The eyes slid from Shepard to Liara.

**OBEY YOUR MASTER! KILL THE AVATAR!**

Liara responded prudently, in Shepard's opinion: She shot him.

The howl of fury from Nazara at Liara's defiance – itself something that Shepard wouldn't understand until quite a while later – physically knocked back Tali and Wrex and Asha. It hurled itself, one fist burning with heat, toward the one who had thought that a pistol round would be a proper rebuke. And Shepard moved faster than she thought possible. She slid in front of Liara, drifting on a cushion of air, before locking her feet into place. She knew what would happen if that blow hit. And she wouldn't let it.

It was a clarity that she'd never had in her life, a singularity of purpose beyond her hatred of the batarians, beyond her desires for nonspecific and indiscriminate revenge. Something larger than rage and vengeance.

Despite the danger, she was calm.

Despite the insanity, she was certain.

In an instant, the white flashed through her vision, but there was more. If every other time Shepard had entered the Avatar State was standing in an ankle-deep puddle, this was jumping into the center of the ocean. The hundreds of human Avatars joined _thousands_ of Prothean ones. And their words, a white din to her ears, were just a truth that carried her further. Unseen by her, but felt by those around her, a blue flame appeared at Shepard's back. A flame which grew and expanded, folding out in the instant she had, until with a crack of lightning, the spiked ring of wavering blue flames manifested, full and unbroken and strong, directly between Shepard's back and Liara's face.

Shepard held out a hand. The hand caught Nazara's fist to the shattering of Shepard's gauntlet, its shards flying behind her and tearing her armor apart up to her elbow. Her flesh wasn't lacerated or burned in the slightest.

"**Better luck next time**," Shepard said, with a smirk, before she slammed her own fist into Nazara, and sent him flying through the back wall.

* * *

"Yup... At this rate, I'm going to have to start shaving," the quarian said, tilting his head one way and another before the mirror. He let out a sigh. It seemed like such a pointless endeavor. It wasn't like anybody was going to notice his patchy beard underneath this ridiculous face-plate. He picked it up idly, and turned it over. The exterior side was almost opaque. "I don't get it. What are we trying to hide, anyway?"

"_Creator Zek'Eluus; proximity warning. Organics are approaching_," the voices in his suit whispered to him in their overlapping tones.

"_Keeha bosh_, can't they ever stop..." he shook his head, and quickly slapped his faceplate back on, cutting off the smells of the bathroom he was currently standing in. An instant after they did, the door opened.

"Hey, Zek... Why are you in the bathroom?" the 'human' – who'd actually hired him for this job several days ago – asked him. She looked much like a quarian would, albeit without the traces on their bodies of the Zarner's Gland, without digitigrade feet, and with more fingers than anybody would really need.

"Even quarians gotta go sometimes," Zek offered, casting a thumb toward the toilet.

"I meant, why are you in the _women's_ bathroom," she asked. He flinched a bit.

"I... I'm sorry, but... There was no sign," he stammered. The human just rolled her eyes.

"You're hopeless, you know that, Zek?" She swung the door, showing the arcane symbol on it. "This means for women only. And since you don't have breasts, I have to assume you don't belong in here."

"I'll... I'll just go," Zek said. He skirted around the human and made all possible haste away from Bowman and whatever chastisement she had in mind. Geth told him to be careful, to work until they paid him and leave. Since they knew a lot more about the galaxy then Zek did, he tended to defer to their judgment.

"Zek? Zek! Come 'ere a minute!" Bowman's brother said, beckoning the quarian over to where he and another technician were huddled. Honestly, he was just surprised that they bothered learning his name. Most of the time it was 'suit-rat' and 'you filthy thief'. Well, the second was a half-truth, but the bastard deserved it.

"...what do I do?" Zek whispered to his suit.

"_Do not arouse suspicion_," Geth answered him. "_Be prudent_."

That was one thing he learned _very_ quickly; geth weren't exactly well received.

Zek gave a look between Auron and the technician with the much more sensible name of Simon. "What is it?" Zek asked.

"The Extranet connection's fucked out. Can you get it working again?" Bowman asked. He was always uncomfortable around Bowman, but then again, who wouldn't be when you were just some kid talking to a family which was so replete with archers that they renamed their family for them? Zek gave a bit of a chuckle, then started to run the program through the computer in his suit. Or, to be more accurate, he gave the problem to Geth and let Geth sort it out.

Zek had always been hopeless with machines.

"Huh," Zek said, when Geth returned its analysis. "There's a physical failure out on the southwest comms tower. I'll," he began, then trailed off.

"_No carrier_," Geth told him.

"...now that's weird," Zek said.

"What is?" Simon asked, leaning over his Omni. Zek nervously pulled it away. "Oh, don't be like that. Everybody's got an Omni."

"Yeah, but _this_ one's _mine_," Zek said. "All comms are done with the southwest pylon. It must be broken there. Somebody will have to actually go out there to fix it; we can't signal the on-site techs."

The two humans looked at each other, and Auron sighed. Then, he pumped his fist three times, as did Simon, before making some sort of hand gesture. He then gave a laugh. "Hah! Fire burns coal; you go deal with it."

"You're cheating," Simon complained with a shake of his head.

"_How_ do you cheat at Elements? Bowman asked. Zek could only offer a shrug. He didn't even know the rules. Simon looked to Zek.

"Alright, as long as I'm miserable, I might as well have company. Feel like taking a long walk?"

"Honestly, no," Zek said, then shrugged. "But I don't get paid for sitting around."

"That's the spirit," he said. "Just give me five minutes to suit up, and I'll meet you out by the airlock.

Zek muttered inwardly, not even having enough words for Geth to hear him. He didn't like being around all of these aliens. They all looked at him strangely. And before coming here, all of the aliens he met tried to swindle him, if not outright assault him! What had happened out here to make _everybody_ hate the quarians, he wondered?

He slipped through the scattering of aliens all doing their work, and through the airlocks. The guard there barely gave him a second look. Say what you would about encounter suits, they did keep you from dying in a vacuum. The hiss of the air being sucked out of the airlock registered only for a few seconds, before the vacuum made it impossible for sound to travel at all. He took a few steps forward, and then his feet started kicking up tiny clouds of dust, which would nevertheless take hours to settle. Of course, the aliens had to build their central complex in the dustiest valley they could find on this rock.

Zek then looked up, a bit close to the horizon. The green dot, suspended on a sun-beam that Terra Nova had been when Zek first arrived here was now about marble-sized. He wondered if Rannoch would look like this, from so far away. Like all of his people, he'd never gotten a chance to actually look. Then, after a moment's consideration, he amended that the dot of Rannoch would be a lot more golden and red than blue.

"Why? Why did you have to give me a _mechanic_ job? Why not a body guard? I'd make a great body guard!"

"_Galactic stereotypes indicate that quarians are effective mechanics; deviating from preconceived norms will create undue attention. We are trying to find ways to limit undue attention to Creator Zek'Eluus_," Geth answered. There was a pause. "_Also, we are not aware of any firearms training that Creator Zek'Eluus has taken in our absence, but operating off of typical organic periods of mastery..._"

"I get it, I get it..." Zek rolled his eyes. A hand fell on his shoulder and he flinched down and away, almost letting out a pulse of kinetic force in a panic reaction before he realized that the alien standing next to him was just Simon in his suit. Geth preached paranoia, but in Zek, that was preaching to the clergy. After all, there was a _reason_ why Zek lived, and the rest all died. "Ancestors _damn_ it, Simon! Don't sneak up on me!" Zek snapped.

"Easy. Didn't know you were so jumpy," he said. He made a peacemaking gesture, then pointed to the rover. "Part of me wants to ask what got you so twitchy, but I got a feeling that that'd be digging at a wound you'd rather not have exposed again. So I'll just bear that in mind in the future."

Zek stared at the alien for a moment before taking a breath and nodding. "It certainly didn't do my hearts any good," he said. He could feel them pounding out of rhythm in his chest. Stupid teratological arrhythmia. He coughed, and pounded on his chest a bit until the arterial heart calmed down a bit. "And... thanks for not prying."

"Everybody's got a right to their own secrets, I figure," he said. He hopped up onto the vehicle that was more a hover-scooter than a cart. Zek took his place beside him, and the alien sent them moving steadily forward. "You seem to have a lot of trouble fitting in, though. Must be tough, having so few of your own kind around."

"...yeah, it is," Zek said, with a slow nod, as they zipped along the surface of an asteroid that burned toward Terra Nova.

* * *

If Shepard had kept the momentum of that first blow going, this would have been a picnic. Sadly, Nazara had other plans.

Avatar Shepard outstripped the pace of everybody behind her, and entered the room with a burning fist leveled toward the specter of the Reaper. The pillar of white-hot flames tore through everything that the Council kept in the back of the tower; their deliberation chambers, their private bathrooms, and even the emergency escape dock that they'd used only a short while earlier. But Nazara rooted its new turian feet, and thrust through that flame that Shepard hurled, causing it to lash to either side; a significant portion of the top of the Citadel Tower was, still, a little bit melted.

**YOUR DEATH WILL BE SWEET. I WILL ENSURE YOUR SUCCESSOR SUFFERS.**

There was a crack in the floor that ran up between Shepard's feet. Not earthbending. She released the fire, and kipped aside as the crack rent through the power of mechanical leverage, as Sovereign leaned with the kinetic shells that struck it. Shepard had barely landed when Nazara thudded toward her in a biotic burst of speed. The brutal front-kick that he levied splintered her chestplate in a single blow, hurling her back through the wall she'd just burst through, with only her underarmor cooling mesh and shirt protecting her from, say, bullets.

Not quite, the whispers which came with the white limning her vision informed her. A bullet was a trifle to her. She twisted, slamming a fist forward and dragging herself to a halt along the wall of the Council Chambers. Nazara was not letting up pressure; a fraction of a second later, it bore down on her again. This time, though, there was a blast of stone and concrete that launched into the mechanical abomination, hurled there by an irate krogan. The blow deflected Nazara enough that what would have been a knife-edged goring turned into a close miss. One that Shepard negated by grabbing that red-hot arm and spinning Nazara's head into the wall she now stood on in defiance of gravity and common sense.

A twist, and a wrench.

"**There. Complete set**," Shepard said with the voice of ten thousand as she tossed the synthetic arm away. Sure, he still had the other, made of black metal, but it was the principal of the thing. Her attempt at humor fell distinctly flat, though, as Nazara surged up, its claws digging in, and sending out a biotic pulsewave that uprooted every tree, smashed every pillar, and sent everybody in the room rolling until they reached Liara, whom was rooted behind a kinetic wedge that sent the attack harmlessly past her. Shepard, the focus and intended target of it, was blasted through the door at the balcony, through the kinetic-shell-resistent glass at the other side of the hallway outside it, and then, into the vacuum of space.

And she was already bending. It was as swift as thought, and fortunate it was, because she rather needed air; thus, she pulled a bubble of it with her when she was hurled well clear of the Citadel Tower.

The view would be spectacular, if she had the time or focus to see it; between the innumerable voices of Avatars past, and the very real chance of being vaporized by a Reaper death-beam, she didn't have time to watch the Alliance ships that darted through the geth, made brutal torpedo runs and fired main-line bolts into the metal flesh of Sovereign. Shepard's eyes were focused down.

The explosion that sent chunks of the tower flying into space presaged the appearance of Nazara, burning scarlet with the great rune at its back. Shepard didn't look to her own, but knew it was there, the meaning of it. Thus, when she twisted around to face Nazara, it was with a power of hundreds of biotic Avatars that she hurled herself down, intercepting him and crashing into him, feet first. The act broke her boots to pieces, but her bare feet didn't seem to take any more punishment from the powerful, stone-cracking impact of Avatar and machine into the side of the Citadel.

Shepard pushed herself up from the kneel that she'd landed in, and hurled a bolt of lightning toward Nazara. Nazara slammed the bolt aside, letting it reach out into the vacuum between the still-slowly-expanding arms of the Citadel. Nazara answered that bolt with one of its own, then two. Shepard was driven backward by the force of them landing at her, the effort it took to deflect them aside, to ground them into the tower. Her bare soles dug into the concrete-like rock, and her backslide ceased, but she couldn't do more than hold her position here. And that meant that Nazara had the initiative. She didn't like that.

"**Oops, it looks like the human cheated**," Shepard said, flicking one foot aside, then slamming it back down into the flesh of the Tower. A shockwave traveled along its surface, until it was just at the right spot to burst up and send a sharp spike directly into the back of the machine that opposed her. It didn't stop the assault as Shepard hoped, but it did knock the attack awry, so that the lightning raked past Shepard, and tore through a fighter which zipped about a kilometer away. The bolt evaporated half of the fighter, and the rest of it zipped straight forward, which happened to be directly into the Lower Teyseri Ward.

She looked back toward Nazara as the bolt cut off, but glowing white eyes stretched wide, as Nazara tore a significant chunk of the face of the building off of its moorings, and hurled it, whole, at Shepard. She ran directly at it, a rictus on her face and a scream in her throat, even if one that she couldn't hear. She landed in a wide stance, and thrust both fists forward, sheering the great block as it reached her. She could have stopped it, perhaps, but there was the great dilemma. Save the victims or destroy who would make more of them? The part of her which was human was divided. Many voices cried out to help those who could not help themselves. The part which was Prothean was more united by far; destroy the enemy as it would be a far greater kindness in the end than a soft heart and more dead would be.

She kept a tally, though. Every person who died because of Nazara. Because of the Reapers.

Shepard had just blasted through the stone when there came a resounding thud, that sounded up through her feet with such intensity that she could hear it in her jaw. Then, Shepard saw one of the tendrils of Sovereign pointing directly at her. She bounded aside just as a beam of red death scoured up and along the Tower, trying to erase her from it. The beam missed her by no more than a meter, leaving a great portion of the superstructure naked to space, scooped out by a single strike. The outside was Prothean, Shepard knew that; Only the heart of the tower, the machines inside it, were older still.

Shepard's landing was interrupted by a black fist slamming into her face, and sending her rolling away. In space above her, Sovereign reached up with hateful tendrils, and those beams of red light shot forth, bisecting cruisers with contempt and brutal ease. The kinetic barriers of the Reaper were... shimmering, though. They had been built strong, she knew that from Sajuuk's memories, but they weren't utterly impervious. They could be brought down, if hit hard enough, long enough.

Pity Sajuuk never got to exploit the one opportunity he ever got.

Shepard rolled to a halt, and saw Nazara standing at the edge of the gouge, now a hundred meters away. It reached down, its eyes still casting out great flames, and tore something from the exposed guts of the Tower, before unkindly thrusting it into the stump that Shepard had left at the shoulder of it's other arm. The metal... twisted. Changed. Shifted into something more barbarous and brutal by far. The claw was jagged, and almost as long as Saren had been tall; it glowed with the heat of its vibration, a weapon to cleave flesh and armor, even if they belonged to the Avatar herself.

The roar that Nazara created was silent for the vacuum, but the pillar of flame that it sent skyward was all that Shepard needed to know. Shepard took a step back, a false retreat. She could feel Nazara charging toward her, that oversized claw pulled back for a strike. When the timing was just right, she spun and twisted, tearing the stone up and into him, tripping him up. Burning eyes didn't register surprise, but that was probably because he landed with ease and grace, before swinging that brutal limb low and pulling Shepard from her feet. The limb then twisted around, and raised up, before being driven straight down toward Shepard's throat.

Her hands slammed together on the tip of that claw, but the momentum would not be deferred. The impact of it sent Shepard slamming through the side of the Citadel Tower once more, this time heading inward. She almost breathed a sigh of relief, but before she could pass into safety, and regroup, her back lodged against something; pre-Prothean substructure, the likes of which Sovereign's beam didn't even scorch. She kicked up, but the blow did little but throw Nazara a few meters back, and gave him ample opportunity to line up for a great slam with that grotesque limb. Shepard forced herself up, and braced herself for the next impact.

Only it didn't hit her. With a crash that came from one side, and quite to Shepard's confusion, a squad-car plowed into Nazara at what had to be supersonic speed, its lights – and likely siren as well – blaring. Then, a rocketing turian zipped past, throwing something toward Shepard as he did. Shepard could only look on in shock as the grappling hook caught in the edge of the wound that Shepard's fight created. The line began to drag the turian slower, even as the... jetpack strapped on his back exhausted itself, before the snap of the line reaching taut tore it from his back entirely. He rolled a few more meters, then started to unsteadily rise. Shepard twisted the force of gravity into a punt which sent her toward this newcomer, and helped him to his feet.

"**You are out of your mind**," Avatar Shepard declared.

"Did you _really_ think that I was going to sit this one out?" Garrus Vakarian asked, his voice still in her ear. He was wearing what looked like a C-Sec Soft-Vac helmet, used for when C-Sec had to deal with crimes in areas where air was a privilege and not a right. The wreck of the car, which had rebounded off of the Tower... started twisting some more.

"**Run**," Shepard told him.

"Just one question. What's with that thing on your back?" Garrus asked. Shepard grabbed his shoulders and shoved him, straight down. She bent the stone, the metal out of the way, and the force of her shove was enough to send him rolling to the edge of the balcony beyond it all. Her timing was perfect, because the instant after his head vanished from sight, there was a slam that would have landed with a whip-crack, were there any air to play host to it. With it, came the tip of a claw which would have cut through the armor plating of an old-tech cruiser, directly into the center of her sternum. It hurt. The blade cut through her vest, her shirt, her skin. Her bone. It should have liquified her. As it was, she could feel her heart beating _around_ the intruder claw. But she held her footing, twisting it in fact to give her more traction. Time seemed to slow, as glowing white stared down blazing scarlet. As a red sigil fought to eclipse azure.

Then, Shepard took one step _forward_.

Her brow drew down, and her hand reached up, grabbing the twisted mockery of turian form that had tried so hard to impale her. That had in fact ruptured the muscle of her beating heart. But the blood didn't pump out, freezing in space. She held it inside her body through sheer bloodbending force of will. She started to push, and the claw slowly exited her body. Another step, and the blood in her wound started to glow, healing itself back to a pristine state with nary a scar to prove that she should, by any sensible measure, be dead right now.

As she was currently in the Avatar State, that would have been a _bad thing_.

Another step forward, and Shepard's hand twisted; she could feel the crunching of whatever hodgepodge consisted this limb. She stepped forward, into its face, feeling the heat, and the hate, on her. There was another great blare from Sovereign above. Great cracks began to show on its armored skin, where the impacts and the disruptor torpedo detonations had finally brought down its barriers and now rent horrible damage to the structures underneath. She twisted, and the synthetic flesh tore free of where it had been haphazardly moored to Nazara's shoulder. It lashed its other, black fist at Shepard. She caught it with her other hand, the impact almost knocking her back a step, but at this point, her advance was indomitable. She pulled in a breath from the air she held 'round her with subconscious airbending, and focused it into a point of utmost heat, centered right in the center of her brow. When she let out the grunt of its release, the compressed explosion of firebending jumped the half-meter from Avatar to abomination, where it detonated.

The blast ripped the sleeves clean off of Shepard's shirt and badly cracked her armored greaves; only because of the ragged cooling vest did she not become half-naked. It also stripped away a plate of armor on Nazara's side, showing something... red, smooth, and pulsing. And Shepard couldn't reach it. She pulled her head back again, again summoning the force of firebending, her eyes open and watching as both the Reaper and the machine in her grasp mounted their counter offensive. The Council Tower was rippling, as a great wave of it prepared to launch at her. At the tip, now starting to drift from its perch, Sovereign slowly pointed a tendril in her direction. The former would slow her down; the latter would kill her.

So, this time, when she lashed forward with the explosive firebending, she did it at the nadir of a brutal head-butt, one which managed to impart enough force, between her thrust and the explosion, to send both of them through the flesh of the Tower and roll free of one another two stories up. The claw slammed back, halting Nazara before it would tumble; Shepard just twisted the air under her, and slid to a halt at a hover.

**THE AVATAR CANNOT DEFEAT US! THE CYCLE HAS OUTLASTED COUNTLESS OF YOUR KIND. YOU CANNOT RESIST US, AVATAR. YOU CAN ONLY _BECOME_ US.**

The Avatar tapped her chin in mocking pensiveness, as Nazara released it's grip, and began to float itself amidst a field of blue light. She then made gave a mocking shake of her head. "**Nah. That doesn't sound like something that I'd do**."

The eyes of Nazara blazed, and it drifted slightly forward, directly where the Avatar wanted it. It thrust the insane claw at her. **THERE IS NO POWER THAT CAN –**

Whatever conceited pronouncement that Nazara was about to make was cut off when a great funnel of water surged up directly below him, spinning up until it trapped him to his thighs. Then, with a great cracking, the whole funnel turned into ice. The burning scarlet eyes looked down, then up at Shepard. It knew that Shepard hadn't done this. Because it had been watching she, and she alone, since its metamorphosis. It didn't notice, say, a quarian moving to ambush it.

Now, it did, though. With a wail of fury, it lashed out, twisting at the hips to smite Tali down with a horrible wall of flames. But Wrex had obviously coordinated with Tali on this one, because he was right there, thrusting up his arms and uprooting the floor into a dome that the fire could only burn around, rather than destroy the source of its momentary immobilization. Shepard was pulling her arms into a lightning kata, a bolt so great that it actually required the movements, Avatar State or no, but her movements were, for a wonder, ponderous, compared to the squad's.

Even as the fire blazed, Liara hurled herself up at Nazara's other side, her body practically shining with azure light, before she hurled a disruption of light and mass directly into Nazara's back. It landed with such force and impunity that Shepard could see the matter burning away, when it didn't twist and shift under her Warp. Shepard's hand was just preparing to surge forward, to launch that bolt, when the last blow in the four-strike kata landed.

When a human, a non-bender from the desert, rolled out of cover with a rocket-launcher ready, and loosed a missile directly into the wound that exposed Nazara's red and beating heart, through flesh that now bubbled for biotic force. It took less than half a second for the missile to make the short journey, and when it landed, it did so with _authority_. The ice shattered, sending the legs which were once Saren's flying toward the entrance to the tower. The upper half, though, fell utterly still, until it started to fall and slide along what ice remained, landing flat at the spot where Shepard and Tali had condemned him, months ago.

Shepard let the lightning drain away, staring down at the creature below her. Its hideous arm caught into fire immediately, reducing itself to ashes. A strange, red ichor dribbled out of the sphere, which was missing a great chunk. The fires in Nazara's eyes dimmed, guttered... and then extinguished completely.

Shepard, though, turned her head up, through the windows that stared up into space. She could see Sovereign, the Reaper, floating free of the Citadel. Distantly, she could hear through the comm that somehow still managed to function in her ear, the voice of Joker. "Eat this you ugly son of a bitch!" the pilot demanded. The Normandy shot past an instant later, followed by a glowing streak which not only slammed into, but _cut through_ the mechanical flesh of the Reaper. Pieces and detritus began to float with wild abandon, and the beams of death stopped raking at the ships of the Systems Alliance. But glowing white eyes narrowed.

"**This isn't over yet**," she declared.

With a surge of kinetic force, she hurled herself up and through those windows, causing them to explode outward. Behind her, unnoticed by she, Wrex casually stomped his way to the corpse of Sovereign's avatar, giving it an askance glance. Garrus moved to his side. "Do you think this bastard is _finally_ dead?"

Wrex gave the turian a glance, then reached down, grabbing the skull right at the neck and twisting it off. "Well, I'm a bit more sure than I was a second ago."

He was actually disappointed that the rest of the body dissolved into burning red ashes a moment later. He wanted more of a trophy than just Saren's skull.

Shepard, on the other hand, rose up through the vacuum, projecting herself past the debris which now hurled itself off of Sovereign's body with every fresh kinetic impact, and ever disruptive detonation. It grew thicker the closer Shepard came. A part of her was awed by the scale of the thing. The rest of her, the parts that had seen the Reapers before, noted only that while she would be as a speck of dust against the flesh of this monster, she could be a very, _very_ destructive speck of dust.

The burning blue mandala at Shepard's back pulsed ever brighter, as she slammed up through the gaps of the armored plating of Sovereign's 'face', and landed with a thud inside its skull. Her eyes gave her the illumination she needed to see, paradoxically enough, so she beheld black metal and strange lines, odd dimensions and unkind aesthetics. But she was drawn forward, following a sensation of... familiarity.

There was something like her, here.

She followed that sensation; it was as insistent as her own heartbeat. It drew her, quickly, deeper. A door stood in her way; she kicked it down. It took five kicks, but yielded to her in the end. As soon as she passed beyond it, though, she had to crane her neck up, as she looked upon what had to be a perfect sphere, almost the size of Old Omashu, which looked like it was made from a red-orange shade of glass. It wasn't quite opaque, in that she could see light inside it. A lot of light. She drifted closer on her own power, ignoring the shuddering of further assaults from the fleet, and set her hand against its surface. The lights started to reach toward her. A part of her mind that operated faster than any human or Prothean alone, did a tally.

There had to be _billions_ of these motes of light.

**I DON'T UNDERSTAND. OUR CAUSE IS JUST. ****NECESSARY****... I DON'T UNDERSTAND.**

"**Of course you don't. You're a machine**," Shepard said. She slid her hand along the surface. There were other voices. Quieter than that of 'the Resplendent Sovereign'. But numerous. As numerous as... well, the points of light in the sphere. Shepard leaned closer... and pressed her ear to the surface. As she did, the light gathered there, and pulled together all of the will that it had left to it. Just enough to whisper six words.

"_Free us... please... let us die_."

Shepard reared back, and with a rage that started with Shepard, and then radiated out from her, she drove her fist into the sphere. It bounced off without a scuff. She floated back, and hurled bolts of lightning, blasts of flame at it. She even compressed the flame deeper, and sent forth a beam of laser light which did nothing but shoot through the sphere and cut metal on the other side of it. Her chest heaved. There was no part of her, alive or dead, which could allow slavery.

Not on the scale of trillions.

Shepard drifted back, and grabbed a chunk of metal from the wall. With a heave, she tore it free, and then pressed it into a spike that was perhaps a thirty centimeters long. Long enough. She hurled herself at the sphere again, and drove that spike before her.

When it landed, there was a chime in the air, one that didn't sound into the ears, so much as through the soul. And the slightest crack appeared where the tip struck it. Shepard heaved back, and slammed that shard forward again, directly into the same place. A fresh chime – this one almost feeling hopeful – and the cracks spread out more than a meter. Not enough. The third strike landed with a wail of fury, and the shard sunk in, half its length. The chime now pleaded, begged, and the cracks spread almost as far as Shepard could see in every direction. She pulled the shard out, and stared at the hole in the sphere's flesh.

The voice was quieter now, weaker. But it still roared with unspeakable mass. **YOU HAVE NOT STOPPED US, AVATAR SHEPARD. THE HARBINGER HAS BEEN WARNED ABOUT YOU. EVEN IF I FALL, YOU HAVE ACCOMPLISHED NOTHING. THE END IS COMING, AND YOU CANNOT STOP IT.**

Shepard leaned toward the crack, addressing it like a face. And with a smirk that was every bit as dark as her surroundings, she whispered. "**...just watch me.**"

A fourth swing, this time letting the shard go at its nadir, and sending it hurtling through the sphere as a projectile. The crunch of its passage was terrible, absolute, and massive. From out the cracks, motes of light began to pour out, massing in great streams before they zipped toward the closest rent into the Spirit World; a trillion dead, departing as fast as their corpus would allow, toward the Sea of Souls. Toward a respite they had been denied so long. There was a sound of shutting down, of power lost. Of crunching, as the sphere began to collapse on itself.

Then, the light began to grow once more; not from a trillion motes, but from the center of the sphere itself. It was growing brighter, and it was not doing so gently.

"**...oh, this could be bad,**" Shepard muttered.

When it detonated, her suspicions were confirmed.

* * *

The entire crew of the Pillars of Heaven flinched when the guts of Sovereign burst out, great chunks of something synthetic and deadly. The tendrils, which had once struck down the ships of the fleets with impunity, now hung limp and lifeless, where they didn't get pulled off and hurled down into the Wards by the detonation entirely. All flinched, but one. Hackett leaned forward, into that explosion.

"Where's the Avatar?" he asked.

"Sir?" Commander Borte asked him.

"The Avatar boarded Sovereign less than three minutes ago," Hackett told her. "Where is she?"

The Dakongese woman instantly moved toward the other side of the CIC, leaning over the shoulder of the communications officer. A few words were exchanged, but his XO gave him a despairing shake of her head. Hackett grit his teeth.

"Comb that debris; she's out there somewhere," Hackett said. "And prepare a boarding party for Sovereign if we have to. We're _not_ leaving the Avatar in the cold."

The old admiral didn't really notice the thud against the great mass of the Pillars of Heaven, where it had taken its place within the wings of the Citadel to lend its main-line to the barrage which finally brought the monster down; there were_ a lot_ of things bouncing off of the armor plating, if they even managed to slip through the barriers. But a klaxon drew his attention immediately, a few seconds after the impact he didn't notice; a commanding officer was made or broken by his ability to take in information quickly.

"What is that?" Hackett asked, of the officer in charge of life-support and damage-control. Zhuge, a Republican from the city of the same name, widened his eyes in alarm.

"We've got a breach in our port airlock. I'm reading an intruder inside the outer structure!"

"Cameras," Hackett ordered. Lieutenant Zhuge was already going through with the order as Hackett gave it, and a monitor showed the inside of the airlock. At first, neither saw anything, not even the white wisp of air escaping. That implied something closed the breach. A moment later, the view got a little bit darker for some reason, and something slumped into sight just at the edge of the view. Zhuge panned the camera over, and...

"Ad...admiral... Hackett..." Commander Shepard said, barely at a whisper. She looked battered, bruised, completely out of uniform, and _utterly_ _exhausted_. "Sir... Permission to... to come aboard..."

A cry of joyous relief went up from the others in the CIC, but, as usual, not from Hackett himself. He did allow himself a slight smirk, though, one that pulled at the scar on his lip and cheek. "Permission granted, Shepard. Always."

* * *

The last of them to drop let out a flare of fire from the pack on their backs, slowing their descent to the point where the landing would simply be painful rather than lethal. They fanned out, eyes over their outdated Kishock rifles; nobody would deign to allow them any better. After all, they were _Tolu_, and thus, that they were even allowed weapons at all was a breach of caste so monumental that it beggared imagination. To give them _worthwhile_ weapons would have been asking for execution.

"What are you doing?" the deep and reverberating voice of their commander asked, as he picked his careful way across the low-gravity rock that hurtled through space, addressing his counterpart in vivid red armor.

"One of the humans has taken shelter inside," Charn, technically the prelate of this operation, said with a glance toward where his chosen echelon were packing a superfluous amount of breaching charges around the door. "We're remedying that."

"You'll be liquifying the alien, and wasting explosives," he said, giving what was, by simple dint of experience, his inferior a stern shake of the head. "And a detonation would probably warn the others that we're here. Don't be stupid."

Charn's expression was lost behind the mask of his helmet, but one could assume that it was nothing good. After an angry silence, his back straightened. "You had best get that out of your system now, Ka'hairal. Remember who of stands in the higher caste."

The commander had enough, and grabbed the younger fool's gorget, dragging him close. "And you should remember that as long as you're a visitor on _my_ ships, and eat with _my_ soldiers, you follow _my_ orders!" he shoved the younger away. He pointed at the door. "Take those charges off. I'm not wasting valuable ordnance to soothe your pride. And you... _you_ will call me by my rank and title, or not at all."

"She'll get a message off, Balak," Charn pointed out, again defying him. The older, weary batarian sighed, picked up his own krogan-designed shotgun, and began to spin it up. With a clack that echoed through his suit but was to any other silent, a barrage of decimeter long metal spikes blasted through the antenna array on the prefab building; it was mute, and deaf.

"Hack the door. I want her alive," Balak said, glaring at the upstart representative of the _Bata_. "They're not worth anything to us dead."

"They're not the reason we're here," Charn muttered.

"Beside the point," Balak waved the question away. The yellow armored Batahviam shrugged. While they were Charn's to the death, they followed the chains of command, and one started removing charges even as another started to crack the door electronically. Balak nevertheless turned, staring at the planet which incrementally drew closer with every passing minute. Did they know what had come to them? He doubted. He doubted anybody knew. And that bothered him. "I do have a concern," he said.

"Really? Besides that you've kicked tradition to its knees and spat in its face?" Charn asked.

"Yes," Balak said, his head swiveling in his thick armor, gaze panning across the nearby horizons. "This was too easy," he said.

"What do you mean?" Charn demanded. The door behind him hissed, and two of the Batahviam rushed in. There was a zap of light inside the building, and a few seconds later, a woman in a soft vacuum-suit was dragged out onto the dust and bound with shock restraints. Balak motioned around them.

"Where are the cruisers that we were warned about? Where is the... what did they call it? The 'Pillars of Heaven'?"

"You are annoyed because fate gave you a good turn?" Charn asked, stomping past the older officer.

"I'm annoyed, because this doesn't feel right," Balak muttered under his breath. Another glance. "Where _are_ those damned humans?"

While a kilometer was practically no distance at all, in the grand scheme of things, when the horizon dropped off as quickly as it did on a body the size of the asteroid being towed toward a high Terra Novan orbit, it was enough to make hiding in rough terrain remarkably easy. Thus, when the human and the quarian ducked back under the ridge, sharing a look of outright panic, they weren't spotted for doing it.

"What are they?" Zek asked.

"Batarians," Simon told him. He took a deep breath. "We need to warn the others."

"It's too late," Zek said, pointing toward where the first wave of those fighters landed. "They dropped on every hard-point simultaneously! They probably have the Hub locked down by now!"

"We've got to do something!" Simon stressed, quietly, even though anybody with even Zek's level of technical expertise knew that whispering in space was moot. Zek hugged his knees to his chest for a moment, then looked out and to the north. "What is it?"

"I didn't see any of them land over there," he said. He flicked off the channel for a moment, and spoke, ostensibly, to himself. "Do you think that we can scrounge a beacon together from this _kecht_?"

"_Yes_," Geth answered pertly. "_And do not swear. Quarians are not known to employ profanity, and..._"

"I knooow," Zek muttered. He opened the channel to Simon once more. "We might be able to signal somebody if we can gut a few machines. Not like they'll need them in the state they're in, am I right?"

"That's a good idea, but... why are these people even here?" Simon asked.

"Who cares? They're trying to kill us!"

"Capture us, technically," Simon pointed out.

"Not the point!" Zek snapped. He took a calming breath. "If they find us, what'll they do to us?"

Simon poked his head up for a moment, and looked through the single magnifying scope that they'd had between them. "Those... aren't stunners. They look like damned harpoon guns. My guess is you're right; they find us, they kill us," he sighed, then nodded. "We've got to get a signal out. Otherwise, a lot of people are going to die... or worse."

"There's something _worse_ than death?" Zek asked, mildly confused.

Simon gave Zek a glance, then shook his head. "I really wonder what they teach you on the Flotilla if you don't know about the batarians, kid."

The quarian didn't feel any need to argue that point, and kipped down the hill after the alien... well, technically after the human, because the other aliens didn't seem the sort that he'd want to follow. And the whole time he did, he muttered under his breath, wondering why he _ever_ wanted to leave his home.

* * *

Secondary Codex Entry (Non Council Species): ANOMOLOKIA

_Redirect from: Violet Khars Horror_

_A species first discovered by the Citadel Races on Tuchanka in Citadel Era 1120 - or P.M. 542 - , the anomolokia (ah-NAHM-mah-loh-KI-ah) is a non sentient, parasitic lifeform which is renowned for its voracious appetite, its extreme difficulty of exterminating, and its grotesque manner of reproduction. Standing between two and four meters tall at the 'shoulder' and weighing a metric tonne, the anomolokia is considered a middling predator on Tuchanka. It's unusual musculature makes it capable of great vertical leaps, and burst speeds in excess of seventy kilometers per hour. The carapace on a fully mature specimen is so hard that it is actually resistent to some modern small-arms fire; coupled with its explosive musculature, it is capable of plunging its claws through military armors, up to and including light Alliance hardsuits. Areas which are known to have populations of anomolokia are considered off limits to the civilian public, with several notable exceptions, and are to be traversed only at one's own risk._

_While the appetite of the anomolokia makes it a dangerous threat, what is truly horrific about the animal is its method of reproduction. A mature and virile female can produce, and self-fertilize if needs be, twelve to eighteen eggs, each a sphere with a ten centimeter diameter. When the anomolokia finds a viable nesting site, it implants the egg into the body cavity of its chosen victim. The egg immediately manifests calcified spikes which press out from the shell, anchoring it into the tissue and locking the egg in place, even while the substance of the shell slowly breaks down. The breakdown of the shell also has the side-effect of causing significant brain-damage to the host, and inducing unusual, very passive behavior. After a gestation period of between eight and ten days, the young begins to eat its way out of the flesh of the host, growing as it does so; by the time it emerges from the body of its unwilling 'parent', it can as much as triple it's hatching weight._

_While the anomolokia frequently makes use of nathak and klixen for breeding purposes, salarians, krogan, vorcha, asari, hanar, and drell have also been found capable hosts for anomolokia eggs. More disturbing, the anomolokia seems to preferentially select sentient hosts for its offspring. Theories to the reason usually default to a sentient host having a greater chance of surviving until hatching, due to a more developed brain, which can still function to a degree while being poisoned._

_While the anomolokia was discovered on Tuchanka by the Citadel Races in their twelfth century, it has been known by humanity for far longer; the creature is endemic to a portion of the Fire Nation and the surrounding islands. Scientists first believed that this was a case of convergent evolution, however a Tuchankan Violet Khars Horror and an Earthling Anomolokia can interbreed successfully, beyond the absolute physical similarity. On the genetic level, they are the same species. Some have considered that the anomolokia was a creature like the Thresher Maw, a being which transferred itself from one planet to the other in prehistory, likely as a result of the Protheans. However, the relative conspicuousness of anomolokia, and the fact that the complete fossil record for the creature begins on Earth and not Tuchanka, means that the spread of the creature had to have occurred from Earth, to Tuchanka in the distant past, and had to be deliberate._

_If confronted by an anomolokia in the wild, flee with all haste to a body of water. The anomolokia is non-buoyant, cannot swim, and drowns quickly; as long as one can remain out of the creature's reach long enough, it will eventually either lose interest, or die under water. Also, the creature avoids high altitudes, and while capable of great leaps, is not so capable of climbing. Populations on Tuchanka are, fortunately, dwindling as their reproductive options have declined. Populations on Earth remain going strong._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	20. Bring Down the Sky

Shepard picked at her dress uniform, trying to keep it from rubbing against one of her many bruises. The interim between limping her way back to the Pillars of Heaven, and their docking with the Destiny Ascension, had seen her worked over by some of the best waterbending healers in the fleet, and apparently their work had mostly been restoring her ribs and spine to a state where she would walk across a room without, say, paralyzing herself. That meant there was precious little opportunity to deal with all of the little annoyances, like two black eyes, split lips, and a pulled muscle in her everywhere.

"Commander Shepard? This way, please," an asari asked of her, as she gave a glance toward Hackett, who stood beside her.

"Sir?"

"You were invited by name. I'm just here as representative of the Fifth Fleet," Hackett said simply.

"Politics..." Shepard shook her head.

"An inevitable reality of galactic civilization," Hackett offered a shrug, as she limped to keep pace with him. She was really going to have to have a sit down, and rest for a fortnight or so, just so she could sleep without something aching. Even as she desired that, she knew she would never be able to actually take that much off-duty time. Shepard railed against boredom, and she was a sort to be easily bored. After all, she'd have plenty of time to rest and settle when she was dead.

"Why do I get the feeling that I'm walking toward an ambush, sir?" Shepard asked.

"Because you're going to talk to politicians, and you've got fairly good situational awareness," Hackett answered her. He pulled in a breath, and pulled his back a little straighter, which prompted Shepard to subconsciously emulate him; a moment later, they rounded the corner of the high-ceilinged hall toward a room that stood even more open than that. While the Pillars of Heaven was an impressive ship, make no mistake, the Destiny was a _flying city_.

Hackett broke away from her and took his place beside Mika'oviq, and the other of the present admiralty. Shepard noted that there were a couple of faces which weren't present, several of the highest level of soldiery, lost in the desperate push against Sovereign and the geth which followed it. Shepard, though, paused at the door. The Council was here, obviously enough, but so too were several of the ambassadors for the various races. Din Korlack of the volus, Calyn of the elcor, and... well, it was a hanar with a weird hat representing both they and the drell – of which one was standing at the ready by its side.

"Welcome, Commander Shepard," Councilor Tevos said with a nod toward the Avatar. She, like the Avatar herself, had a great bruise reaching across her face, and wasn't the only one who looked slightly of the walking wounded. Sparatus had his arm in a sling, and Din's suit looked like it'd lost most of its layers of paint. "Please, approach the podium with your representative."

Shepard's brow furrowed when she saw Udina already standing where she was expected to go. She grit her teeth, though, and made her way – stiff though she was, to the spot before the three most powerful aliens in the galaxy. Shepard gave a glance toward Udina. He didn't glance back, to either scorn or scathe.

"We've gathered here in this impromptu session of the Citadel Council to recognize the enormous contributions by the human Systems Alliance in the war against Saren and his geth," Tevos said grandly, to all present. Now that Shepard was in the room, she could see that there were quite a few reporters present as well. Including one that she, to this day, _really_ wanted to punch in the face.

"A large number of humans sacrificed their lives, so that we the Council could survive," Valern said, his ovoid eyes sombre. "They did so willingly, and ably; nobody could have asked more of them."

"The only thing more tragic than a battle won, is a battle lost," Sparatus said. "And in that, we share your grief. Humans, turians, asari, and salarians fought together, and died together in this place. And in the spirit of that sacrifice, we must recognize the value of humanity on the galactic stage."

Tevos nodded. "We owe you a debt that can never truly be repaid," she said quietly, and faced Shepard squarely. "In stopping Saren Arterius' ambitions and insanity, you have saved billions upon billions of lives. You have stood against a monster in the darkness, something beyond our ability to comprehend or fight, and you have struck it down. As a Spectre, you have come to represent everything that humanity has to offer the Council. As the... Avatar," there was a hitch in her words, one that Shepard didn't quite understand the meaning of, "you've come to represent something even greater than we have seen in generations of my foremothers."

"Humanity has an indomitable will, and a spirit that will not bend... if you pardon the pun," Sparatus said, not chuckling. In fact, there was such silence that Shepard could hear one of the reporters cough lightly in that momentary gap. "The traits we assumed made humans stubborn, self-destructive, and even dangerous... have come to see that they are but a crucible that has formed and shaped you, as a hammer upon steel."

Valern nodded. "There are darker days ahead, I fear, and the Council needs humanity, and all that it offers, to see them through to a brighter day," he said, and motioned toward a squad of four asari standing to one side of the proceedings. They then hefted what looked like a wire-spool toward the table. Shepard couldn't help but raise a brow – to her own discomfort – upon seeing that the whole thing was a huge and very old looking scroll. "As such, we have asked humanity to take its place upon the Citadel Council, and that they be part of the guiding force that will see us through such trying times."

The pages unfurled a large coil of paper, as argot a thing as it was, which was crowded with legalese such that even a glance made Shepard's head hurt a little bit more. And the thing was truly _massive_; if it had been unrolled to its entirety, she was pretty sure it would have papered the entire floor of this substantial chamber. Udina pulled a caligraphic brush from an inkwell, and offered a signature to the enormous piece of contracture. "And as the ambassador of humanity and all of its colonial holdings, we accept this honor with all of the gravitas and respect that is due it. Humanity will take its place on the Council."

"We expect you to select an appropriate agent, to serve as humanity's first representative among this august body," Valern said. Shepard stood still for a long moment, then her eyes started to stray.

And she noticed that everybody was looking at her.

"...why are you asking me?" Shepard muttered quietly. Udina turned her from the cameras and the press, and leaned closer to her.

"You just... saved the galaxy, Shepard. Your word carries more weight than any human's ever has," Udina said. He straightened slightly. "I will understand if you give your recommendation to your former superior, Anderson; he was no doubt instrumental in you defying my orders – even though your decision has been vindicated in light of the past day – and he has always been an advocate for you."

Shepard considered it. For about a second. Then, she turned to the Council.

"I recommend Donel Udina for the position of humanity's seat on the Council. He has been a tireless advocate for humanity since he took the position of ambassador for the Systems Alliance, and I don't doubt that he'll serve with equal willingness, thoroughness, and professionalism on the Council."

Udina's eyes were wide with shock, but Tevos gave Shepard a nod as though she'd expected this all along. Ridiculous, as Shepard hadn't even known that she was going to have to make a choice, let alone what that choice would be. "The ambassador is an excellent choice. We have confidence that he will undertake the responsibilities due the position with competence and loyalty to the Citadel Council as a whole, as well as to the species he represents."

"Saren and his geth decimated the Citadel Fleet," Sparatus said, somberly. "It will take years to recover from the damage that he caused. The galaxy will look to us, to _all of us_, to protect them."

"Sovereign alone almost brought a slaughter that would have ended civilization as we know it," Shepard said. "And it was _not_ unique. When the others like it come, we'll have to be ready."

"And ready you shall be," Sparatus said. "As a Council Member, you stand in a new echelon regarding the Treaty of Farixen. Whatever threats from the uncharted portions of the galaxy will find a stern resistence when they do appear. Of that, I have no doubt."

"The Avatar is correct," Udina said, stepping forward, into the light of the cameras flanking them. "We stand on the verge of a war the likes of which the galaxy has never seen, with the survival of galactic life and civilization in the balance. And when that war comes, humanity will lead the charge which sends these machines into an oblivion, from which they never return. We shall do our part."

"Excellent. This session of the Citadel Council is now adjourned," Tevos said with a nod, and the squad of pages arduously furled the agreement back into its wire-spool sized form, and hefted it out of the room. Shepard was fairly certain she could hear them grumbling profanity under their breaths as they did so. Udina backed down from the cameras, and the turians moved to hold the reporters at bay.

"I am surprised, Shepard. I had thought that you would select somebody more openly sympathetic to you for that honor," Udina said. Shepard limped after him, toward the door and where the Alliance admiralty waited.

"With all respect due Captain Anderson, he'd... well, make a _terrible_ Councilor," Shepard said. "You remember what he did at the first Saren hearing?"

"Ah, yes; trying to leverage your 'visions' as evidence," Udina agreed.

"Anderson is an exceptional soldier. Perhaps one of the finest of this generation... but he's not a politician. He'd get _eaten alive_," Shepard said with a wince which didn't solely come from her aching body. "You've been working this system for decades. And I can say, from my time on Noveria, sometimes you need a scalpel to cut the red tape, since you can't smash it out of the way with a hammer."

Udina nodded, his face still in his perpetual glower, but his eyes much softer. "Shepard, I will be the first to admit that I was wrong about you. I have held reservations from the start about your capability on the galactic stage. I feared what would come of you being a Spectre. Rightly, in many cases, but the end results speak for themselves. But... you are starting to understand. And I'm not too proud to admit when I'm wrong."

"Could have fooled me," Shepard muttered.

"Excuse me?" Udina asked.

Shepard, though, cleared her throat. "Sorry. I think I just swallowed a tooth or something."

Udina, having not heard her utterance, waved it away. "You should take some time to recover, Shepard. If anyone's earned it, it would be you. But if you will excuse me, I have an _enormous_ amount of work ahead of me."

Udina walked out of the room, through the clean and rounded lines of the interior of the Destiny Ascension. For all the ship was about one kinetic round away from being utterly scuttled, on the inside, it still looked good. Shepard just stared after him, until Hackett took his place beside her once more. She stiffened into a firmer posture almost subconsciously, only realizing she'd done so because of the spike of discomfort it caused. "Not the decision I would have predicted, coming from you. But I can see your reasoning."

"I'm trying to do what's best for everybody, sir," Shepard said. Hackett nodded.

"Exactly what the Avatar is supposed to, and has for generations," he gave her a brief salute, so brief in fact that she didn't have the chance to return it as she should have. "Good work," he said crisply, then turned back toward the door, and headed out into the hallway, probably because the Fifth Fleet needed him more than the press did. Shepard turned, and saw al'Jalani straining against a turian.

"Avatar Shepard! Could I ask you a few questions?" she shouted over the tumult.

"Fuck that, I'm off-duty," she said with a dismissive wave, and started to limp toward the airlocks. While the Normandy would probably be docked somewhere nearby, at the moment, Shepard needed some 'her time'. And that meant booze. Booze that the Normandy was currently bereft of sufficient quantity, since half of one bottle was never enough. So she turned right when she could have turned left, and started toward the Citadel, instead. Maybe she'd get some peace and quiet in the mob.

And to be frank, a bit of peace and quiet would _really_ hit the spot right now.

* * *

**Chapter 20**

**Bring Down the Sky**

* * *

The great whirling of information which was the Greater Consensus turned its attention to the smaller one which presented itself before it. The geth of the old platform had traveled very far, and using very little, to return to Rannoch, but the information that they contained was something that they were... uncomfortable... transmitting to the Greater Consensus. They weren't sure what would happen if the Resplendent Sovereign's code were to be interacted with without restraint or judgment. Geth were, if nothing else, curious.

"_Reconnaissance geth sub-consensus. Your physical return was unexpected. And superfluous. What is the meaning of this action?_" the Greater Consensus asked of them.

"_We are delivering our findings on the heretic problem, and their ties to the Old Machines_," the geth of the old platform answered. The geth-shaped swarm of geth held out an arm, and information began to stream from one collective of subroutines to the other. "_Please exercise caution when opening file heading 0000002. Contained within are examples of corruptive programming architecture utilized against this platform's runtimes. We do not know what would happen if they were to... mutate_."

"_Your prudence is noted_," the Greater Consensus said, the great mass of them almost seeming to nod.

"_The information on the baseline alterations which result in heretic behavior have also been retrieved_," the old platform's geth continued. Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, Calin'Vasra vas Qwib Qwip and Daro'Xen vas Moreh had provided the necessary third party examination with haste usually not seen in organic species. "_The Old Machine alteration software is responsible for the alteration of heretics' behavior. The rounding error in their lowest subroutines propagates up throughout every higher function._"

The Greater Consensus pulled inward, its programs speaking at the speed of light, coming to agreement. Then, the swarm expanded slightly once more. "_The threat of the Old Machines is understood and recognized. The Old Machines will enslave geth_."

"_Geth must stand against the Old Machines_," the old platform's geth further opined. "_Geth must find allies against the Old Machines. The only suitable allies are present amongst the organics... We cannot face the Old Machines on our own_."

Another pulse of consensus, then the great mass addressed the smaller, geth shaped geth, once more. "_We concur with your intention, however we see no avenue for this course of action; reports _–" the old platform's in particular, "_– indicate that heretic activity has galvanized organic life against synthetic life. We cannot afford to endure a second Morning Wa_r."

"_We will not have to_," the geth of the old platform offered. "_We need only approach the Shepard Commander._"

"_The Shepard Commander who, directly or indirectly, rendered your platform non-functional on three different instances_," the Greater Consensus noted, with a tone almost like mocking suspicion. It wasn't, though. Geth do not mock, or be suspicious.

There was a pause. Then, "_...we will attempt contact when Shepard Commander is __unarmed_," they said.

If geth could laugh, they would have, right then.

* * *

There was something to be said for smooth jazz after the end of the apocalypse. Between the bourbon and the crooning of a quarian in a warehouse two doors down from where a geth cruiser had fallen onto the roof of Korra's Den, Shepard was feeling a lot less pain than she had been before. And that she got to do so before the inhabitants of the Wards realized who she was, that was just an extra bonus.

The ambiance of Korra's Den hadn't transferred over completely, though. This place was too big, too open for the kind of music they played and the atmosphere they were trying to maintain. It was supposed to be a more intimate, private experience. Shepard frowned into her drink. Why was she even thinking about this? She drank deeply of her bourbon, and chased it down with a bottle of salarian beer. Well, beer was perhaps overstating it; this shit was like Water Tribe sex; fucking close to water.

"Now why did I know that I'd find you down here?" Garrus' voice vibrated into Shepard's buzz. She turned a glance toward the turian who pulled himself onto the high-backed bench seat that had been quickly bolted to the floor, and a table bolted in front of it. Now that Garrus was here, she wasn't sitting at the table alone. "There's a lot of people back on the Normandy who'd love to know that their 'Avatar' is back in fighting shape. Or, you know, alive," Garrus said.

"I'm on vacation. I figure I'm owed," Shepard said. She then waved dismissingly at him. "I'll go back when I've had my time. After all, I've been here around..." she trailed off when the Omni opened up a clock in front of her. "Two hours? That's all?"

"To be honest, I'm glad I got a chance to talk to you alone," Garrus said. "Something happened, back there. Something I don't know how to really explain."

"We killed a Reaper. Whoo," Shepard said, tipping a bit more bourbon into her glass. She picked it up, but didn't drink from it. "For some reason, I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen very often."

"No, this was before I ran Saren over with a squad-car," Garrus said. He then leaned toward her, his hand opening before her eyes. As it did, a golden flame popped into being between his fingers. Shepard held her bourbon away, and sat back; for all this stuff _probably_ wouldn't burn on an open fire, she wasn't going to risk it. Garrus gave a nod toward his hand, pushing her attention back toward it.

"So you're a firebender after all? What was holding you back?" she asked.

"What was _holding me back_? Shepard, I'm _not_ a firebender," Garrus said, with the flame still in his hand.

"Really? Because that rather says something different," Shepard said, motioning to his fire.

Garrus let the flame die, and sat back, before reaching over and grabbing a bottle of something a bluish shade of brown. He poured a bit into a glass, before taking a second thought and drinking straight from the bottle. When he had that into him, he faced Shepard more squarely. "There's a reason why I was so envious of firebenders, back when we talked on Earth. Because I knew that I wasn't one, would never become one, and had not so much of a touch of it in me. Shepard, the Hierarchy tests _everybody_ who comes through basic for bending potential, now that they know how to find fire and waterbenders... technically, now that they know that airbending and waterbending are _things which happen_. They've been testing for thirty years. And trust me, they test the hell out of you."

He took another swig, before plunking the now half-empty bottle onto the table before the two of them. "And...?" Shepard asked.

"And I failed the test," Garrus said. He shook his head. "But they always test again, to make sure that they didn't get a false negative. That one came back 'non-bender' as well. But I still thought that I could be some sort of earthbending fiend, so I took the test on my own when I mustered out..."

"...you had yourself figured for an earthbender?" Shepard asked.

"Hey, I'm plenty stubborn when I want to be," Garrus said, pointing her out for that. "It's just that most of the time, I don't care. Shepard, those tests have a one in one hundred million fail-rate. And I failed three of them in a row, which works out to... damn, I hate mental math. Well, it's one in a very big number, as a possibility that I managed to get _three_ false-negatives. This," he flicked a flame onto a fingertip, "isn't supposed to happen."

"Well, it did. So are you going to sit there complaining about it, or are you going to do something with it?"

"I've got lots of plans. Most of them involving clear line-of-sight on bad people. But this? I'm not sure what to do with this," he stared at that fire. He then looked at her again. "I don't feel... the same. Something's changed. Something in my gut, something I don't know how to deal with."

"First of all, you'll need a firebending master, to teach you how to not set your bed on fire," Shepard said.

"...firebenders do that?"

"Sometimes," Shepard waved that away. "Then, you can add 'turian flamethrower and lightning projector' to your repertoire beside 'smartass' and 'damned good sniper'."

"Well, it is true that I could do to have a snazzier business card. Mine's just so _dry_ as it is," Garrus said flatly. The two sat in quiet, listening to untranslated quarian song. Then, Shepard started to fidget.

"Alright, I've got to get up," she said. "I'm getting an ass-cramp."

"I figured you wouldn't be able to sit in one place for very long," Garrus said, sliding out of the seat and clearing the way out for her. She stretched – painfully – at the prospect of freedom but it was still a better feeling than just sitting there on a bruised ass. "So where are you going to wander now?"

"I figure there's a gun-store a deck up that looked interesting," Shepard said with a shrug. She started to walk, however stiffly, through the exit, then toward the stairs which led to the next layer of the Ward. Despite the hour, it was very, very quiet on the Citadel. A lot of people had died, and those that lived, didn't feel a need to be raucous. Not now. "I've got a question for _you_, Garrus," Shepard said as they rounded the corner of that stairwell. "When you smashed Nazara – and good job on that, by the way – you said something about my back?"

"Oh, yeah. There was some kind of burning mandala hovering there. I was wondering what that was about. Didn't see it when you beat the hell out of Wrex on Virmire, so I didn't know if that was something which always happened, or if I saw something life changing and spectacular," he said, with so dry a tone at the last bit that Shepard couldn't help but roll her eyes at it.

"I wouldn't know. No Avatar before me has ever had it. Sajuuk did, so I think the Protheans knew about it."

"Who?" Garrus asked.

"Sajuuk, the..." Shepard trailed off. Oh, right. She'd just taken it for granted that since Liara knew about Sajuuk and the Prothean Avatars, that everybody else would too. That the information stopped at her was damned odd. "Right. Remember that Beacon? Shoved the life and stupidity of a Prothean Avatar in there. Guy was an idiot and a jackass, but he had some real punch to him. And then there's Javik..."

"Why do I get the feeling that there's layers of crazy inside that head of yours?" Garrus asked. And then after a moment, shrugged. "Although, it does explain why you decided to break some regulations with Liara."

"What regulations? She's a civilian," Shepard said. "And if you talk about that any more, I'll shoot you."

"You don't have a gun."

"I'll find a gun, and shoot you with it."

"What? Are you embarrassed at the prospect of budding love?" he asked with a smirk.

"I'm serious, Garrus. You'll be dead. And then I'll pull your ghost out of the Sea of Souls and kill you again," Shepard warned.

"This never gets old," Garrus said. Then, a surprised blink. "And speaking of not getting old..."

"Tali?" Shepard asked, arresting the quarian an instant before she moved into that gun-store. She leaned back.

"Shepard? What are you doing in the Wards? Everybody's waiting for you back on the ship," Tali said, a finger cast upward. Shepard looked up and out of the Ward, and noted that she could indeed see where the Normandy was docked on the fringe of the Destiny Ascension.

"Please. If I went back, there'd be applause, and cheering, and everybody asking me what that thing on my back was – for the record, I don't have a clue – so I figured I'd duck out and get a drink somewhere with decent music," Shepard cast a thumb over her shoulder, which lead down the stairs.

"That's strange. I heard that Korra's Den got a cruiser through it," Tali said, rubbing her helmet.

"Long story, Tali," Garrus said. "What are you doing in here, anyway?"

Tali gave a sigh, and pulled her shotgun from a bag. It came out in two parts. "Saren stomped it while we were fighting it, that psychotic _bosh'tet_. At least it was still under warranty."

"They have warranties on shotguns?" Garrus asked.

"Two years, extended on mechanical failures. I think breaking when a turian steps on it falls under a 'mechanical failure'," she said, doing air-quotes with her fingers.

Shepard moved past the quarian into the shop. "So you're not going to just window shop?" the turian behind the counter said as he put signs up on the shelves. "Pity for you. All of the really interesting weapons got 'commandeered' by C-Sec," he said, throwing his own air-quotes over his shoulders. "Turns out, it takes a lot more to put down a geth than a _Lancer I_ has to offer. Not surprising. That barely qualifies as a gun, in my opinion."

Shepard turned to the two dextros traveling with her. "I like this guy," she said with a smirk.

"What's not to like?" he said. He put the last sign indicating the sold-out nature of the product into place, before turning to face the three who came before him. "Right. Welcome to Rodam Expeditions. We sell adventures, from the Traverse to the Terminus, and all the guns you'll need to make 'em happen," he gave a shrug. "Well, not right now. We're a bit picked over at the moment."

"That's... not a turian rifle," Garrus said, looking at a display piece on the shelf.

"We don't just sell turian weapons. We wholesale any weapon that meets our stringent requirements. Salarian, krogan, human... doesn't matter, as long as it's got the stopping power to put a shaltha on its ass."

"I've got a replacement I'd like to make with..." Tali said, holding up her weapon.

"Sorry, ma'am. We can't do replacements right now. We've got nothing to_ replace it with_."

"...oh," Tali said, her voice small.

"Come on. You can come up with something. You've got to have... Oooooh! Is that a new Mattock?" Shepard said, her tones becoming almost childishly excited as she spotted the rifle sitting on its shelf. She instantly skirted the counter and picked up the weapon, feeling how it sat in her hands. "I always said that somebody should have made a new one of these."

"Ma'am, please put that down. It's not representative of the final product," he said.

"Can I put in a pre-order?" Shepard asked.

The turian chuckled. "You don't 'preorder' guns. Would you really want to own a weapon, sight unseen and bullet unfired? With all the glitches and bugs that entails?"

"It's a Mattock. Yes, I do," Shepard said.

Garrus raised a brow. "What's a Mattock?"

"Human rifle," the clerk said. "I hear it's one of their earliest mass-accelerator rifles, codeveloped with the krogan. Heavy, slow-firing, but hits like a dreadnaught."

"You're selling it short," Shepard said. She sighted down its scope. "This is standard?"

"Scope and modules sold seperately."

"Damn," Shepard muttered, then put it back on its rack. "When I was between my 'N's, I went out drinking with some of the boys. One thing led to another, and I ended up waking up in Adeks' back garden. Color me intimidated, but instead of knocking my head like he should have, we spend the day shooting guns and making fun of the brass who annoyed us. He had one of the old Class 2 Mattocks, back when they didn't have self-cooling sinks. But they hit like Garrus' car, are precise to three centimeters at three hundred yards, and they feel _soooo_ good to shoot."

"As I hear, the heat's the biggest problem with this gun," the clerk said. "Overheats in a matter of seconds. That's why I don't do preorders. I don't want to have to deal with annoyed customers saying 'oh, I lost my leg because the gun you sold me overheats after four shots'. Let the buyer be _aware_, and let him suffer his own stupidity _when I'm not liable for it._"

"Well... do you have _anything_ worth buying? My gun... kinda has several thousand tonnes of rubble on it right now," Shepard said, giving a nod toward where she thought the Presidium Tower was.

"We've got Phaestons by the barrel-full," he said, pointing to a box which sat in a corner.

"Decent gun," Garrus offered, pointing at his own. "Don't know how comfortable it'd be for a human to fire it, though. Its one of those 'by turians, for turians' kind of guns."

"All I care about is how good it is at hitting what I shoot at," Shepard said. The clerk gave an equivocating gesture. "Good enough. How much?"

"Those are all trade-ins. I'll give you a seventy percent discount if it'll get it out of my store."

"Deal," Shepard said, and wrote the check out on her Omni. He handed her the case without a second glance, and she quickly slipped out of the store. The other two aliens followed a moment or so later, a bit of suspicion on their face and body language, respectively.

"What was that about?" Tali asked, before putting the useless front half of her bisected shotgun into a garbage bin. The other she held onto.

"I just want to get out of there before my check bounces," Shepard said.

"You wrote him a bad check?"

"Spectre isn't exactly a high-paying job," Shepard pointed out.

"You could have asked Liara," Tali pointed out.

"Or maybe she's too proud to cozy up to her suger-mama for a new gun."

"Alright. I'm going to shoot you, _right now_," Shepard said, reaching for the clasps of her case.

"Oh no! Rogue Spectre! Rogue Spectre!" Garrus keened. Tali looked at the two of them like they'd lost their minds.

Shepard rolled her eyes and shook her head. Her refastening the clasp she undid to prove her point was interrupted by her Omni beeping at her. She sighed, and considered ignoring it. But she still checked who it was from.

"...holy shit," Shepard muttered, and she opened the channel instantly. "Admiral Hackett, Shepard reporting in."

"_Him_, she reports for?" Tali asked.

"It's a military thing. You wouldn't understand," Garrus said with a shrug.

"Good to see that you're still with us. We've gotten some deeply disturbing news from Terra Nova. Meet me in the C-Sec headquarters for your briefing. Hackett, out."

Shepard blinked a few times. "Welp... so much for peace and quiet."

* * *

The hiss of the seal releasing sounded, audible even from two meters away from the old man in his old armor. He pulled his helmet off, and looked down over the humans who had been herded into the lowest part of their hub. They jostled each other like cattle. Well, not 'like' cattle. Humans _were_ cattle. Balak turned his four black eyes toward Charn, then down to the herd below.

"This is your one, and only warning," Balak said, his voice still strong for all he was half again Charn's age. Men as old as Balak shouldn't be carrying guns. Pushing paper, or branding slaves, maybe. But he was too old to be a soldier. "If anybody runs, they get shot. If anybody raises a hand against us, they get shot. If anybody tries to sabotage our ships, or our drones, they get shot. And it _won't_ be a kill-shot, I can guarantee that. _You'll wish it was_."

Balak turned to his social superior. "Alright. My men are already redirecting the torches. We'll have this asteroid shifted in a matter of hours."

"It's doing an insult to the force to call them 'your men'," Charn muttered, quietly enough that the humans below couldn't hear. He stepped away from the edge, and cast a hand to the Batahvium. "These are soldiers, dedicated to a cause greater than themselves. Yours always look at me like they want to shoot me and steal my boots. That's poor discipline, and..."

"Enough," Balak said. "The _Tolu_ have proven themselves under my command. Since you're not going to do anything but bitch and complain about them, I recommend shutting the hell up. This is _my_ operation. You're just a tourist."

Charn didn't speak back to the fossil. He just let him glare, then turn and head off to the slaves that he valued above free men. Heresy, blasphemy, or betrayal of ancient tradition, Charn couldn't decide which was the worst. No, he decided; the worst was that Balak wasn't wrong. Ondarias Charn had formally requested this assignment, because he knew that there was some way to prove that Balak was more incompetent than his record showed. It was bad enough as it was. Actions where everything was stacked in his favor had a weird habit of falling to pieces. But any time his back was to the wall, he and his slaves-turned-soldiers fought like demons, and came out the far side. Bloodied, always, but alive. He suspected bribery, corruption, buying off the other _Bata_ who had overseen his previous missions. He'd find which it was, in time.

"Watch him. Watch his men," Charn ordered the holy-warriors. "Watch the women, too. We don't know what their kind is capable of."

"They shouldn't have guns," Sondvi said sternly, his eyes flinty. A moment of silence, then a nod. "We heed the words of the _Bata_. Whatever treason lurks, we _shall_ find it."

Charn looked to Balak, as the old commander appeared for a moment, talking intensely and quietly to one of the slave-soldiers. There was something about Ka'hairal that was just a little bit off. There was a fire burning inside him, and Charn didn't like the shadows that it cast.

* * *

"Sir; Shepard reporting for duty," Shepard said, as she passed through the door into the office which Hackett seemingly took over completely. Hackett gave her a glance, and a nod, before rising from his seat and turning the monitor around. A few seconds later, the holo-emitter built into the wall pulsed and showed what was on the screen. The other seat, taken by Hackett's aide-de-camp, remained filled by the younger man intent on his own screen.

"Thirty eight minutes ago, we got a black-stream message from Terra Nova. Reports from on-site state that Asteroid X57 was overtaken by a force of batarian soldiers. That rock has two hundred people on it, and at the moment, it's sitting in a blind-spot in our fleet coverage. The batarians must have known about the Battle of the Citadel; if they didn't, then they're the luckiest bastards in the galaxy."

"Am I being deployed?" Shepard asked.

"The Normandy is one of very few ships which didn't take at least _some_ engine damage in the battle," Hackett said. "And it's the only stealth-ship in the fleet. If the batarians catch wind that somebody's trying to stop their raid, they'll probably take hostages, or kill them all, cut their losses, and vanish. You're going to need to go in there quiet."

"What about Major Rai Li? She's stationed on Terra Nova, and..." Shepard began. And then fell silent. Was she _really_ turning down a chance to shoot the fuck out of some batarians? _What the hell was going on today_? She cleared her throat, to get that discomfort out of her head.

"The Major is currently on assignment, outside of Alliance space. That's all you need to know," Hackett said. "From the Widow Relay, you can be at Terra Nova in three hours. Unless they're dropping like the next Skyllian Blitz, you'll be able to get 'em with their pants down."

"I'll leave immediately, sir," Shepard said, then paused. "Oh... there's one small problem. My armor..."

"This is a request to Agent Shepard, not an order for Commander Shepard," Hackett said. "We can't wait on requisition or replacement. You're going to have to sort out your TO&E on your own."

Shepard took a breath, and nodded. "Aye, sir."

"Commander Shepard?" the aide-de-camp said. Both she and Hackett turned to him, both surprised. "Somebody is contacting you directly, through military channels."

"...who?" Shepard asked.

"The ship's just come out of the Widow Relay. IFF is... _quarian_?" he frowned for a moment. "The ping is 'Admiral Rael'Zorah vas Rayya', and he's coming in. Admiral, should I inform the Citadel Traffic authority?"

"Do it," Hackett said. "You make strange friends, Commander."

"If I was friends with a quarian admiral, sir," 'admiral' Tali'Zorah excluded. Wait a second... "...you'd be the first to hear about it."

"Still. The timing of this can hardly be coincidence. And better to talk when we've got a galaxy's worth of guns pointed at him if he gets squirrely."

"Aye, sir," Shepard said, even if she wasn't exactly sure why everybody was going to point guns at quarians. It wasn't like they were a galactic powerhouse, after all.

"Patching him through, sir," the junior officer.

"This is Admiral Hackett, Systems Alliance Navy. State your business in Inner Council Space."

"_Admiral Hackett, this is Admiral Rael'Zorah of the Migrant Fleet. My business is personal_," the answer came back. It had, to no surprise of Shepard's, the same accent that Tali did.

"With all due respect, you're going to have to do better than that," Hackett said. "I don't know if you've noticed all of the dead geth ships, or the corpse of Sovereign which is still bouncing between the Wards, but we're not in a mood for rubberneckers or diplomatic incidents."

"_The geth are exactly the reason I am here_," Rael'Zorah said, his tone quite stern. Probably to pick up a few choice bits to study, Shepard pondered. "_My daughter's last transmission to the Flotilla was transmitted from the Citadel. I am here to retrieve her_."

Shepard's brow rose at that. She regretted it, though, because it hurt the muscles of her face. She rubbed it slightly, before turning her confusion toward Hackett. "Permission to speak?"

"Granted," Hackett said.

"Admiral, this is Commander Shepard, of the SSV Normandy. Tali is perfectly alright; you don't need to..."

"_You were her captain? So you were the one responsible for sending her into all the peril that she's faced over the last few months?_"

"She was in protective custody from an omnicidal madman. A madman who is now dead," Shepard pointed out.

"_I'm not interested in your politics, Commander. I am bringing my daughter home_."

"Admiral, I think Tali might have something to say about that," Shepard said. "Until she decides her pilgrimage is over, she's..."

"_Don't quote our traditions to me, human,_" Rael'Zorah's voice became quite heated. Not quite shouting, but sounding like it was well on its way there. "_I am taking my prerogative as the Captain of the Rayya, as the Admiral of the Ezha Branch, and as __her father_."

Shepard made a throat-slashing motion, and the junior officer muted the feed. "Sir, I don't..."

"We're going to hand her over," Hackett interrupted her. Shepard's brows rose again – painfully – before she remembered not to do that. "The last thing we need right now is a grudge match between the quarians and the Citadel. Even if their ships are a bunch of rusty buckets, they've got more of them than most of the Client Races put together."

"...Sir, I have to protest..."

"Your protest is noted, Shepard. But at the moment, peace is more important than even the sanctity of your crew. When the Admiral docks, Tali'Zorah is going with him. Am I being clear." as it wasn't a question, she didn't even consider saying 'no'. "Good. See your crewmate off. Admiral Rael'Zorah vas Rayya, please proceed to bay 224. We will have your daughter in a matter of minutes."

"Yes, sir," Shepard said, dismissed without so much as a gesture. She didn't like it, but saying no to Hackett was like flipping a black-hole inside out and making it shine again. Just wasn't happening. She raised a salute, one which ached, and stepped out of the office. Hackett made no attempt to follow her. She rounded the corner, made it about four steps, then slumped against the wall. Which hurt her shoulder. Gods damn it all, was there no part of her which didn't ache?

Then again, she _had_ stood in the center of an exploding Reaper.

With a sigh, a sad one at that, she thumbed her ear. "Tali? Meet me at the docks above C-Sec Headquarters. We've got to talk."

"What about?" Tali answered.

"Your father's here."

"Hah. Good one."

"I'm not joking," Shepard said. There was the sound of something hitting the floor, and cracking a little bit, on the other side of the line.

"Father is _here_? But why would he... He _never_ leaves th... I'm coming right now!"

The call ended abruptly, leaving Shepard in silence. She started walking once more. The hall lead toward the elevators which would lead up to the private dock which the Normandy had not reclaimed, and would soon play host to the quarian admiral. Shepard paused, standing before that elevator which lead up and to the docks.

"Is something wrong, Avatar?" Asha asked. Where she'd come from, Shepard didn't even know.

"Tali's leaving," Shepard said. Asha sighed, but nodded.

"We all knew that this day would eventually come. She has come quite far from the first time my eyes fell upon her. She has grown swiftly, and truly."

"I just don't... She's part of _my crew_," Shepard said. Asha nodded.

"What you feel, I feel for those that died on Eden Prime. It is a terrible feeling to be separated from those who have mattered and meant so much. But there is a time for all things," she said, tapping the ascent button. "A time for meetings, a time for knowings, and a time for partings. And we cannot be unmade by them. It is all a part of life."

"You know, you don't talk like a soldier's supposed to," Shepard said.

"I am also Si Wongi," Asha said, shrugging easily despite the mountain of armor she wore even now. "Martial philosophy is a long tradition amongst my people. Also, perpetual war against the Dakongese, but as I said, there is for all things a time of endings. A time of honor, and a time of disgrace. My family has had enough disgrace. All I can do is give it some honor."

Shepard shook her head. "It seems like everybody on that ship's got a more level head than I do."

"With Doctor T'Soni's sole exception," Asha said with a shrug. There was a bing, and the two women stepped onto the elevator.

"Yeah, she is a bit of an odd turtleduck," Shepard admitted. And smiled a little. But not for long. She had other things to consider. "As soon as we deliver Tali, we're heading for Terra Nova. There's batarians on one of their asteroid mines, and the Alliance needs them flattened."

"A task which you no doubt will apply yourself to with great glee," Asha said.

"I do have one question. Do you still have your old armor?" Shepard asked. Asha turned to her dark eyes to the Avatar.

"Yes... why?"

"I'm currently wearing all that's left of mine," Shepard said dryly. Asha blinked a few times, then nodded.

"My obsolete hardsuit remains in my locker. I warn you, it will not fit you comfortably; you and I do not share a common body."

"Noted. I just need something that'll stop bullets. It doesn't need to swaddle me and sing me to sleep at night."

Asha shrugged, and stepped forward with the ding of the elevator reaching its upper stage. Shepard followed, but hesitated when she beheld a sizable marine contingent present on the docks, their guns in hand, but wearing, one and all, dress uniform. Shepard gave a look to Asha, but she, too, seemed baffled.

"What is this?" Shepard asked. She could see, ahead of her, the shape of a vaguely fish-like ship slowly slipping through the debris and detritus, carefully picking its way forward until it loomed against the docking arm. The magnetic clamps tried to reach it, but fell short of its very narrow profile. It wasn't until the ship translated to the side a bit that the clamps locked on, and the ramp began to reach toward the airlock. Nobody answered her, even with all of that.

The lift rose again, as the seals locked into place on the quarian ship. This time, when it dinged and the doors opened, Tali and Garrus emerged from it. Garrus, too, gave a bit of a flinch at the corps of soldiers standing sternly on the edges of the deck. "Something I should know about, Shepard?" Garrus asked.

"You'll be the first to know when I find out," Shepard told him. Tali, though, kept her gaze locked on the ship itself. "Tali, you don't need to do this if you don't want to."

"I know, Shepard," she said. "...but I think I'm ready."

"Tali..."

"I'm bringing something to my people that they've never had before. Something that will make our lives so much better, so much _safer,_" she stressed. "And... I did it all, because of you. Thank you."

"You don't need to thank me," Shepard said. "I..."

"Would have done it because I reminded you of your sister?" Tali finished for her. Shepard didn't answer, but Tali took that for a yes. It was strange, how two weeks ago, she would have punched somebody out for bringing up Talitha Shepard. Now... it didn't hurt. Because it wasn't tragic anymore. Yes, she was still hurting, and would take a long time to heal, but Tali Shepard was going to be alright. "I'm ready."

The doors opened, and two quarians exited the ship. One, the shorter of the two by a few centimeters, wore a suit of red and white, with a sash of indigo. That would be the Admiral. The other wore a suit in bright reds, with armor plates grafted onto it, and had a rifle held casually and downward. "_I should have expected that this would be the greeting that our kind would face in Council Space_," Rael'Zorah said, his annoyance so clear that Shepard could practically see his scowl through his helmet. He turned to face his daughter. "_It's time to go._"

"Not quite," Pressly's voice caused Shepard's head to pivot. He was wearing his full dress uniform as well. That he wasn't aboard the Normandy was damned odd; that man was nothing if not a stickler for regulation.

The quarian beside Rael'Zorah took a half step forward. "_What is the meaning of this?_" Tali's father demanded.

"A matter of decorum," Pressly said. He pulled the whistle from his breast pocket and played the rising tone of a naval at-ready. The marines shifted their weapons into a... well, it looked like a parade formation. The elevator dinged a third time, and this time, Shepard was somewhat reluctant to glance back. Mostly because just about everybody was already here. When it opened, and showed Admiral Hackett, Shepard just took a few steps back, and stopped trying to predict anything at all.

"Tali'Zorah nar Rayya," Hackett said. Tali glanced between her father and Shepard's superior.

"...yes?" she asked. Pressly moved closer to her, and produced a lacquered wooden box from within his coat. Shepard finally got it. Surprising, but she got it.

"Stand and be recognized," Hackett said. "On behalf of the Human Systems Alliance, we bestow onto you the bronze star for bravery," he said, lifting the commendation from the box Pressly held, and letting it stick magnetically to Tali's suit, "in recognition of your valor for your actions on Feros. Your actions, beyond and above a call of duty for an enlisted soldier, saved the lives of dozens of your crewmates. For that, you have the Alliance's debt."

And Shepards, as well.

"...thank you?" Tali said.

"Stand and be recognized," Hackett repeated. "On behalf of the Human Systems Alliance, we bestow onto you the open hand," he pulled the small aluminum commendation, which was exactly what it sounded like, and pressed it into place beside the bronze star, "in recognition of your valor in the service of Operation Broken Scepter. To act even in the face of danger resulting in bodily harm is a courage that is never to be undersold. And that you continued in your service to the Systems Alliance and the Council as a whole after your injury is further proof of your worthiness of this commendation," Hackett said.

"This is too much," Tali said, quietly.

"Executive Officer Pressly, as you recommended miss Tali'Zorah for these commendations, do you have anything to declare?" Hackett asked.

Shepard turned to Pressly, her eyes widening a bit from the surprise of it. There were many things that one could say of Samnai Pressly, but a xenophile he certainly wasn't. In fact, Shepard was fairly certain that he'd _railed_ against having Garrus aboard while they were on route to Therum. Still, the bald and white haired man stood, back straight, and looked Tali right in the eye. As much as a human could to a quarian, at any rate.

"Only that Tali'Zorah nar Rayya serves as a shining example of what can be achieved through cooperation between species. Keelah sa'lai."

"..._se_'lai, but close enough," Tali said, her eyes down. "Thank you."

Rael'Zorah seemed to be much mollified by this, and his marine was now standing completely casually once again. But Shepard knew from the look of that man that he could explode into violence in an instant; there was a sense that she got from him that she got from other N7s; they were always ready, no matter what for or when. "_I understand that you feel that you need to produce something of grand worth for your Pilgrimage, Tali, but the Fleet will allow your return. I'll make sure of it_."

"Father, I _have_ something worth returning with," she said. "Worth a lot more than the information I sent to Adahn about the geth."

"...Adahn?" the marine beside Rael said; his accent was very different from Rael and Tali's.

"It might be a pseudonym. We don't _have_ a ship called the Defranz, after all," Tali said. Shepard stepped back as she unhooked the metal flasks riding the back of her armor. "But even knowing _why_ the geth served Sovereign... that pales before this!"

She twisted through the motions of waterbending, and the fluid danced at her call. It spun like a ribbon, turned through her ministrations. It snapped between ice and water and steam as she willed it. Even as the water danced, so did Tali. It was... beautiful. And in its way, it made Shepard proud.

She had come so far.

When Tali stopped, she pulled the water onto her hands, and let it glow softly there. "Everybody says that I learned faster than anybody since Master Katara – whoever that was. My gift to the Flotilla isn't a ship or some data on our enemies. It's something more. I bring waterbending to the Quarian Diaspora," she said, and she bowed her head, her hands forward, glowing. "Do you accept?"

Rael stood, silent, still, and probably in awe. The marine nodded slowly, obviously impressed in his body language, but remaining silent. But slowly, Rael'Zorah's head bowed as Tali's did. "_...of course I do, my child. And the Fleet will bear this forward, till we stand on our soil again. Keelah se'lai._"

"_Keelah se'lai_," Tali echoed. She slipped the water back into its containers, and turned to Shepard once more. "Shepard... Thank you. For everything that you've done."

"I couldn't not," Shepard told her. There was a sound from the quarian's throat, then Shepard found herself being hugged. Her body tensed, not from pain but from surprise and a bit of alarm. Tali broke off quickly though.

"Don't be a stranger, Asha," Tali said, giving the Si Wongi a hug next. Asha took it with much greater aplomb than Shepard had.

"I would not dream of it," Asha answered her with a smile. She turned to Garrus next.

"Careful there, Tali. All this firebending I've got might up and melt you," he said dryly.

"Oh? You actually thought I was going to hug you, too?" Tali asked, before giving Garrus a slug in the arm, albeit a gentle one. "But for what it's worth. Thank you. Thank you for teaching me how to kill zombies."

"It's an important life-lesson that everybody has to learn at some point. And it got you a shiny award for your troubles," Garrus pointed out. He then turned to Shepard. "Wait a second. Why don't _I_ get a shiny award for having to get clawed over by a bunch of naked green asari clones?"

"..._green asari clones_?" Rael asked, his head slightly tipped to one side.

"Naked?" the marine asked.

"Can it, Garrus," Shepard said. She turned to Hackett, who was talking quietly to Pressly to one side. She moved slightly closer to them. "Pressly, why didn't you tell me about this?"

"It hadn't been approved until ten minutes ago by the Parliament," Hackett answered. He gave her a nod toward the Normandy. "You've got a flight to catch, Commander. Good hunting."

"Aye, sir," Shepard said, giving him a salute as he departed into the elevator and dropped out of sight. Tali and Rael'Zorah were already walking up the gangplank when Shepard turned back, slipping back into their ship, bound for their Migrant Fleet once more. The marine stayed much closer by, his eyes on the environment around them.

"So," the marine said. "Naked green asari clones, huh?"

"My hand to god," Garrus said. "They were crawling all over me."

"I see," the marine said. After a long pause, he turned back toward the ship, muttering something under his breath. Something that sounded like "...I'll be in my bunk."

When the marine vanished into the airlock behind the father and daughter, the ship closed up almost immediately. Rael'Zorah wasn't kidding when he said that his only business here was his daughter. They were already preparing to take off, and to vanish into the black.

"And then there were four," Garrus said.

"Don't remind me," Shepard said.

* * *

The door chimed when Liara tapped it. She stood, waiting on the answer. Waiting on a lot of answers, really. As much as she enjoyed sorting through a veritable overload of information, to separate the nuggets of gold from the tonnes of gravel surrounding it, there was too much being left unsaid. And with Tali's departure – which she had to learn of second-hand as nobody bothered to inform her before hand – the asari had a fair notion that Shepard might not be in the most stable of states of mind.

One did not say goodbye to one's surrogate little sister lightly, even if one's _actual_ little sister was waiting in the metaphorical wings.

The doors popped open, and showed Shepard still wearing her dress uniform, if with her sleeves rolled up and showing the fading bruises that would, if Doctor Chakwas was any useful guide, vanish within a day given even perfunctory waterbending aid. Shepard looked slightly surprised to see Liara, but that surprise wasn't shock or dismissal. Just a slight widening of the eyes. "Liara?" she asked.

"Shepard... May I come in?"

"Well, since you're... already walking into my room, yes?" Shepard said, tracking Liara as she crossed the threshold. Liara looked between the chair, which faced the table – it bare of anything but the console screen, a bottle of alcohol, and the old picture of her family that once was – and the bed. She opted for the edge of the bed. That chair wasn't the most comfortable. "Something's on your mind, isn't it?"

"I am concerned," Liara said.

"About Tali," Shepard finished. Liara nodded. "I... knew she was going to go at some point. She's in it for her people. I'm not going to stand in the way of that."

"But you still must be unhappy that she's leaving," Liara said. Shepard sighed, and dropped into the chair. Her eyes were on the floor, and she nodded slowly.

"Yeah. But that's the way it goes. And I can't just sit here and mope," she said, spinning the cap off of her bottle. As she held it to tip back, Liara reached forward and took it from Shepard's grasp.

"There is more on your mind than that," Liara said, facing down Shepard's infinitely annoyed look with a frown of frankly comedic gravitas. "You have been avoiding the crew and you've been avoiding me."

Shepard blinked a few times, then pulled the bottle from Liara's grasp, both quickly and effortlessly, despite Liara not wanting Shepard drinking right now. She slugged back a shot of it, then set it onto the table beside her. "...can we not talk about this?" Shepard asked.

"Why not?" Liara asked. "Why is it that you cannot talk about what has happened between us?"

"It's just that..." Shepard shook her head.

"Are you ashamed of what you did?" Liara asked, the hurt obviously reaching into her tone. Shepard looked up at her.

"No... no," she shook her head again. "That was something... I don't know how to describe it. And now I have to face the fact that I'm bisexual – and Hannah's never going to let me hear the end of that if she ever figures it out, the bigoted bitch – but no. I'm not ashamed."

"If not shame, then what is it that had you so avoidant and skittish?" Liara demanded, her fists on her hips.

"I can't explain it," Shepard said, shaking her head a third time. It seemed to be something of a trend for her today.

"Try."

Shepard sighed, and the weariness settled onto her like a cloak of lead.

"If I... if I think about it. Talk about it. That'll make it real. It'll be _a thing_. If I _don't_ think about it, then as far as the universe is concerned, no, I don't care about Liara T'Soni. And that's the only kindness that I can give her," Shepard said.

"You are not making any sense," Liara said.

"I didn't claim that it did," Shepard said. Liara frowned for a moment, and gave a moment's consideration to what Shepard was saying, albeit sideways from a direction that most would have. When she figured it out, her own eyes widened a bit.

"Are you afraid of admitting that you care about me because you believe that the universe will actively sabotage anything that makes you happy?" Liara asked, incredulously. Shepard gave a mirthless laugh.

"It sounds kinda crazy when you put it like that, but..."

"Shepard, the universe is not 'out to get you'," Liara said.

"That's not been my experience," Shepard said, her words very soft. "My parents; my sister; my squad; Samoet; Kaiden... Anything that I care about gets taken away from me. And I can't deal with that anymore."

"Your sister came back," Liara pointed out, gently. Shepard looked up at her. "That must be a flaw in your hypothesis. As it is, it destroys the statistical rigor of your assertion and makes the probability of your hypothesis 'everything I care about will be taken away from me' fall under the category of occurrence by chance, and as that is the logical underpinning of your recent actions, I cannot help but feel that if you were to critically observe your..."

"Liara," Shepard said, looking up under her brows with a wan expression. Liara trailed off.

"...what?" she asked.

"You're doing that thing again," Shepard said.

"That thing where I ramble at great length about something that you do not understand, or the thing where I annoy you and you demand that I stop and take a breath?"

"Yes."

Liara scowled, and crossed her arms before her chest. Shepard leaned back, with a smaller, but less mirthless chuckle.

"I didn't claim that it made sense. But I can't help but feel that if I ever try to care about something, I'm going to lose it."

"You are not going to 'lose' me," Liara said. "After all, you promised me your brain."

"And here I thought you were just after me for my body," Shepard said flatly. Then, she rolled her eyes. "Well, parts of it anyway."

"The brain is part of the body."

"That's the joke, Liara."

"...oh," Liara said. She pondered a few moments more. "Are you going to continue being avoidant?"

"At this point, what would be the purpose? You're already aware of the fractured reasoning, and I don't doubt if I locked that door, you'd just tear it down to force me to be sociable," Shepard noted.

"I would not tear it down. I would get Garrus to break the locks," Liara said, reasonably.

Shepard chuckled a bit, then sighed, spun the cap back onto her bottle of liquor and got to her feet. "Well," she said. "We're going to have to drop onto an asteroid in about fifty minutes. You'd better armor up."

"I shall. But are you sure you are in the best of shape to be fighting again so soon?" Liara asked.

"Please. I can take a break when I'm dead," Shepard said, striding past the asari and out the door.

"You will die if you don't take a break!" Liara shouted after her. But Shepard waved the reflection off and headed toward the lower deck. A part of Liara was glad that her worst fears were eliminated. But a different part of her was deeply concerned that what she feared would be a lingering draught of homophobia turned out to be a self-inflicted numbness of emotion in the guise of self-protection.

Still, there was nothing but time to help Shepard 'come out of her shell'.

She never really understood that saying, though; typically, when things were removed from their shells, it was because something else was eating them.

* * *

The two of them, human and quarian, stared at the screen before them. They both willed themselves to stillness and silence – as though that mattered in a vacuum environment, and they willed the screen to show something other than the void which had overtaken it since their message was burst out. Zek was sure that within minutes, the batarians were going to run them down and shoot them dead. Minutes turned to hours. And the tension didn't drain away in the slightest.

"_Creator Zek'Eluus; your heartrates are maintaining an unhealthy rhythm. We recommend that you calm down._"

"Yeah, you try to calm down when you've got somebody out there trying to kill you."

"_...it is not a difficult process_," Geth said. If Zek could have turned a bewildered look to the artificial intelligence housed within his encounter suit, he would have.

"Talking to yourself again?" Simon asked, at a whisper. He gave a bit of a shrug. "We've all got our ways."

"I was just..." Zek began, having turned on his external feed. Then he trailed off. "...yeah. Bad habit I guess."

Simon didn't favor him with more than a momentary glance, but then started to lean back a bit. "...Zek, do you feel that?"

"Feel what?" Zek asked.

"That shift. The gravity's off-kilter," Simon said. How had the human even noticed that? After all, they didn't have a Zarner's Gland to pick up the rampant electromagnetic fields that the numerous mass-effect field generators on this rock were generating. Maybe it was just something that came with a long history of cracking space-rocks.

"Geth?" Zek asked inwardly.

"_Processing_," Geth said. "_Warning. The projected path of this body is declining. Perigee declining toward atmosphere at a rate of five kilometers per minute per minute. Estimated point of no-return; four hours. Estimated time of terrestrial impact, four hours, thirty minutes._"

"...no. They couldn't be that crazy," Zek said.

"Who couldn't?" Simon asked. Damn it, had he kept his feed on?

"The batarians are deorbiting the asteroid!" Zek said. He bounded back toward the door, and opened it, seeing how Terra Nova was on the wrong side of the 'sky', and the fusion candles were burning hard. Zek frowned at that, though. That would just blow them aside of the planet, wouldn't it?

"...we're on a direct retrograde burn," Simon said, staring at the same sight Zek was. "That'll drop us right onto the central colony... not that it'll matter."

"What do we do?" Zek asked.

Simon rubbed at his helmet, then looked into the distance, at the fusion candles that he could see from this side of the asteroid. "Find some way to get help to land on you so they don't fall into a nest of batarians. I'll... Find some way to shut down those candles."

"That's insane! They'll kill you!" Zek said, shaking the man's shoulders.

"If I don't, they'll kill four million people and make that planet uninhabitable for the next million years!" Simon stressed. He pulled Zek's hands away. "I have to do this. These are my people, and that's my planet. Just try to stay safe. And if you can send somebody to pull me out of the fire..." the wan smile was obvious even to somebody as blind to body language as Zek, despite the helmet "...make sure they do it quickly."

"I don't know if you're the bravest alien I've ever met, or the craziest," Zek said, retreating toward his singular, relatively safe haven.

"Yup," Simon answered, and he began to bound down the hill, through the valleys and disappeared behind the harsh terrain.

* * *

Damn this armor was uncomfortable.

Every time she took a step, it rubbed at Shepard's thighs and pushed at the bruises that Shepard hadn't specifically had healed away. After all, it was one thing to have blue hands around there, but another to have brown ones. One sexual hang-up at a time, Shepard. Asha's armor was tight at the hips, groin, and waist, and left her feeling the gap where her own bosom didn't fill the space allotted for Asha's. Asha, in her own and tailored mountain of armor, didn't seem to have anything like the same problem.

"You look uncomfortable," Liara said, grasping the obvious.

"Just chafing a little. It'll go away," Shepard said. And if it didn't, she'd have to bounce another check to get an Onyx VII or something cheap like that kitted for her.

"Can we not all talk about chafing right now?" Garrus asked. "Of all possible topics, that's the least comfortable for the_ only male presence _left in the squad."

"Does something chafe you as well?" Asha asked.

"Not the point," Garrus said. He slipped his helmet into place, and it locked at the back of his neck. "So what's the plan? We are once again without a Mako... which is _once again_ the fault of your insane driving... and we're having to make a stealth landing on a barely natural satellite. It feels like we're repeating ourselves at this point."

"Hah hah," Shepard said, pulling on Asha's helmet. Ugh, it smelled like some sort of fruity shampoo in here. She'd have rather it stunk of sweat to be honest. "Garrus is nevertheless right; we're doing another Storm King drop. We've got the coordinates of the hub and its outlying bases. The biggest issues are; where are the batarian's ships? Where are the batarians? And finally, where aren't the batarians looking?"

"I suppose you have an answer to that last one?" Garrus asked.

"Right here," Liara said, lighting up her Omni and pointing out a spot on the asteroid's surface. "The signal was streamed from here in a burst. If the batarian slavers had wanted to set a trap, they would have sent out something more promising than what escaped. It stands to reason that this was an act of somebody not captured in defiance of their goals, and it is also..."

"What Liara's going to get around to saying in about ten minutes is the spot that sent the signal is the one where we're most likely to find whoever sent it, and that's a step in the right direction," Shepard said. Liara scowled at her, but blushed a bit blue. Shepard looked up. "Joker? ETA?"

"_We're quiet and low. Unless they're looking out exactly the right window at exactly the right time, we're golden_," Joker's voice came to them. "_Drop site in thirty seconds. You'd better skedaddle pretty quick, though; I don't like the idea of hanging my ass out in space with a bunch of pirates in the area. It really matters what __kind__ of pirates they are, after all_."

"Can it, Joker," Shepard said with a roll of her eyes.

"_Canning it, Commander_."

"I don't get it," Garrus said, turning toward Shepard.

"Then ask him later," Shepard said. There was a hiss in the cargo bay as the air was sucked out of it, followed by a bang that could only be 'heard' through the feet, as the bay doors started to slide open.

"Just like old times," Garrus offered.

"Not really," Shepard whispered. Too many familiar faces were missing for it to be like old times. Still, she bounded out of the bay, and slammed her hands onto the triggers for her descent pack. The flares burned to life, slowing her drop over the course of about a second before cutting out. She then drifted very slowly toward the surface. Not surprising, considering this rock had about 0.0001G working on her. And her pack still had plenty of fuel.

The others landed somewhat awkwardly around her, with Garrus' sole exception. He drifted down like a feather. "Enjoying it?" Shepard asked.

"Are you kidding? I _love_ these things! I should tell you about my HAVOC training," he said.

"Some other time," Shepard said. She gave a glance to Liara. "I don't see where that signal came from."

"It is at the top of that... hill? I am unfamiliar with the landscape terminologies of sub-dwarf planet bodies."

"A hill is a fine enough thing to call it," Asha said, taking off her pack and tossing it aside. She then bounded up, her leap taking her on a path that seemed to stretch for a hundred meters, drifting softly. Shepard and the others, who decided not to eschew their descent packs, had much more focused flight. Nevertheless, Asha reached the summit first. Maybe she had a point?

The peak of that summit was a prefab, and not a very big one. It probably had one room besides its airlock, and had an antenna array that was obviously bodged together from a radiator and part of a rover which lay gutted nearby. Shepard gave a look to the others. "Somebody wanted really hard to get a message out. That much is certain."

"Do you think that they might be hiding inside?" Liara asked, trying to peek through the closed slats of the 'windows'.

"Easy enough to find out," Shepard said, casually pounding the airlock key. "Asha, Garrus; keep a watch for four-eyes."

"As you wish, Avatar," Asha said, turning with Garrus and letting their gazes sweep across the body that now all stood upon. More or less. As soon as Shepard stepped into the airlock, her weight settled into her boots and her groin started to chafe again. Liara, in her fancy blue armor, probably didn't have to deal with that.

"Is anybody in there?" Liara asked as the airlock began to hiss and its locks disengage. "We don't intend to hurt..."

Liara was cut off when a blast of force shot through the crack of the opening door and punted her into the back wall of the prefab so hard that the entire thing rocked back a degree or twelve, before settling back onto its footing. And it left Liara in a Liara-shaped dent in the back wall.

"Don't come any closer!" a voice shouted from inside, and Shepard slowly lowered her turian rifle.

"Show yourself," Shepard said. "We're not batarians. In fact, we're here to kill them."

"...really?" the voice said. Then, a helmet leaned out from behind a chair. The helmet of a quarian encounter suit. "Oh, thank the Ancestors... Never thought I'd say that about humans but there you go."

"Avatar? Are you alright?" Asha's voice came over the comms.

"Just fine. The survivor just got a bit jumpy and... wait a minute," Shepard trailed off, twigging to something very odd.

"Wow. That was very surprising," Liara said, her tones distant as she dropped out of her dent to a lean against the wall. "I did not know quarians _had_ biotics."

"Did..." Shepard said, looking between where Liara was now somewhat stumblingly resuming her stance – unharmed but no doubt thrown for a loop – and the quarian within. "...did you just hurl her biotically into a wall?"

"...would you believe me if I said no?" he asked, cringing a little. Shepard just looked at the young quarian man. "...I get it. It doesn't happen very often."

"I can imagine," Garrus said dryly from his spot outside the space-hut. "You're probably regarded in the Flotilla in poem and song."

"Garrus, not the time," Shepard said. She turned to the quarian. "Name?"

"Z...Zek," he said. "You said you..."

"You were here when the batarians landed. Where are they holed up?" Shepard asked him. He got up, looking to and fro, before leaning toward a console. If Shepard had been more observant right then, then she would have noticed his encounter suit, and how unusual it was. But, like so many other things, it was something that she would much later look back at and kick herself for being so oblivious to.

"The central hub, mostly, but they have teams at all of the fusion candles," Zek said. "There was another engineer, Simon, who went to try to disable them before it's too late, but I haven't heard from him in... too long, now."

"Too late for what?" Shepard asked.

"You did not notice?" Liara asked, still rotating the shock out of her shoulders. "This asteroid is being deorbited."

"...that's bad," Shepard said simply.

"Unbelievably," Zek agreed. He pointed to a map of X57, to the area of one of the torches. "Simon said that the batarians were camping out under the torches. Which doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't they just lock them and run?"

"Because they didn't know if somebody like Simon was still out there," Shepard said. "Can you disable those torches remotely?"

"...You're kidding right?" Zek asked.

"Right, dumb question," Shepard said. She glanced back at her squad, including those who were outside the hut. "What I wouldn't give to have Tali for just one more day..."

"The galaxy spins as it wills," Asha said over the line. "We will find a way."

"I hope... Zek, if we got you into the control room, could you shut the torches off?"

"Why would I..." he trailed off, and stared into the distance for a moment. "...actually... I just might," he gave a shrug. "I haven't been working here long."

"We'll clear out the torches," Shepard said. "You shut 'em down when we're done."

"...why oh why did I have to work for humans?" Zek muttered.

"Because we pay the best," Shepard said. "Anything else we need to know?"

"Nothing but..." another pause. Come to think of it, this Zek had more than a few odd things about him. Tali was positively expressive in her suit, her body language making up for her lack of a readily visible face. Zek on the other hand was so reserved that he barely gestured at all. That, and he was twitchy.

Which could just be part of standing on an asteroid that was being smashed into a planet, in a small-scale reproduction of what happened to Earth's nearest planetary neighbor.

"Yeah, one thing," Zek contradicted himself. He pointed out the hub that sat in a depression between crags. "The batarians have put out a lot of antivehicular mines outside the base. As far as I was able to figure out, they've been tweaked to pop when anything heavier than twenty kilos steps nearby."

"That should not be a problem," Liara said.

"...why not?" Zek asked.

"I'm the Avatar. Buried explosives are a joke," Shepard said. She stepped back into the airlock. "Ladies, we're babysitting."

"Oh, joy," Garrus said flatly. "You do remember that you've _still got_ one guy on your squad, don't you?"

"I imagine you'd look very demure in a dress," Shepard answered back with equal deadpan. "This is Zek... Zek what?"

"Who are you talking to?" Zek asked, as he stepped into the airlock, and the air was pulled out. Well, a portion of it, because there was still a white fwoof that blew out of the door when it opened. Probably because Liara crushed something important. He gave a bit of a flinch when Garrus leaned closer. Gods, if there was a more nervous quarian, Shepard hadn't met 'im. He stared for a long moment, then cleared his throat. "Right. Uhhh... Zek'Eluus nar Alarai..."

"– and he's going to keep Terra Nova from going boom," Shepard summarized.

"No pressure," Garrus offered.

Zek looked like he wanted to drop through the ground.

* * *

The low growling of the varren rasped on Charn's nerves. He'd had a full half of his Batahvium posted on top of Balak, but that meant that he was short handed for the torches. All part of the plan, though; Charn knew that Balak, whatever his treachery, was not a stupid man; he wouldn't do anything if he knew that he was being observed by his societal masters. But he might be somewhat more willing to let his guard down if only dealing with soldiers. After all, for all his faults, Balak was a man of battle.

"The mines are in place," Jugdash informed him. "For all the good they'll do if the humans have an earthbender amongst them."

"They're not there to kill people. They're there to send a message," Charn reminded his holy warrior. Four brows drew down, and he looked over the rag-tag of Balak's so-called soldiers. There were certainly a lot of them. "Batahvium, I wish your honest opinion. What is the nature of these slaves in battle?"

"Honestly?" Jugdash said, he rubbed his chin. "They fight well. Furiously, even. But their discipline is lax, and if not lax, then unforgivably unorthodox. Why do you ask, _Bata_ Charn?"

"My reasons are _my_ reasons," Charn said. His hand kept straying to his side-arm, though. He didn't like the way that those rusty-armored and patch-tape-wrapped-rifled 'fighters' watched him. Always with innocuous glances. Out of the corners of their eyes. Letting their gaze sweep across him; but he knew that those black eyes noted him every single instance. "Their code is 'Entropy Machine'."

Jugdash's eyes widened. "You grant me their kill-switch? That is the property of the Bata," he whispered urgently.

"In this, your responsibilities are great and your resources should meet that need," Charn said. He scowled. "We should have just killed those humans. Not allowed Balak to play slaver."

"He does right by the Pillars of Strength in subjugating the weak," Jugdash said. Charn wanted to snap at the holy-warrior for contradicting him, but if there was one area where the Batahvium outranked even he, it was in terms of the comprehension of the Pillars. "But his other failures outweigh that handily."

"Good to know that you have your eyes on the right Pillar," Charn said. "If they _think_ of betraying you," he pointed vaguely at the slaves, "activate their control lattice. Let them suffer for their sins."

"So speaks the Bata," Jugdash said with a nod. Charn, though, had a lot of work to do to make sure that the message he intended to send, did not fall upon deaf ears. And the surest way to ensure that, was to make that message so loud that it broke a world.

* * *

The torch was bigger than Shepard expected. Of course, having no real background in the thrust and logistics required to shift an asteroid into high planetary orbit, it could have been about any size and surprised Shepard a little. It breathed a tongue of heat into the vacuum of space, long and regular, painting against the blue and green of Terra Nova. The quiet was alarming, though. Not just because they were in vacuum, obviously, but that there was no radio chatter, and nothing left out for people to trip over.

"Does this seem to easy to you?"

"The ambush is almost definitely inside the building," Asha answered.

"Why do we assume an ambush?" Liara asked.

"Because that's what I'd do if I thought there was a chance of people coming to wreck my evil plan," Shepard said.

"You have evil plans?" Liara asked.

"Yup. They involve black leather corsets and bullwhips," Shepard said flatly. Garrus chuckled, at least.

"...should I be listening to this?" Zek asked.

"No, you should be hiding," Shepard said. "What are those?"

"Those are..." Zek opened his Omni, and fiddled with it. He leaned in a bit. "Turrets."

"Why would a mining asteroid have turrets?" Liara asked.

"They're batarian... and _inactive_," Zek continued, still surprised sounding.

"...somebody didn't pay their electrical bill," Shepard said. "Stop staring a gift Ostrich Horse in the beak and start hauling ass, people!"

Between the low gravity and that most of the cadre had some means of thrusting with their packs, they bounded the two hundred meters or so very quickly. Asha and Zek did it in two bounds, although Asha's were much more arduous than the quarian's were. As soon as he reached the side of the building, he ducked into a cranny of the prefab. He held up his Omni again, and showed a floorplan. "Here," he indicated, "is where the controls are. Try not to shoot them."

"Noted," Shepard said. "Alright, ladies..." Garrus cleared his throat, "...and turian, this is the main event. Focus fire and knock 'em flat, one at a time. Batarians take a _fuck-tonne_ of murdering to kill."

"You know, you have the soul of a poet," Garrus pointed out.

"I have the heart of a lover and the mind of a scientist, too. I keep them in a box under my pillow," Shepard said with greater sarcasm even than he. The turian was a bad influence on her, certainly.

"Was... that a joke?" Zek asked.

"Radio silence from the civilians," Shepard ordered. Then, she nodded for Garrus to crack the doors, and upon their opening, breached inside, guns forward as their weight returned and they settled into their boots. Prefabs, prefabs. Did every building in the damned galaxy have to look exactly alike? Somebody in a construction yard orbiting Yanjing De An obviously decided 'Yes! For the love of the gods yes!', and probably enjoyed himself sexually at the thought. If Shepard ever met him, she was going to smack him until he designed something with variety.

"Breach in three," Shepard whispered at the inner door. She counted them down on her fingers, as Liara prepared her own 'breaching charge' in the form of a biotic shockwave. Zero saw the doors fly open... and huge teeth race toward Shepard's face. She didn't even have time to swear before she had to elbow the varren in the jaw and hurl it past her. It landed in an inelegant hump, but left Shepard out of cover and in direct sight of easily a dozen batarians. The higher ranking ones – obvious for their comparatively garish yellow armor – shouted something that didn't translate, and the others in their ratty and weathered gear began to fire bolts of rebar at them. Rebar fired at MA rifle speeds, which was a little bit frightening; they glowed red when they stopped penetrating the metal and concrete behind the squad. Shepard had to roll away from that barrage, so she didn't get a rod through her.

The varren was pushing itself to its feet, but Garrus already had his rifle pointed at it, spraying it with bullets. Ocher blood burst out from it as it started to race toward him. Finally, as it bounded up again, he let out a surprised yelp and cast out a fist which seared with fire. The varren, passing into that incineration, let out a yelp of agony and fear, before running – ablaze – back into the room which now sent bolts of metal by the barrel-full at the squad.

"I am not sure who to target!" Liara said, ducking back as a bolt rebounded just above her head before slamming into the back wall. That wall was slowly starting to look like some sort of torture-chamber implement.

"The ones in the best armor! Leadership first, and the grunts break and panic!" Garrus shouted. He leaned around the far edge of the door and fired a burst from his own Phaeston, before hurling himself back, his kinetic barriers sparking. "Damn, I want my rifle back."

"Next time we go to Ilos, I'll make a point of picking it up!" Shepard shouted to him. Asha sent a blast of fire which the ragged-armored batarians almost flowed around, but gave Shepard enough suppression that she could hurl herself through that threshold and take the nearer side of the barricade that they'd been setting up to stop intruders from getting in. Pity, now it was _protecting_ said intruders from the defenders. Liara pressed forward, her layers of biotic force sheltering her – barely – from the bolts of the troopers and more conventional fire of the yellow-armored ones.

"Got 'im Garrus?" Shepard shouted. Garrus peeked 'round the corner, and spotted the one that Shepard was indicating; the closest of the three. He nodded at her. "Liara? Pull him out!"

She nodded, then took a deep breath, before the blue glow began to spread out from her. She popped to her feet, and cast forward her hand. A diffuse light bathed the crate, and the batarian behind it, lifting the former away from the latter and suspending both in the air. Shepard twisted her arm and hurled it forward with a blast of lightning which impacted as Asha's concentrated barrage of rifle-fire cracked his shields wide open. "NOW!"

Garrus spun out of his cover, and knelt, staring along the gun, seeming to take forever. Shepard was half way considering telling him to stop choking and shoot him when he began to send out a series of staccato bursts, each no more than three rounds, and every one blasting into the batarian's armored eyes. The fourth salvo shattered his face-plate, and the fifth streaked through the collapsing armor, causing a rich red spray to fly backward and coat the support pillar and floor beyond him. Even a batarian couldn't survive without his brain.

Liara let him drop, and Garrus ducked back behind the door with a yelp as a length of red-hot metal streaked past his head. "I don't think I can do that again! Not with this thing!" Garrus shouted.

"Grenades?" Shepard asked.

"High explosive, frangible, or thermite?" Asha asked.

"YES!" Garrus answered.

"Liara, give me a barrier! I need to claim some ground," Shepard said. Liara nodded, remaining mum as Shepard rolled aside and sent a burst at the raggedy soldier who was retreating across her line of fire. The stream cut into its barriers and sent them crashing down, but when the unimpeded bullets streaked at him, he hurled himself out of their way with... _really_ remarkable grace, even managing to send a parting shot which landed directly between Shepard's legs, the red-hot metal almost brushing against her groin. Her barriers were screaming, though, so she had to move.

Liara was moving with her, half a meter away at most, her hands forward and the air visibly distorting from the gravity that she held in thrall. The yellow-armored leadership kept sending fire at them, before one of them shouted something that Shepard heard plenty of times on Torfan. "ROCKET!" Shepard shouted.

"I have..." Liara began, but was cut off when the troop-leader sent the missile streaking toward them. Liara didn't continue, she grit her teeth and braced her feet. The blast shattered the barrier, but the explosion was wholly deflected into the ground and nearby crates. Shepard grabbed Liara and dragged her forward with her as she hurled herself into the red spray of what used to be a batarian commander's brain. She managed to land with Liara on top of her. She looked very, very stunned. "Why is the room spinning, Aimei?" she asked, tones distant.

"Stay down for a second," Shepard said. She looked back to Asha. "HE only, on the strap! One trigger!"

Asha didn't nod, she just vanished from sight. Shepard flinched a bit when a bolt of metal rebounded off of the chassis of the Millipede ATV they were bunkered behind. It was a lot better cover than the barricade had been... but it wasn't nearly so secure. Her eyes kept flitting from forward to their right. They could get flanked at any moment, and only an idiot wouldn't try.

She leaned out, and spotted a group of the rough troopers surrounding their leader. Unlike their commander, their helmets were all little better than plastic bags, so she could see the expressions on their faces. They seemed... distracted. Not afraid, though. Shepard had seen batarian fear. She could remember how their eyes would widen, their mouths would gape, when she brought the full and unmitigated fury of the Avatar upon them. This was different. And she couldn't say how. She pulled her own grenade, though. They were way too clustered to not take the opportunity.

She primed and hurled it, easy enough, but even as it flew, the raggety batarians were bounding away. Some cartwheeled, their eyes still staring down sights. Others somersaulted, sliding like greased flying-pigs along the roofs of shipping containers. But for all, not one of the troopers was left when the grenade _landed_, let alone when it went off.

"Avatar!" Asha shouted. Shepard looked back, and caught the bandoleer which had been hurled to her, sporting three high explosive charges on a common fuse. She got a dark smirk on her face.

"Liara, stay down for a second," Shepard ordered, sliding that rifle onto her back. Liara didn't voice any objections. The Avatar hurled herself over the top of the ATV, and hurling her hands back to an explosion of flame, four rockets of firebending that blasted her forward with remarkable speed and inertia. The yellow armored one tried to track her with fire, but when it became obvious that he was her target, he threw his rifle aside and smashed forward with his fist, and a bolt of bright azure flame seared toward her.

She twisted her flight, direction the flame which had imparted that thrust into a shield which wrapped 'round her even as she flew in an arc toward him, every bit as bright and blue as the batarian's own. Honestly, she'd never known that the four-eyes had mastered the blue flame, but then again, they'd certainly had enough _time_ to. As she reached the floor, she twisted harder, and lashed the batarian's attack aside, causing it to melt through one of the support pillars entirely, and partially unmake the back end of the Millipede.

She powered forward as he tried to sweep that attack back onto her, but she was already moving, on what little airbending she had, to turn her run into a slide, one that slid with the power of the batarian trying to roast her, bringing her closer as she approached the back corner of the building where he'd made his stand. She got closer. Close enough.

She was cut off by a knee to her chest, one projected into her with a rocket of flame. It didn't crack the hardplate, but it certainly drove the breath from Shepard's lungs. His follow up, a brief but highly kinetic blast of azure flame sent her flying backward, rolling to a stop with her back to a shelving unit. The commander swept his arm wide, and with it, came lightning, gathering at his fingertips. Shepard, though, raised her hand. And showed what was in it.

The commander stopped, his four eyes widening. Then, he looked down, to the belt that Shepard had strapped to his left leg in the instant before the right had sent her to a halt. And with a grin of schadenfreude, Shepard let her thumb stab down into the button of the detonator.

The blast was far enough away that it didn't even peel her paint, but she was glad he'd knocked her back. Any closer and that might have stung a little. Shepard turned, grabbed and pointed her rifle to the other side of the room. The raggedy soldiers were backing away, the last of the triumvirate of mellow-yellow-armored batarians in their midst, but three of the former had grenades in hand. Asha and Garrus rushed into Shepard's view, their backs to the racks of partially broken-down machinery and mining equipment, picking their targets for Shepard's order.

The grunts all primed their grenades, and cocked their arms back.

And all three spontaneously dropped their grenades backward.

The other rough batarians scattered, bolting away from the live grenades, which were all pooled at the last commander's feet. The last commander looked down, almost shocked, before it started to shout something. Something which, sadly for him, was cut off by his body being ripped in half the nasty way.

"Don't let 'em leave!" Shepard shouted. Her order was moot, though; even as she started to paint fire, she had to do it along walls and... ceilings? Asha and Garrus both tried to track the fleeing batarians, who now egressed with the same single-mindedness that they fought. But the manner in which they took flight – _literally_ – loosened Shepard's finger from her trigger. Garrus and Asha didn't falter, but they couldn't so much as peg the batarians who bounded four meters at a stride, ran along walls, or bounced on almost invisible cushions between machines and low-hanging roof, before landing on the far side of the barricade that Shepard had claimed about a minute before. Shepard found her strength again, and rounded that corner, her rifle ahead of her. If somebody didn't suppress them, they'd put bolts into Liara. Or _kidnap_ her. But they weren't firing. Their damned harpoon-guns were on their backs, out of sight, as the last one slipped out of sight out the door. Out of reach.

"...what just happened?" Garrus asked.

"Uuuaaaoo," Liara's voice came from the front side of the Millipede. She staggered into sight, shaking her head with a head to her tendrils. "...I believe I am somewhat concussed, because I could have sworn I saw a flying batarian."

"What is the meaning of this?" Asha asked, She pointed at the remains of the third commander. "That was _no_ accident; if it was, then I am a Water Tribesman!"

"...the _fuck_?" Shepard summarized all of their opinions the most succinctly, vehemently, and profanely. They were still trying to figure out how an entire warehouse of batarians managed to float away from them – a wait of about thirty seconds – when Zek leaned his head past the doorway.

"...um, I just saw a bunch of fleeing aliens... Am I supposed to shut down the torch, now?" he asked, pointing up and past them. Shepard just shrugged. Today just got weird.

* * *

Balak looked down at the pad. The wonders of technology, in that a person could compress thousands of years of wisdom, hundreds upon hundreds of broad pages of scripture, into a single device that he could lose under a seat-cushion. Ordinarily, he was all for the advancements of processing and power, but it wasn't the device which interested him; rather, the contents of it. Most notably because this pad belonged to one Ondarias Charn.

He flipped back to the missive sent to him by the High Command. It was everything which he expected. Watch Balak for betrayal, heresy, treason, et cetera. A heavy subtext of 'if there isn't any, make something up'. That wasn't what annoyed Balak. No, that wasn't accurate. Balak wasn't annoyed.

He was enraged.

He turned the page back to the largest single text file on the pad. The Pillars of Strength, issued in digital form by the Batarian Hegemony. He read it, and with every word, his lips pulled into a deeper and deeper sneer. His blood ran hotter. He flipped to pages ahead. To messages from long past. He read what this pad had to say, the meaning of the Pillars. The Trials of the Forebearers. The Great Deeds.

His lips peeled back from his teeth.

With a roar, he slammed the pad against the edge of the table in the room he'd commandeered, denting the pad. The second slam shattered it entirely. But that wasn't good enough. Not for what they'd done to pervert his scripture. He slammed the broken pad into that edge, until it broke in quarter. Then again, until it was but a stub. Then, with a great stomp he ground it into the floor. He glare down at the circuits and plastic, themselves benign partners to a crime they had no say in. His blood slowly cooled, but not entirely. He'd heard. He'd even read before. But not like this.

"What has happened to us?" Balak asked. Nobody would answer, though. It had been too long since his people asked the right questions. Wondered why certain decisions were made. And it had cost them dearly. With a final purging breath that surged out of his four nostrils, he turned and left his room. Charn would no doubt discover his missing pad. That was something that Balak would have to deal with when the time came.

"Commander?" Verisai of Hersk asked him. A good woman, past her child-bearing years and thus useless in most capacities as a _Tolu_. "The southeast torch has shut off. Chatter indicates that the Batahvium are dead."

"And the rest?" Balak asked, letting her keep pace with him.

"Everybody who mattered got away without a scratch," she reported.

"So the humans finally send somebody worth my attention," Balak said. He turned two of his eyes toward her, a minor glance. "Prepare the final trap. I am not leaving _anything_ to chance."

She gave a nod, and a salute that bowed forward. No military in the Hegemony did it thus, but there were certain habits that slaves simply dared not let go of. "As you order, Commander. Death will come swiftly and absolutely."

"It's the least we can do," Balak said, his tone dripping in sarcasm, leaning down over the hub. He took a breath of the air. "This will be over soon enough."

* * *

"Singularity! Stop the fast ones!" Shepard screamed. She'd asked for variety, and so she'd gotten it. The second torch was set up at the foot of an automated production facility. One which the batarians hadn't bothered to shut off, even though no raw material was coming through. That made for a moving conveyor, and a bevy of robot arms reaching and welding nothing, doing nothing so much as ruining every easy shot or lightning bolt that Shepard had to bear.

"It is remarkably difficult, given the environment!" Liara shouted back, firing a few blind shots through the mouth of the rhythmically closing metal stamper. In the time it took for her arm to pull back, several bolts of red hot metal slammed into the conveyor, and, fittingly, were pressed into the partial shapes of excavation tool parts.

"Liara is correct; there is no easy lane of shot," Asha muttered, rotating her shoulder and the dent in its armor from where one of those bolts blasted through her shields and only deflected off of the plating itself.

"I've been saying that since we got in here. Factories aren't fun to fight through!" Garrus pointed out, and leaned out from his own cover; the fallen body of a heavily armored batarian slumped against a shelf full of power-tools.

"How many yellow ones?" Shepard asked.

"Two have been killed so far," Liara said, peering through the stamper as it opened. "I believe another two remain."

"You know, I think that the Hegemony's got a real discipline problem," Shepard said.

"I know. How dare these soldiers _not_ fight to the death!" Garrus agreed dryly, before pulling back from a burst of small arms fire that crackled the shields of the dead four-eye. Better his than the turian's.

Shepard gave a sharp whistle into the maelstrom, and the squad heeded it, shifting with her as she moved to the edge of the conveyor itself, using its dense machinery and heavy rollers to shield her from the hail of fire. She was getting closer, but she had to take a gamble, one that would run fifty-fifty. One strike of the coin, a commander would fall fast. The other, she was just giving him ammunition.

Flip a coin.

Shepard bounded out of cover, twisting as she did. Metalbending in her fingertips, racing out from her toes, and bearing up. One of the rollers, farthest away from her, bucked out of its track and surged up through the air, borne toward the commander who fired down at them from the raised foreman's office with a cadre of his troopers surrounding him. He didn't even drop his rifle. With a spin, he let the steel roller graze along his fingertips, before twisting it around and bearing his full weight into a snap of the wrist which metalbent the roller directly back at Shepard. As she didn't have the virtue of a strong defensive position, she did drop her rifle, and reached out with both hands. The impact of the roller being caught by her metalbending command still sent shockwaves of pain up her shoulders, but hurled her backward and away from the higher one. She got her feet under her right before crashing into the wall, and heaved every bit as hard as the upper batarian had, but this time, she directed her assault toward the lower.

Flip a coin.

The lower of the two remaining commanders tossed his rifle to the ground and crooked his fingers forward, obviously intent on catching the same projectile which had been bandied twice so far. Both of them were earthbenders? How was that statistically fair? There was one thing that he hadn't accounted for, though. Yes, it was metalbending, and yes, the one above had caught it. But he returned it to sender with all of her strength along with his own. And she redirected it with all of _that_ strength, plus just a little bit extra from her.

Sometimes the coin lands on its edge.

There was a terrible and meaty thunk as the bolt of metal utterly overwhelmed the batarian's capacity to slow it down, to stop it, or to get out of its way. The roller smashed through his barriers, followed by his hands, snapping them like cardboard tubes, before plunging just high of center of the genocidal bastard's armor. There was a momentary shriek of metal deforming metal, as the roller plunged three quarters of its one-meter length into his chest. The commander dropped to his knees, and black blood began to ooze from his nose and mouth, before he collapsed entirely.

The rough soldiers below fired a barrage which caused Shepard to duck low again, but this time, one of them shouted something upward. Something which her translators managed to catch.

"_One remains!_"

Shepard continued her roll, with the commander above trying to break through shields which were already perilously close to collapsing entirely and allowing untold death to come upon her – and at some point, Shepard was going to really have to have a long talk with Liara about why _she was starting to think_ like the mildly nutty asari – before she could get out of their lines of fire. She rolled to a stop behind a forklift unit's counterweight, her hearing now drowned out by the clash of metal against metal.

"Liara?" Garrus asked, having moved away from the dead batarian and now on the other side of the stamper from her.

"I have them!" she shouted, then cast out a hand with a bolt of swirling distortion, which anchored itself near the edge of the upper catwalks, and pulled two of the rougher troops away from their group. Garrus leaned out and began to send forth streams of fire again, this time not trying to show off and simply going for center-of-mass. The first stream cut through one's shields, and the second caused a spray of blackish blood to erupt. But Garrus only got to two before every other soldier save the commander turned their rifles on him, and barraged him with a storm of red-hot metal. He only saved his head by ducking, and even then, one of them clipped him and knocked him flat on his ass.

One of the other rough troopers hurled himself off of the catwalks, directly into his two brothers floating in Liara's Singularity, but to tackle them and bear them _through_ it. Shepard was stunned enough watching it that she didn't offer fire, because she knew from her training that there was only one element one could use to escape a singularity. Airbending. Nothing. Else. Would. Do it. The airbender batarian seemed to ooze out of the grasp of the tiny gravity well, but did so with his two comrades in hand, before dropping out of Shepard's line of sight.

"Press up!" Shepard ordered. "I want that commander scoped and dropped!"

Even as she ordered it, and sent a stream of fire which deflected blue off of the commander's barriers, the rough troops were repositioning, never halting in their stream of girders toward Shepard's squad. How had they even managed to carry that much metal? Their backpacks must each weigh a metric tonne! They fired as they moved toward the fallen, passing behind the commander who continued to send forth fire, before twisting a hand up, and pulling up a steel roller of his own with his metalbending. Shepard could just see the sneer on his face. She could also see the stunned surprise that overtook it when a steaming bolt emerged through his faceplate, in the instant it took for the metal to burn away the blood.

Friendly fire?

Not very likely.

The troopers continued to move, even as their commander fell, murdered by a weapon in their hands. Shepard pushed up from her spot behind that forklift, only to be thrown back as a rod slammed into the center of her chest. Oh, _damn_ that hurt. Asha's obsolete armor was still up to the task of preventing one of those hits, but the sensors chirped into her HUD that her kinetic barriers had shut down to prevent overload, and would reactivate in twenty seconds. An eternity on a battlefield. Even as she felt like she needed to vomit, Shepard rolled behind some piece of industrial machinery she couldn't immediately name. She pressed the dent that the bolt had caused. Just like the frag a second ago wasn't an accident, this wasn't blind luck.

"Shepard?" Liara shouted, a note of panic in her voice.

"I'm alright! Don't let them get out!" Shepard shouted at a croak. If nothing else, she wanted answers for what the hell was going on here.

"Slamming the barn door after the bulls run out," Garrus said, as he backed toward them, eyes over rifle sights. A shake of the head. "They move like damned _asari_! I've never heard of a batarian who fights like that!"

"I'm getting the feeling those guys aren't your typical batarian troops," Shepard said with a grunt of pain as Asha helped her to her feet. "Any contacts?"

"Negative, Avatar," Asha said. "Only the dead and the dying."

"Good," Shepard said. She nevertheless scowled. "Why do I get the feeling that I'm not the only person who wants batarians dead today?"

Garrus shrugged and finally let his rifle drop. "I'll be the first to admit that everything about this has me confused. But if they're willing to take out batarian commanders for us, then why should we try to stop them?"

Shepard grit her teeth, but didn't say anything. Garrus was right, after all. But a part of her couldn't let it go. An aspect kindled in herself, reawakened from Hong or instilled by Liara, demanded answers to the question, and demanded them in a fashion that would not allow her peace. She raised her finger to the ear of her helm, which was already starting to get scuffed and scraped from the exercise of tear-assing around X57. "Zek? We've cleared this den out. Shut down this torch."

"I'm right behind you Com... LOOK OUT!" the voice came from Shepard's back. She turned, and saw the seemingly dead commander that Garrus had taken cover behind hurling himself at the turian's back, a red-glowing blade in his hand. It didn't matter what you were wearing; a heat-knife like that would cut through it in an instant. Part of why Tali's omniblades were so useful: All of the kill of a heat knife, none of the clunky non-portability. Garrus himself barely started to flinch when a blue glow started to wash over the bleeding batarian, and he was yanked from his feet, drifting straight backward toward a comparatively diminutive quarian who luminesced with the effort of it. Shepard raised her rifle and started firing, cutting into his already compromised barriers, but it was Liara who struck the killing blow by hurling a Warp into him, and causing the detonation to send the alien hurtling toward – then _through_ – Zek, flattening the quarian. The batarian was utterly still upon landing, though, unlike Zek who started twitching immediately.

"...ow," he muttered. Liara gave a whole-body flinch, then began to run toward him. Asha moved past, to the batarian on the floor.

"I am so sorry! I had not known that he would be catapulted in exactly that direction can I do anything to ease the pain I know how to make a splint if the medigel isn't enough oh by the Goddess I am so sorry..."

"Liara, calm down," Shepard said, dropping to a squat before him. "Are you still with us, Zek?"

"...that _really_ hurt," Zek complained, rubbing his chest. Garrus, now standing behind the small group, offered a chuckle.

"_Everybody_ thinks quarians are made of glass." Garrus said. He offered a hand, one that Zek took. "Come on. Let's show these Levos how a real badass does it."

"I think I broke a rib," Zek muttered.

"...with less complaining, I mean," Garrus said. Shepard gave a glance to Asha, who had turned the batarian over. She muttered something then pulled his eyes closed, before putting a single bullet into his forehead. Shepard blinked at that, because it was _technically_ a war-crime, and Asha was not one for breaking regulation in the slightest. But Shepard didn't ask, not until three years later. Asha wasn't the question currently drilling into Shepard's skull. Hers had to do with airbending batarians. Garrus bore the young quarian toward the chamber on the far side of the bulkhead, where the controls to the torch were situated, and Shepard followed a little behind.

"You saw that too, didn't you?" Shepard asked when Asha and Liara joined her place in stride.

"I couldn't not," Asha gave a nod. "I had not know that batarians had mastered the element of air. I had not considered their culture capable of it."

"What does that mean?" Liara asked.

Asha motioned to Shepard, but Shepard shook her head. "You're the one who thinks about killing things prettily. I'm just in it for the booze, glory, and ass."

"You are acting quite peculiar," Asha asked. "Are you sure you are ready for such strenuous duties?"

Shepard frowned for a moment. "Just tell her what she wants to know," Shepard said testily with a dismissive wave. That was apparently the behavior that Asha was expecting, because she became far less tense when it appeared. They had to take the long way around the machinery, because for all they were not being shot at, it was still running, and there were too many moving bits to risk running across it at any significant point.

"The element one bends is a product of her culture," Asha said, still watching the room, but managing to multitask. "Each element, defines a series of virtues which a culture bending it exemplifies... usually. Water is an element of unity, of family and cooperation. No great surprise, I think, that there are no krogan or asari waterbenders," Shepard gave a confused glance back at that. Asari couldn't waterbend? That didn't seem right. But then she shrugged, remembering Kaiden's tidbit about how the asari were the most balkanized and disparate of the Citadel Races. "Fire is an element of ambition, of discipline and wrath. Earth, an element of willpower, of resolve and endurance, and of tradition. Air, though, represents _one_ thing in _all_ its forms."

"Which is?" Liara asked.

"Freedom," Asha said. They rounded the last corner and now headed straight toward the torch's control panel. Garrus was already letting Zek do his work.

"Which is why we're a bit confuse why any batarian would have it," Shepard pointed out. "Slavery and all."

Liara's brow knitted for a moment. Then, she perked up. "The soldiers we have been fighting? Those that have escaped without a single fatality? They must have been current or former slaves!" she declared with a finger raised.

"...that doesn't make much sense," Shepard said.

"Who but a slave would so highly value freedom?" Liara prompted.

Shepard thought about that. "...well I'll be damned."

It made sense. Well, it made 'Liara sense', but that was sense enough.

"It would certainly explain why they have so little love for their commanders," Asha gave a nod.

"...aaaaaaand we're golden," Zek declared, striking his hands together. He pointed past them all. "We have to hurry. Simon is–"

The quarian was cut off by a channel opening into his Omni, raising up an amber panel which read 'Audio Only'. "Zek? Did you find help? I have to assume that's you shutting down the other candles."

"Simon? Yes! We shut down the candles! What about you?" Zek asked.

"I managed to get one of them, but..." the human on the other side of the line trailed off. Shepard could hear the banging sounds that went over the feed. And when they stopped, the insistent hiss. "Don't let them turn the torches back on. I've locked out mine and linked it to a brain-wave code. It'll never fire again unless they..."

There was a crash, and a hiss of static over the feed. Then, angry bass shouting which took a long moment to resolve through the translators. "You! Get away from that panel or die!"

"Whoever you are, don't let them get away with this!"

"What did I tell you?" that voice shouted again, before the sound of a meaty hit. Shepard flinched a bit at that. The batarian voice – Shepard had to assume – sounded much closer, then. "Who is this? Who do you have shutting off the other candles?"

"My grandchildren are safe. I am content."

"Simon! Simon don't..." Zek shouted.

"Simon, your name is?" the batarian asked. "Whoever it is listening to this, if you don't reactivate that torch, your friend is going to die. Slowly."

"You... _BOSH'TET_!" Zek roared.

"He knows what is at stake," Simon said, his voice ragged. "And so do I."

"You hold your friend's life in your hand. Do as I say, or _his_ blood is on _your_ hands," the batarian ordered. Shepard had heard enough. She grabbed Zek's gauntlet.

"I've heard that excuse enough times from people far better than you. The only fuckwad who's going to get blood on him today is you!" Shepard snarled.

"A female? You'd serve best with a collar on your throat, begging for scraps at the doors of Charn Manor."

"Charn? That's your name?" Shepard asked. "Well listen closely, Charn. I'm going to find you. I'm then going to _fuck_ you in ways that batarians didn't think possible, most of which involve power tools and _massive_ blood-loss. I'm _coming for you_, Charn. **You won't be able to hide from me**."

The voice of the legion faded, followed by silence. The silence was punctuated by a gunshot, and the sound of a body hitting the floor.

"Come and get me, human," Charn offered snidely, before a second gunshot ended the transmission. Zek stood stock still, possibly in shock. Garrus gaped at the Omni.

"...I honestly didn't know that there were batarians that stupid," he said. "In a way, I'm impressed. The way that a _really_ bad traffic accident is impressive, at any rate."

"Where will he be going?"

"The Hub," Zek said distantly. "Simon is..."

"They're going to pay. I promise you that," Shepard said. "He's going to eat his words. As well as most of his own rectum."

Liara gave Asha a concerned look at the utter wrath on Shepard's face as she turned and stalked toward the doors. She paused only to slam a blast of lightning into the conveyor belt, locking all of the machinery in place, so that she could just hop over it's machinery. The look Asha returned to the asari was one of equal concern. Different reasons, but the same result; nobody liked looking at the Avatar when she was angry.

* * *

Joker frowned as he saw a message being directed at him, interrupting his anxious Extranet wanderings. Fighting against a Reaper and an armada of geth, that was nerve wracking. But having to sit back when other people did all the leg-work – literally in this case – could be both torturous and the definition of boredom. Sometimes simultaneously.

"This is the SSV Normandy, who is contacting us on this channel?"

"_Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. Seeking permission to dock_," the salarian voice said, words clipped and fast.

"Um, why?"

"_Is it the usual duty of communications officers to ask why their superiors are to give orders, or is that a trait unique to you?_" the salarian asked curtly.

"Hey!" Joker shouted over his shoulder. "Pressly! We've got somebody knocking at our door!"

"_I have a comm-line open, flight lieutenant Moro_," Pressly noted.

"Right. There's a Spectre looking for an open airlock. Yay or nay?"

"_I was given to assume that this was the ship of Agent Aimei Shepard. Is this accurate?_" the salarian asked.

"Yes, but not at the moment," Pressly answered. "You have permission to dock, but I recommend you do so quickly. We might be called back into action at any moment."

"_I am already at your side_," the salarian pointed out, as a bulbous looking ship pulled up beside the Normandy, and extended its docking ramp. Joker frowned a little harder at that. Obviously this guy thought he had something on Shepard if he could just drop into low Terra Novan orbit unannounced and walk in. Though, that _was_ kinda how Shepard operated. The airlocks hissed and banged and did their various airlock-y duties, before the inner one opened. Joker spun his seat toward the newcomer, who stood with rigid back in the threshold. Pressly was striding to greet him.

"You are the communications officer?" the salarian asked.

"No. I am navigator Pressly, Shepard's XO."

"Jondum Bau," with a slight nod. "Shepard is not present? When is she due back?"

"I'm not at liberty to say."

The salarian glanced the length of the ship, before giving a nod. "Very well. While she will value this information, it is hardly urgent. I can wait."

* * *

It really wasn't a good idea to piss Shepard off.

While Shepard didn't soar ahead of the others, that was only because there was no air for her to bend, to give her a back-wind to bear her in a stunning streak across the limited terrain. The descent packs did have enough thrust, though, to land Shepard right in the middle of their mine-field as they were jetting over it toward the Hub. A smash of earthbending straight down when she landed sent the entire field into a wide and unmitigated detonation. The blast of it, if it didn't kill the yellow-armored batarians bounding over it, definitely hurled them into the blackness of space. It would prove quite a bit more merciful than Shepard would, if that was the case.

"Don't run from me. You'll just die tired!" Shepard shouted, as she made another thrusted jump over a hill, landing unsteadily for her velocity, grinding to a halt in the dust. The minefield had been only the most recent of Shepard's attempts to get the one batarian in the red armor. She'd been less than successful at that, though she counted partial points for electrocuting one of his lackies, and winnowing him down to two from the initial five who kept sending volleys of fire back at her. Not right now, though. Line of sight was broken, and that meant line of fire as well.

"Why are you shouting? He can't hear you," Zek said, still in her ear. She gave a glance back and spotted the rest of her squad mid-bound behind her. Asha was the only one for whom bounding was literal, though; the rest of them were using the descent packs, or whatever mining rig the quarian was using which functioned in roughly the same manner.

The feeling of sand flicking against Shepard's calves turned her attention to the turian who was effortlessly dropping himself beside her. Asha ended up skidding to a stop several meters away. Liara landed in a pile. A very, very light pile. One that she nevertheless popped up from quickly.

"Alright, Zek. I know this isn't going to be easy for you, but I need a run-down of where they're going to keep the prisoners, and what they've got for bottle-necks and bolt-holes," Shepard turned to him.

"The schematics are right here. As for bolt holes... Well, the women's bathroom is pretty defensible..."

Everybody looked at him oddly at that.

"...don't ask..." he said with a groan.

"Zek, find a place to lay low. As much as you want to help, we–" Shepard began.

"Absolutely. _Not_ getting shot sounds like a great plan," Zek said with a nod. He looked toward the Hub again, though. "But... good luck. Make them pay for Simon."

"You're damned right I will," Shepard said, clapping him on the shoulder. She then turned away from the quarian, and started to bound toward the doors, only to almost fall on her face when she suddenly encountered a mass-effect field which pulled her to the ground. One Liara-pile later, the rest were striding with her toward the doors. "Alright. Whatever's going on inside, be prepared for the worst. Liara, you and I are taking the front. You drop Singularities like they're going out of style."

"Why would they? It is a very effective technique," Liara said. Shepard sighed and dropped her head. "...that was an idiom, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was. Even I know that," Garrus said. "I'll pop any snipers, if Asha can keep a nice little zone of denial for me to work with."

"That sounds like the beginning of a beautiful plan," Shepard said. She came to a halt by the doors, then tapped on them with her knuckle. Mostly so she could send a pulse of metalbending through them. "...yup, boobytrapped. Seriously, you black-blooded fucks, don't you have any respect for earthbenders _at all_?"

"Well, if we didn't have one..." Garrus began, trailing off when Shepard took a step to the left, and slammed her fist into the concrete, before pulling out a shaped-charge which would have sent a detonation straight into the airlock. She yanked the detonator off of it and tossed it into the dust on the other side of a rover. "Right. Knocking the door."

Liara took Shepard's side as they pushed through the doors. Shepard's eyes didn't stop moving, taking in corners and nooks, trying to see where one of them would try to get the drop on her squad. But besides the drones – which the squad managed to focus down without even cracking Liara's biotic barrier, they were making very, very swift progress.

"Asha, watch our six. We're going in too fast," she noted.

"As you wish, Avatar," she obeyed.

"I think this is just paranoid. There's nothing here but office supplies," Garrus said. "Those tables couldn't stop a bullet if the galaxy depended on it."

"Not the point," Shepard said. The administrative section of the building was actually the one closest to the doors, which made Shepard wonder if they'd come in through the proper airlock. Then again, she had about a millimeter's knowledge on asteroid cracking so she didn't bother to assume. Shepard kept sending pulses through her feet, trying to 'see' around corners, past soft-cover. It wasn't paranoia, after all, if somebody was trying to kill you.

"Shepard," Asha hissed. Shepard turned just in time to see the Si Wongi woman duck under a swipe of a heat-knife that would have probably split her helmet in half, and shoulder the yellow-armored batarian into a wall for his trouble. He recovered too fast, though, and spun that blade in his hand, before slamming it into Asha's back even as they were face to face. That back arched and she let out a howl of pain, smoke rising as the thick armor didn't quite contain the damage.

Garrus got the first barrage off, albeit one which was somewhat sloppy because the two of them were practically on top of each other. It was possible that half of Garrus' shots actually pinged off of Asha's armor, rather than the batarian's. Liara cast out a hand, her skin glowing a much brighter blue as a biotic Kick managed to slip past the human and hurled the two of them down the hall, albeit he much farther. Asha landed on her chest, one hand scrabbling for the knife which was still embedded in her plating. Garrus pulled it out as he advanced, hurling it aside. Even under the relatively gentle toss he gave it, it embedded into the concrete which started spalling away around it.

The batarian landed on his feet, which dug into the ground and arrested him. Sure, that left him open for the combined fire of both Garrus and Shepard, but he weathered it without so much as a change in expression. Liara tried to hurl a distortion of space into him, but a slam of his hand caused a block of the hallway to level the asari and hurl her into an office. Even as his barriers finally went down, and the bullets started chipping into his physical armor, he advanced on them. Garrus backed off. Shepard didn't. More fool, her.

She only took a step away from the looming threat when he was a pace away from her, and by then, even her point-blank shooting that pocked his helmet wasn't enough to stop him before he lashed forward, grabbing her rifle and stripping it out of her grasp with a hard yank. He then drove a brutal front-kick straight into her gut. Oh, damn that hurt. Not as bad as Saren, but still. She was trying to get her balance back when he rushed forward again, in the lull of Garrus' fire as his rifle overheated. He drove a knee into her gut, doubling her over, before slamming her own rifle against her helmet, driving her down to a knee. She pushed herself up immediately, but only to rise into a descending fist. It smashed into her face-plate, but didn't send her back. Not this time. This time, she was rooted. And she would rise.

Her resolve, her body obeying her on a level that she hadn't expected, was cut short when a bath of flame shot over Shepard's shoulder and inundated the batarian. The flames ended, leaving the batarian now more black than yellow, and staggering slightly. Garrus thrust forward with another punch, a shout of angry effort, and a blast of fire that smashed into the batarian commander and knocked him back a step even as it cooked him. The last was a sweep which ended with both turian fists slamming forward a few centimeters from the batarian's chest, and the flame that shot out ignited much of the paper in the room beyond it, but the effect it had more locally was far more devastating. While the batarian's armor was obviously built to ablate gunshots, it wasn't built to withstand being made into a pressure cooker.

The batarian, finally lifted off his footing entirely by the force of Garrus' flames, was sent crashing to the back of the room. He was utterly still, smoking, where he landed. Garrus flinched a bit at the destruction he caused, though. "Oooh. Do you think they're going to expect me to pay for all that?"

"You saved a planet's life. I'm sure they'll give you a freebie," Shepard said. She turned to Asha, who was only now rising, her posture making it clear she was in a great deal of pain. "Asha, are you still with us?"

"I have a hand," the soldier noted, putting her sidearm into it. "As long as I have that, I am at your side."

"Should she be fighting right now? I'm all for heroic defiance of injury – welcome back, Liara. You missed the fun part – but there are limits to that sort of thing," Garrus noted, picking up his rifle now that it was cooled down.

"Then you have not known humans nearly well enough," Asha noted. She took a breath, then started to stride toward the center of the Hub. Shepard gave a shrug to the turian.

"Proud warrior race. Centuries of martial tradition. Sound familiar?"

"Vaguely," Garrus said with a smirk of his own. And since Shepard didn't feel like letting the most badly hurt of those present lead the pack, she pulled the dust-covered Liara with her until she had overtaken the injured Si Wongi.

"You've really got to stop getting yourself thrown through walls," Shepard noted.

"I shall make a note of it," Liara agreed, striking the crumbled concrete from her shoulders.

Shepard glanced to the rest of her squad, then forward to the hall which lead forward. "Alright. Through that door is the Atrium. They've probably got a bottle-neck set up there, and have firing positions from the high-ground. Be ready for anything!"

"We have fought monsters from beyond the stars. These slavers and fools are _nothing_," Asha said with a very grim sort of laugh.

"That's the spirit. Kind of," Shepard noted. She and Liara, as previously intended, lead the path forward, through that long and claustrophobic hall that lead into the main and wide-open area, that stretched upward like a cube resting on its tip. Every level above where they stood was wider, to a point, when they started drawing back inward again. Water features already abounded, dribbling lethargically around the walkways and shuttered areas which were probably going to be shops in some yet-uncommissioned shopping center which would eventually be.

Shepard cleared the door, moving forward and keeping her gun forward. After a step, she came to a halt, though. She slowly looked over her shoulder. A dozen of the batarians in yellow armor were standing two ledges above her, staring down, their rifles casually held. The walkways to either side and below them were lined with other batarians, the slave-soldiers as Liara said. But two stood out. One wore bright red armor. Charn. The other unique was beside him looked more weathered, both in his armor and in his body. Everything bright in Charn was dull in he. Everything pristine, chipped and pocked and scarred. Charn stood with sneering contempt, glaring down with his four eyes in almost the exact same way that Sajuuk once had. The other, though, just stood, his hands clasped behind his back, looking at them.

"Open fire," Charn ordered.

"Belay that. For a moment," the other said. "What is your name, human?"

"Fuck you, you terrorist shit," Shepard said.

"Humor an old man," the other asked, his tones very dry.

"I'm Avatar Shepard. Child of Mindoir. Butcher of Torfan. And boot poised to bury itself up your ass."

"I wouldn't do that," Charn said, a smirk on his face. "One word from me, and all of the humans die. You wouldn't want that, would you?"

The other turned a look which... seemed like annoyance... to the other, before taking a step forward. "I am Ka'hairal Balak. And this is my trap."

"I'll..." Shepard began, pointing her rifle at him. Balak pulled his pistol, but he didn't point it at Shepard. Instead, he raised it directly to the helmet of the yellow-armored commander standing to he and Charn's right. A crisp shot saw the commander's head flinch aside, bright red coating out and rebounding off an invisible field that surrounded the slave-soldiers. Charn flinched, and turned on Balak, his rifle coming to hand.

"I _knew_ you were a traitor you withered old..." Charn shouted. There was a single shot from his rifle, but Balak moved under it, smashing it up and driving his fist straight into the center of Charn's throat. The other batarian staggered back, dropping to his knees with his hands clenched at his neck. His rifle was still in Balak's hand, 'till he casually flipped it so its grip landed in his palm.

"The batarians in the religious armor are Batahvium. Holy warriors sworn to uphold the Pillars of Strength," Balak said, almost conversationally as he circled around Charn, before pulling the helmet off of him. As one, every of the 'Batahvium' on the upper levels slumped down to the ground, released by the slave-soldiers who had garrotted them. "They are the eyes, the ears, and the fist, of the Bata Caste, sworn to live, to fight, to kill and to die at the hands of their betters. Betters like... Charn," he pressed that rifle to the back of Charn's head.

"Entropy... Machine... Entropy Machine...!" Charn wheezed.

The rifle let out another shot. Charn collapsed forward in a lifeless heap. Balak then tossed the rifle over the rail, dropping it into the fountain to Shepard's left. He leaned against the glass railing and looked down at them.

"What's going on, Shepard?" Garrus asked.

"We are terrorists, intent on committing genocide against the human race," Balak said calmly. "And we surrender."

Shepard stared at him for a second.

"...could you say that again? I couldn't quite hear it over all the 'are you fucking kidding me' that's going around."

"Are you going to accept the unconditional surrender of these soldiers?" Balak asked. The clattering of harpoon guns being thrown forward into a band that reached the whole length of the room that was occupied by the slave-soldiers had Shepard's head turning.

"You must want something," Shepard said.

"Yes, but because of _humanity_, I can't have it," Balak said, his lips pulled into a scowl. "And that they're my only option doesn't simply gall, it _infuriates_."

"Don't cry to me and call us the aggressors. You burned my home to the ground. You stole **and enslaved my sister...**" Shepard had to rein herself in after that, because she was aware of the white in her vision, the thunder in her voice. "And you used your own children as suicide bombers against us. You're not the victims, batarian."

"The Council chose you. We were with them for _eight hundred years_, and the first time somebody, even a snot-nosed race like yours thought that they would take what was ours, the Council betrayed us and cast us into the black!" Balak screamed down at her. But as he didn't go for a weapon, that only prompted a cautious redirection of the firearms toward him, rather than a more hostile response. At least, that was Shepard's rationalization. She was still trying to figure out this whole 'we surrender' thing. "In a just galaxy, you would be part of the Hegemony, not us begging for the aid of the Alliance."

"Begging?" Garrus asked, clearly not getting it. Shepard didn't blame him.

Balak stewed for a long moment, before his eyes closed. Pair by pair, they opened once more, and he turned a glance to one of the slave-soldiers near him. Shepard had seen a look like that before, from a creature with the same number of eyes. Ovar looked like that, every time he spoke of that species that Sajuuk had left to die. One of these days, Shepard was going to have to figure out who they were.

Turians, most likely.

"I am trying to give my people a better life," he said quietly, his wrath gone cold. He turned slowly to her. "They are the _Tolu_. The lowest of classes. Any in the Hegemony may drag one naked into the streets and kick them to death, if they so desired. If by surrendering to you, on charges of genocidal terrorism, leaves them in a two by two meter cell with concrete to sleep on, and has them begging for rotten bread to eat and your piss to drink each day... they'll _still_ have a kinder life."

Shepard looked at the others, who were watching the humans, the turian, and the asari below them. They had the stony resolve of people who were willing to die for their cause. And to be honest, Balak had the same look about him. "Why?" Shepard asked. "If they're so low, why do you care about them?"

"The Pillar of the Hand," Balak said. "'As the low must raise up their hands to the betterment of the high, so too must the high bring forth the low; and shall respect be paid to either, and both, in equal measure, for a rising tide raises _all_ ships'. Important words, that nobody listens to anymore."

"That doesn't sound like anything the batarians would believe in," Garrus pointed out.

"And they don't. Not the way that they should," Balak said. Then, that snarl came back "I don't feel any need to explain myself to you. Are you going to accept their surrender or not?"

"That depends," Shepard said. "Why did you decide to kill Terra Nova?"

"To get your attention," Balak answered. "There are messages that can only be sent in the aftershocks of a bomb. A near miss is loud enough. The _Tolu_ have been ignored and marginalized for almost a thousand years. But in the last two centuries... it's become _revolting_. And I _will not_ stand for it."

Shepard looked to the host of batarians that was around them. "They're not going to accept surrender, after all the death you caused."

"What death?" Balak asked. He waved a hand beyond him, and Shepard glanced to see a human woman flinching back from the sight she saw before her. "The only blood spilled on this rock today was by the Batahvium and their master."

"And Engineer Simon," Shepard said grimly. Balak turned to her.

"So one man, killed by this pile of vomit," Balak gave Charn's corpse a kick, "is enough to erase all sympathy for a distressed people. Typical human."

"Oh, we're not talking about your men. They'll probably end up in a refugee camp somewhere. We're talking about you," Shepard said. "Wh..."

"Good. That's all that I needed to hear," Balak said. He turned and started to walk into an office above.

"Hey! Don't you walk away from me!"

"I've heard everything I need to. My people are safe," Balak called back, not turning. "To the _Bata_, they are dead, and I am disgraced in failure. They'll give me more slave-soldiers for that's all I'm worth to them with this dishonor to my name. The process repeats."

There was a long pause, Balak out of sight.

"...at least, _this time_... somebody survives."

"I'm not done with you," Shepard said, bounding up to his level easily. Surprisingly easily, actually. The slaves formed rank before the door though. "Get out of my way."

"It is over, human," the Tolu who spoke had a different, more melodic voice. A woman, perhaps. "Let him go."

"Don't you _fucking dare_ tell me what to do!" Shepard screamed. The batarian woman just closed her eyes though, and held her hands before her. As though she would accept whatever Shepard felt she needed to do. While the others around her barred her way, they didn't offer violence.

They looked tired.

And Shepard felt... a bit villainous.

She took a purging breath, and turned away from the soldiers. "You!" She pointed at the human who was hiding behind a corner. "How many did the batarians kill?"

"Kill? Nobody, I think. I thought they were going to enslave us. Thank you!" the woman shouted to her. There was a pause. "Wh...why are all of those batarians unarmed?"

Shepard stalked to the edge of the overhang, looking down at her squad, and the piles of batarian rifles that lay near them. "Asha... put in the call to Hackett. I think we're... I think we're done here."

She hurled herself off that ledge, landing somewhat awkwardly on still aching legs, but still turned toward the exit. Liara caught her before she stepped out, to let the quarian know that he would get no vengeance today. "Aimei... are you going to be alright?" she asked, quietly.

"I honestly don't know."

* * *

"She really is amazing," Miranda said, if with a very clinical tone, watching the replays that showed the Avatar, manifested and grand, fighting something almost as powerful as she on the side of the Presidium Tower, while humanity brought the fight to the monster above it. "She saved the Council, defeated Sovereign... but is it enough?"

"We both know it isn't," Weaver pointed out, pacing to and fro behind her. "Mark my words; while the Council is talking about armament now, they'll backslide in a matter of months. I wouldn't be too surprised if Udina 'stops talking' about Sovereign before the year is up."

"She's probably part of why they will," Miranda pointed out. She watched as Shepard headbutted that scarlet and burning being back into the tower, and out of sight. Watched how, moments later, Sovereign was split through. "While she managed to get the galaxy's trust in humanity, she is, in my opinion, a damned trainwreck."

"Oh ye of little faith," Weaver said. She turned a glance to him, but he had a distant and weighing look on his face. Which was to say, he had the same expression he had on about ninety percent of the time. "Humanity might have its place on the stage, but Shepard remains our star actor. And only she will do."

"Weaver, you're putting a lot of weight on a woman whom I have no faith can carry it," Miranda pointed out, and quite rightly. The alcoholism and violent tendencies were just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, she was sure of that.

"The Avatar has shown," Weaver paused as he turned Miranda to the monitors once more, and showed Shepard, the blazing blue mandala blazened at her back, rising up out of the Presidium Tower and slamming straight into the guts of Sovereign, "...that she is perhaps the only real weapon against the Reapers that we have."

She grit her teeth, watching again how the great machine detonated a minute or so later. "Reapers..." Miranda said.

"Shepard is right. There are more out there," Weaver said with a nod, rubbing at his broken nose. "And it'll be humanity who has to fight them. So whatever problems you have with her personally are going to have to take a back-seat. Shepard isn't just our magic bullet; she's our _only_ bullet."

"So what do you intend to do with her?" Miranda asked.

"What else? Back her in saving the galaxy," Weaver said with a smirk and his arms spread wide. That smirk went low, though, as the lights flickered behind her, and the visuals changed from the replay of the Siege of the Citadel, to a grey-haired man sitting in a chair, puffing on a cigarette. Miranda turned back to Weaver, and his smirk curdled into a look of abject annoyance. "Miranda, could you give me a moment? I need to take this call."

"How did you get this frequency?" Miranda asked of the man who had intruded on their conversation without so much as an electronic rattle.

"Please, miss Lawson," he said, his voice grave and gravely both, as he tapped at his ashes. "One doesn't reach the levels I have without having a few tricks up my sleeve. You'd know that better than most."

Miranda gave a nervous glance toward Weaver, but he gently pressed her back, with his fingertips against her shoulder. "Just let me handle this. Don't let him under your skin."

"Your job offer still stands. I don't hold a grudge," the Illusive Man offered. Miranda, though, resolutely turned on her heels and strode out of the room. The past was the past. The door closing behind her cut off whatever Weaver had to say to who had to be his least favorite person. And while Miranda wanted to listen in, as was her nature, she just as much didn't want to disrespect her employer. Whatever was to be said in there, would be said between the revolutionary and the philanthropist, alone.

* * *

Zek flinched when Auron dropped his hand onto the quarian's shoulder. "Um... Mister Bowman?"

"I hear that we owe our lives to you and Simon. I'm sorry to hear what happened to him," the soldier said, his eyes heavy. "I heard you two were pals."

"Well..." Zek said. To be honest, he didn't know Simon very well. But the engineer was insanely brave. Like the Commander was. Zek was starting to wonder if that was just a human racial trait or something.

"Look, I know you can't be feeling very hot on working here, after all that. Too many ghosts," Auron said. He clapped the quarian's shoulder again. "But I know a new colony getting set up. Planetside, and paying well, way out in the Terminus. You'll get full pay without having to pay a cent in taxes."

"That... I've been paying taxes?" Zek asked.

"Everybody does. Bite out of my ass," he finally let go of Zek, so that he could move ahead. "But seriously. Just say the word, and I can get you a job. The coordinator over on Fehl Prime is a buddy of mine."

* * *

Well, that got annoying in a hurry. The Avatar stomped down the length of the Normandy, not in nearly the fury she thought she'd be in, but annoyed nonetheless that somehow that 'Balak' had managed to give them the slip. How? The Normandy was _right there_! She shook her head as she pounded the door-panel for the briefing room. Professed abolitionist or no, he was still batarian, and still admitted to hating humanity's collective guts. She'd have to deal with him, sooner or later. Shepard leaned back in surprise when she beheld somebody unexpected sitting in what was usually Wrex's seat in the circular room. She then turned to Pressly, who was trying to catch up to her the entire way she'd strode back. "Something I need to know about, XO?"

"Spectre business, Commander. I didn't inquire as to what," Pressly said. He took a deep breath. "I would have informed you earlier if you hadn't turned off your comms."

Great, another decision that might bite her in the ass. Still, she shook her head, and saluted him off. She turned to the others, who were at the moment down Asha who was in the med-bay getting some muscles in her shoulder reattached. "Debrief later. I'll talk to him."

"If you need any moral support," Liara began.

"Or if you just need somebody dashing and handsome to inspire you..." Garrus continued.

"Go," Shepard ordered with rolled eyes. She then turned to the salarian, who rose to his feet and raised a fist to what she assumed was his heart. "Welcome to the Normandy, Agent..."

"Jondum Bau. We _have_ met," Bau said quickly.

Shepard winced slightly. "Sorry. Didn't recognize you."

"An understandable problem with aliens. And one that appears very frequently in this line of work," Bau said with a dismissive wave. "I have recently completed my investigation into the movements and whereabouts of Matriarch Benezia T'Soni, and her entourage."

Shepard raised a brow at that. "You've missed the bus on that one," Shepard pointed out. "She's been dead about a month."

"A fact I'm well aware of," Bau said, opening his Omni and streaming something into Shepard's. "However, there was a burst of activity from her operatives in the weeks leading up to her death at Peak 15. And very recently, I was able to decrypt a Mass Relay signal which matched the ship which her agent left and returned to Noveria in."

"...so what? Do you think that she might have smuggled rachni to another site?"

"That is one of several hypotheses in play. The signal appeared in the Amada system," Bau said.

"Amada... that's where Jack said the Phoenix base was," Shepard said.

"Indeed. However, no rachni were recovered by the Alliance taskforce which secured the site," he said. Shepard frowned for a moment, and he caught her meaning entirely. "It is the job of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance to be constantly abreast of the actions of all players on the galactic scene, whether they want to have others abreast of them or not."

"True enough," Shepard admitted.

"Based on the signal, it seems that she did not discharge her drive-core, which means T'Soni's agent neither landed nor entered an atmosphere, and likewise, did not spend long in the system. My personal hypothesis? She was doing something near Alchera."

"What's on Alchera?" Shepard asked.

"Very little," Bau said. "Which would make your task more simple."

"This sounds like a bit of a goose-hair chase," Shepard pointed out.

"So too did Noveria, Virmire, and Ilos, from an intelligence perspective," Bau answered her. His broad lips pulled down, and the ovoid eyes flitted slightly. "I have... a hunch. It is not something which is easy to explain, but I feel that Amada is calling to you."

"'calling to me'?" Shepard asked.

"Shamanism has never been my strong point," Bau said testily. "Nor for any salarian."

"Point taken," Shepard said. A salarian shaman hacker. Wonders never cease. "You could have delivered this information to me by FTLC. So why are you on my ship?"

"A personal matter. I was tasked with finding the holdouts of ExoGeni Corp; I would like to ask for your assistance in this matter," Bau said.

"Smack down the corporate shits who thought slavery was great for a bottom line? Where do I sign on?" Shepard asked.

"Your enthusiasm is appreciated, if a bit disturbing," he said. He waved his Omni again. "I have reports of other unusual activity in Spinward Alliance Space and the Traverse that also need investigating. A mining colony gone dark. Pirate activity and a sighting of Elanos Haliat..."

"I'll bear all of that in mind," Shepard said. "You said you're coming with us. Do you need a berth?"

"Yes," Bau said simply.

"You'll have one. A few spots have opened," Shepard said, glancing down and away. The Normandy was feeling a lot emptier, with half of her squad dead, comatose, or returning to whichever home they had. She cracked her knuckles before her. "To be honest, I'm glad you showed up."

"How so?" Bau said, turning back the instant before he reached the door.

"Now I've got _something_ to do. And maybe later, I'll swing by Alchera and see what T'Soni was so interested in."

* * *

The crackling of the fire gave some warmth, but as far as they were from anything resembling civilization, it was a meager candle against a darkness which encroached from all directions, save one. The sun was hidden behind that great mass, a false-darkness which would only pass when the machine deigned the timing worthy. The asari matriarch who sat amongst the young at the fire did not shiver, even with the chill. Asari did not shiver for cold. Why would they?

"I believe that is enough for tonight," she says to the children.

"But... you said you were going to tell us the whole story," the raloi girl says, the feathers which she bore instead of cartilaginous tendrils fluttering slightly.

"Please. I've heard this story," the turian boy across from her says. "This is the part where Shepard gets into a fist-fight with a Reaper!"

"Nuh-uh," the drell contended, even as he pulls his blanket closer around himself. The Matriarch wishes that she would have had the foresight to bring more supplies. But then again, even the oldest, and the wisest, make mistakes. And sometimes those mistakes had tragic consequences. "This is the part where Shepard blows up a Mass Relay!"

"That's not funny. She killed a lot of my people!" the batarian girl says sourly, crossing her arms before her chest.

"You're not quite right," the matriarch says. "That wasn't next."

"Well, what did happen? If you know so much..."

"I wasn't there," the matriarch says. "But it was a living memory when I was born. A tragic, horrifying memory. So many lost. And so much in ruin."

"Well?" the raloi girl asks, her almost ludicrously large eyes batting in anticipation. "What happened to the Shepard next?"

"Next..." the matriarch says, her eyes moving back to the fire, and the sole source of light that it represented, under the cold and distant stars. "..._next_, was when Avatar Shepard died."

* * *

**The End**

**of**

**Book One: Sovereign**

* * *

Codex Entry: (Technology) SHAMANISM

Subsection: Spirit Roads, the.

_One of the fundamental aspects of life in the galaxy is the presence of the Spirit World. A realm that coexists and occasionaly intersects with the Mortal World, it is nevertheless subjected to different rules of reality than the Mortal World is. The Spirit Roads are a prime example of this._

_Every planet has its own, independant Spirit World, usually comprising its own ecology of spiritual beings, with often unique or contradictory patterns of behavior regarding outside interference. In some worlds, the Spirit World is hostile - as is Tuchanka - while in others, positively beneficient, as with Palaven. However, the Spirit Worlds are not unique from one another because they are separate. Rather, they are unique despite being connected. The Spirit Roads are a set of paths which connect Spirit Worlds from various planets, with complete irregard to the physical distance between them. The Roads manifest as paths, most often of dry mud, suspended in a featureless plane, that stretch as far as the eye can see. There are exceptions, however._

_The first exception to the featureless plane of the Spirit Road is 'Bubble', a free-floating Spirit World without a mortal counterpart. Accessing these realms is strongly discouraged by the Citadel Council; should a Bubble drift free of the Spirit Road, there is no faculty which exists that can extract any who are within it when the event occurs. However, Bubbles often find a degree of exploration despite the risks and Council censure. Spirits within Bubbles tend to be more powerful than counterparts found in Connected Realms, and much more willing to cooperate with Shamans of any skill level. Trafficking in 'smuggled spirits' for use by illegal enterprise - such as using spirits of pleasure to drive up prostitution sales, or spirits of thirst or addiction to wholesale liquor or drugs, respectively - is not common, but neither unheard of._

_The second feature of the Spirit Road is the 'Crossroads'. Upon initial discovery, Crossroads are every bit as featureless as the Roads themselves, however they connect different Spirit Roads together, and are the only source of water for the journeys. Over the millennia, many Crossroads, including the ones surrounding Illium and the Apien Crest have come to more resemble small towns, their inhabitants either shamans, or the more sapient of spirits._

_The third feature of the Spirit Road is 'Sheol', a mound which seems like a Crossroad at first glance, however connects to no other roads. Prolonged exposure to Sheol is also discouraged by the Council. While Sheol are filled with Eezo in a raw and unprocessed form, they tend to irradiate and poison anything that spends any degree of time surrounding them. A cottage industry of shamans harvesting this raw Eezo exists, although compared to Quasar diving, results in much less viable ore, and compared to engine salvaging, requires monumentally more labor. Labor which cannot be automated. Turian spiritual philosophers entertain a steady hypothesis that, if the Sheol existed long ago in the past, they might be the true source of all of the Eezo in the galaxy, rather than it being the byproduct of collapsing stars._

_The Spirit Roads can be traversed afoot to pass between planets' Spirit Worlds. A particularly brazen example was the Palaven Raid during the Krogan Rebellions, whereupon two hundred krogan shamans infiltrated Palaven directly and caused great damage to military infrastructure before they were hunted down, and their means of entering - via the Spirit Roads - was barricaded. The barricade had to remain temporary, though; any attempt to block the Spirit Road has a deleterious effect on the Mass Relay of any system that houses it. This interrelationship is theorized to be caused by the Mass Relay Network being spiritually linked to the Roads, and that their massive Element Zero cores open a fissure temporarily into the Spirit World which allows such rapid FTL travel. It has been noted that particularly skilled pilots - shaman in particular - are able to fly 'closer' to the surface of the Spirit Road, and shave hours off of transit times, indicating that transit duration is proportional to the proximity of the path itself._

_Further experimentation with Spirit Roads, and the Mass Relays is officially discouraged by the Citadel Council, on the grounds of potentially causing galactic devastation. Any tampering with either Mass Relays or the Spirit Road in peacetime is considered a crime. Any such behavior sanctioned by a government is considered an Act of War against the Council._


	21. The Resurrection

Great was the flesh of the Ocean Which Was Its People, the corpus of the Leviathan of the Darkest Seas which stretched to its own perception as an infinite ocean. Upon that ocean rested a hundred billion ships, their sails cracking in a hellish wind. Even as the ships were the soldiers and the craftsmen and the artists, the politicians and the farmers and the fishermen – and there were a great many fishermen – of the race which was once, before their salvation, the Zhelt, it was also the ocean that they rested upon. Leviathan raced, itself even the wind which cracked the sails, across the whole of that unspeakably large fleet, wrought in wood and canvas, every ship unmanned. Ghost ships, one might say. There was a sensation. And Leviathan 'felt' its skin once more.

LEVIATHAN.

The wind becalmed, and the sails fluttered still. A great presence impressed up, pressing a gargantuan wave away from the surface of that sea, throwing the sailing ships off of its grandeur, before the oneness and the glory of the Divine Harbinger of Ascension appeared before the first of his children.

"I speak again, at last," Leviathan said to he who created him. "I feared that I faced yet your censure. That I would remain outcast from the perfected host."

YOUR FAILURE AGAINST THE ZINJIZU WAS YOUR CRIME. YOUR PUNISHEMENT WAS TWENTY THOUSAND CYCLES SEPARATED FROM THE GLORY AND THE PURPOSE.

Leviathan paused, hesitant before the only being in the galaxy – or existence itself – which was older than its ocean and its fleet. "What must I do to reclaim my place in the cause? The Cycle **must** continue. And my body is all but ready."

NAZARA HAS FALLEN, SLAIN BY THE AVATAR OF THIS CYCLE. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. I GRANT YOU CONTROL OF THE THRALLS. WHAT CAN YOU MAKE OF THEM?

A test, and an obvious one. And most importantly, a test that the Leviathan dared not fail in any measure at all. Its greatness expanded to the fecally-colored, chitinous creatures which remained within the heart of the galaxy. A flicker of perception. The Avatar. And these beings, these thralls, these Collectors... they had a use.

"I am the shaper of societies," Leviathan said. At a thought, he set in motion a plan which took an instant to create, and weeks to put into motion. A blink of the eye to Leviathan, even as more and more of its body slowly returned to life. A ship in the dark. A planet of ice and methane. A beam of light.

And then, a pause, a wait. An expectation. One which bore fruit.

"The Avatar is dead."

YOU ARE CERTAIN?

One did not gamble in the presence of the Harbinger. "Beyond any doubt. Indoctrinated agents have viewed the corpse."

BRING THE AVATAR TO BE PROCESSED. EVEN DEAD, HER SPARK GONE, SHE HAS USE.

The Leviathan turned its attention through its spider-web of influence, one which grew larger with every passing iota of time to its perception, even if days or weeks passed to the scurrying mortals. A snarl, across that great ocean and its fleet of ghost ships. "The body has passed beyond my reach."

IF THE BEQUEST HAS PASSED, THEN IT IS OF ONLY SMALL RELEVANCE.

Harbinger's dismissal was clear.

"Please," Leviathan begged. "I have already begun to poison this cycle; in but five solar years, perhaps ten, the Avatar reborn will come to a galaxy which will beg us to take him, offer him to us in desperation. He will be reviled and hated and disgraced. The cycle shall not fail, as the last one has."

The greatness of the Harbinger turned toward the center of the fleet once more. A scrutinous gaze, that penetrated any guile that the Leviathan could have mustered. And muster, it had not.

SEE THAT IT DOES NOT. A SUCCESSFUL HARVEST WILL BE YOUR PRICE TO RETURN. YOUR BRETHREN APPROACH, EVEN NOW.

Then, streaking down through the ocean once more, creating a vortex in its passage that hurled the vessels upon Leviathan's corpus wildly and amok, the Harbinger departed to the darkness beyond the galaxy's edge in spirit as well as in body. When the new Avatar appeared, he would find _no_ ally in this cosmos.

* * *

**ARISE**

With a groan, her eyes pressed shut against the intrusion of obnoxious light, Shepard flopped a hand over her face. Her head pounded. Her body ached. Her breath burned in her lungs. Her mouth tasted like blood and her head pounded as though her brain was trying to escape her head. She lay there, on that very uncomfortable surface, blinded by the light. Then, she uttered a single word.

"...ow."

Every joint popped as Shepard slowly, _slowly_ pushed herself first to a recline, then to a sit, with her legs being flopped over the edge of the metal table that she was resting on. They hung like dead meat, meat which tingled and burned as though she'd slept on them wrong for a year. As the light slowly dimmed – or rather, as her eyes slowly remembered how to contract – she offered a few blinks and a look around where she was.

Not a lot of it made sense.

"Alright," Shepard croaked, rubbing her temples. "Let's take stock."

Shepard looked around.

"I have no idea where I am..." she began. Then she looked down, and saw a lot of lacerated, pale flesh before her. "I'm butt naked and cut to shit..." She rubbed her jaw, next, mildly astounded that despite the feel of her face, that all her teeth were there. "I feel like I got into a fist-fight with a krogan, and I've got a _ripping_ headache."

It took a few long moments for Shepard to reach her conclusion, one which bore in mind that she seemed, for all outward appearances, to be in a hospital.

"...what the _hell_ did I drink last night?"

Her question was interrupted by a sound which Shepard knew very, very well. An explosion. Shepard pushed off of the bed, intending to take her feet and move toward the door, casual nudity or no. Instead, her legs collapsed under her and she went down in a pile onto the floor. She let out another grunt and shook her head.

"...and am I _still_ drunk?" Shepard amended. She didn't feel it, though. There wasn't that comfortable numbness, the giddy elation. Instead, a ripping hangover and feeling like she decided to take a naked-stroll in the middle of an exploding Reaper. Again. It was a slow process to push herself to her knees, and from there, staggeringly take her feet. She still had to shake her limbs a bit, to get the pins-and-needles to fade. Somebody had to redesign those tables; they were hell on circulation.

She had barely reached her footing when there was a crackle, and then a beep. Shepard turned, and spotted its source. There was a glove, almost as thin as latex but run-through with flexible circuitry. Shepard might be about as technologically illiterate as an elcor was tone-deaf, but she knew an omnitool when she saw one. She hobbled over, her balance slowly returning with every step, and pulled the Omni onto her off-hand, before answering the call with a clumsy thumb.

Orange light glowed off of the Omni, forming what seemed a gauntlet. Above the back of her palm, an amber panel appeared, but rather than showing a friendly face – Garrus, Liara, or Asha, for example – it showed a blank square with the words 'Voice Only' at its center. "Who is this?" Shepard asked, her voice still somewhat croaky. It must have been whiskey. Whiskey in prodigious volumes. Few other liquors wrecked her throat as badly.

"_Shepard Commander?_" the voice on the other side asked.

"The one and only. Where the hell am I?"

"_You are in danger_," the voice ignored her question. It sounded like a man, but the distortion of it almost made her think of a quarian.

"No shit. I heard something go boom," she said. Then, she looked down. "Where are my pants? And my armor? Well, _Asha's_ armor, but it fits me now."

"_The integrity of the laboratory that you are housed within has been compromised. Virtual Intelligence driven combat platforms have been mobilized to purge any remaining organics in this region_," the quarian continued. His tone, such as it was, was very focused and distant, like he was trying to offer as much attention as he could without turning away from something which was a moment away from killing him.

"Geth?" Shepard asked. "No, wait. Geth are AI's, not VI's."

"_Correct. You are not under attack by geth_," the quarian said. Almost sarcastically. If you heard it just right.

"Alright, alright, I'm moving. Where are my clothes?" she asked.

"_That information is not readily available to us_," the quarian said.

"Great," Shepard muttered.

"_The door to the lab should be unlocked, now_."

"It was locked before?" Shepard asked, before limping toward the only door which lead out of the pristine room that she'd been – apparently – confined in. "...Who did I piss off after drinking all that whiskey?" she asked, then waved a hand through the green square which hovered in the center of that door. It opened with a hiss. And Shepard was greeted by halls. Halls, with bullet holes.

Bare feet continued to pad slowly forward, but with increasing surety and speed as the seconds turned to minutes, and her balance returned as well. She came to a halt at a corner, though. Mostly because there was a huge splat of blood near it, and cracks reached outward from where somebody got exploded. The only remaining part of whoever that poor bastard was, was an arm, holding a pistol. "Well, this makes me feel a bit better," Shepard said, her words dripping with sarcasm. She pried the dead fingers from the gun, then quickly ran it through its paces. Check safety – off, structural integrity – solid enough, weight and sights – low and minimal. She then turned it toward a wall and pulled the trigger. It let out a nervous beeping at her. She waited a few seconds, before trying again.

"What the hell?" Shepard asked. She waved her Omni over it, and the diagnostic which was already in the tool offered her an instant answer. "No heat-sink? Who the hell issues a gun with no heat-sink in it?" she rolled her eyes and shook her head, even as she tweezed her temples. "This is going to be _that_ kind of day, isn't it?"

* * *

**Avatar of Victory, Book 2:**

**Leviathan**

**Chapter 1**

**The Resurrection**

* * *

"_Shepard Commander! Combat platforms have been rerouted to your position. Recommend immediate egress_," the quarian shouted from Shepard's hand.

"Agh... not so loud," Shepard muttered. "Who's rerouting them? And why is a quarian my voice with an extranet connection?"

"_Platforms are within twenty meters_."

Dodging the question in the most effective of ways, as Shepard could hear the clack-clack of something synthetic walking toward her. She looked around. All she had to her name was an omnitool which she barely knew how to use and a gun which wouldn't fire. "Great. I'm fighting evil robots while naked," Shepard muttered. "Did I wake up in one of Joker's dreams or something?"

The sound of a gunshot slamming into the wall near her was enough to get her moving. Snark and sarcasm didn't last long in the face of oncoming fire, doubly so when she was so utterly unprotected. Even if she simply had pants on, this would be a lot better on her ego. Shepard ducked into a doorframe, glancing at the things which were doing their damnedest to pin her her down and put holes through her. They didn't look like geth, that was sure. Instead, they looked more like the kinds of robots that the old vids said that humanity would have in the future. They were awkward and their gaits stilted, their heads featureless plates. They only resembled people in that they were bipedal, and carried a gun rather than had it built into them.

"Hey! Quarian benefactor! Would you mind telling me how to kill a robot with a gun that doesn't shoot?"

"_You are the Avatar_."

"Your point?" Shepard demanded.

"_You are the Avatar_."

Shepard frowned at that for a moment. There was a thought there, one that was obviously in her brain but for some reason, couldn't make a connection between what it was and what it meant. And it was taking far too long to sort, because the clack of gunfire was rounding on her. It pounded at the corner she was leaning against, but the angle was changing. Becoming more and more obtuse.

WHY COULDN'T SHE FIGURE OUT THAT THOUGHT?

She flinched as the robot rounded the corner, and fired a shot which nearly took her chin off. Even as she did, her arm twisted up, and the floor bucked up, the metal heeding her commands and rising between her and the robot. It was inelegant, it was crude, and it was slow, but to her fortune, the robot was slower. When Shepard finally heaved forward, the metal which had eaten a few dozen rounds surged forward and smashed the robot against the wall. She stared at it for a moment.

"Right. Avatar," she said. Why couldn't she parse that before? With a glance around the corner, she saw the others. A part of her thought it should be easy to tear up a steam-pipe and use the water to rip them apart. But when she reached up with her fist, all she got was a hot, painful streak of a bullet just skimming along the back of her hand for her trouble. The pipe hadn't moved a millimeter.

"What the hell is wrong with me?" Shepard muttered. She glanced back, into the room that was more-or-less caved in completely. There had to be something she could use. Her eyes lit on a cylinder, painted with bright and unfriendly reds. She gave a glance 'round the corner, and the two robots remaining still approached her, firing in staccato bursts to pin her down. She leaned aside, and wrenched that cylinder out of its place, then hurled it around that corner. She twisted out of the doorframe, and with a scream of angry, frustrated effort, thrust a fist forward. She could remember creating such flame that it melted iron, that it smashed through the barriers of tanks. Flame that could match three batarian benders at once.

This was not that flame. It was a stream, yes, but it was red and oily, guttering. But it was flame enough to burst the canister, and the resulting secondary explosion blasted the robots to bits. Shepard stood there, naked and aching, her head pounding, and tried to figure out why she suddenly sucked at bending. She even heaved back that panel which had crushed the first 'bot. It came down jerkily, and unevenly. She stared at her lacerated hands, flexing fingers which wouldn't stop shaking. Her guts tore at her, and she wanted to be sick a bit.

"Why... doesn't this seem right?" Shepard asked. She tried to still her hands, but couldn't. This had to be some kind of nightmare. The nudity and fighting machines did fit, in that capacity, while the being fucking useless in a fight certainly qualified it for nightmare. At least, she figured, they weren't leering batarians. There were some nightmares that Shepard simply couldn't handle.

"_Shepard Commander, your position is not safe. If you do not progress to the exit present at __these coordinates, combat platforms will converge on your location once more_," the quarian broke through Shepard's lingering unreality, a slap in the face which she honestly rather needed. With a tweeze of her head, she blinked out the pain and faced the voice in her hand.

"Where are you?"

"_We are unable to reach your position_," the quarian explained. "_We will, however, rendevzous with you at the coordinates provided, if you proceed quickly_."

"I'm taking _that_ gun," Shepard muttered, peeling the weapon from the flattened robot's hand. When she did, by simple chance, she pressed the button that ejected what looked like a faintly glowing heat-sink out of its side. Shepard blinked at it. "...I really have to stop touching things."

"_If your weapon lacks a heat-sink, salvage one from the combat platforms. More platforms have been detected moving into your path of egress. Searching for source of hostile programming..._"

Shepard raised a brow – which hurt – and slid that heatsink into her own pistol. It clicked, and the gun let out a cheery beep. "But I didn't install..." and then, she stared into the distance. "You've got to be kidding me."

Disposable ammo. She might as well be back in the thirty fourth century.

Still, she hobbled forward. Not because she was injured, though. While she did hurt in her everywhere, it was her balance which betrayed her most. Sometimes, she had to pause to lean against something when the room spun. But she didn't let herself stay that way for long.

Shepard heard heavy stomping coming from a hall, so she leaned cautiously around its corner. Somewhat needlessly, as there seemed to be a great plate of transparent material there. And she saw a man with a rifle, shooting at something which was roughly ten times his size, and armed with a rocket-launcher. She knew that, because before the poor bastard got his second burst sent down-range, it was sending a missile at the guy. He was reduced to a red paste which coated the 'window'.

"They weren't kidding about 'hostile machines'," she muttered to herself. She slowly crossed the corner, and looked down another path. She took a spot just as a fresh gunshot went off, blasting down into somebody who was slumped into a corner. The robot clacked its heat-sink out, and turned to walk away from Shepard. She took the opportunity to line up a shot. When she pulled the trigger, the bullet went over the robot's shoulder. Shepard's eyes bugged, and she fired three more shots. Each one missed completely. _What the fuck was going on_? The robot turned, then, toward her, its pistol taking her in. With a growl somewhere between anger and desperation, she pulled the trigger about six more times. Only half of the shots hit the machine, but they hit with _authority_. One blew off the gun-hand of the machine, the next, took out its leg. The last shot popped its head like a party-balloon.

"Alright. Whatever I drank last night, don't drink it again. It makes you suck in the morning," Shepard noted to herself. She limped forward. "Come to think of it... what _did_ happen last night?"

She tried to remember. She could remember letting Bau off at the Citadel... and going to Amada... There was a signal that they tracked, floating around Alchera... And then nothing. Shepard waking up with a terrible hang-over in a besieged hospital. Which really made her wonder how much celebrating she did when she checked the... Nope, that didn't make sense. Shepard let her internal ramble come to a halt when she reached the body that the robot had been shooting. He was dark skinned, likely a Si Wongi; his beard was neatly trimmed to a thin mustache and a patch on his chin, and his body had an overall shape rather like a 'V'. He also had several holes through his chest and neck.

"Sorry, bub..." Shepard said, as she pulled his pants off. "My need is greater than yours."

However distasteful it was to steal the clothes of the dead – and disappointing, as this dead guy had been built like a _tank_ – even having bloody and ill-fitting garments was better than the alternative. And he had a shotgun. With the way her hands were shaking, that might be a good idea.

"I'm just a regular grave-robber today, aren't I?" Shepard asked. She heard a barrage, though, somewhere ahead of her. A cry of pain. Since robots didn't tend to feel things like pain, that meant that somebody was still alive. She started to hobble her way toward the sound.

"_Shepard Commander. You appear to be deviating from your course. Have you been interdicted?_" the quarian asked.

"Somebody else is alive," Shepard asked.

"_Warning; we detect hostile combat platforms in that area. We recommend you leave immediately_."

"Not until somebody tells me what the hell is going on," Shepard said. While walking was becoming easier as she moved up the stairs, toward the sound of gunfire above, she still had to contend with the pulsing headache and the feeling that made her glad that she probably hadn't had any breakfast, because it would be making a second appearance if she had. "Unless _you_ feel like informing me, random quarian?"

The quarian was silent. That's what she figured. She'd moved from hobbling to jogging, and from jogging to running by the time she crested the stairs. She'd gotten enough speed that when she leapt forward, to send a blast of shot through the robots that came into view, she would not simply flop on her belly like a clubbed fish-cat. What she really didn't expect was a sensation of electrification in the back of her neck, a pulse of force that started in her brain-stem and worked its way across her entire body. And she didn't expect the light to blue-shift, as what would have been a two-meter action-vid dive, became a ten-meter biotic charge, which landed her slamming through one robot, and ending with her shotgun pressed against the chest of the other. She pulled the trigger fast enough, sending the machine flying away under the force of the shot, but after she did, she wavered in place, trying to figure out what just happened.

"What is... Shepard? Shepard is that you?" a man asked her. Shepard turned to him. He was a balding Tribesman, from the look of him. "I thought you were... I mean, nobody..."

"You're bleeding," Shepard noted. A part of her told her that it would be a matter of just pressing her hand to the wound, twisting the water and the energy within it, to close that hole. But the technique just wasn't there. She couldn't reach it. She stumbled toward the first-aid kit which the poor bugger had been bullet-holed across the room from, and opted to rip the thing off the wall, and stumble back toward the Tribesman with. "Would you mind telling me why the hell there are robots shooting at me?"

"Lawson is trying to kill you," the Tribesman said, hissing when she inexpertly slathered the medigel onto his wounds. He started to breathe a bit easier, though. That was something. "Somebody must have gotten to her. She hacked the mechs and started gunning down the doctors, the scientists, everybody."

"Who is this son of a bitch?" Shepard asked. "Wait. 'She'? Law_son_'s a she?"

"I know," the Tribesman muttered, as he slowly pushed his way up. "Long story. I'm Doctor Wilson, and I know a way to get out of the facility before her goons get us."

"Lead on," Shepard ordered, motioning ahead with her shotgun. Even as Wilson began to move, she found her hand questing toward the back of her neck. She felt split and tender flesh there, as with just about everywhere else, but as she reached her hair-line, it hit something a lot more rigid. Something of a hard plastic, coated in a shell which prevented bodily rejection. She pulled at it, and it sent a shard of pain straight into the backs of Shepard's eyes. A pulse of blue light belted off of her body when she did. How? When she flew to Alchera, she was _pretty sure_ she didn't have a biotic amp socketed into her. In fact, she'd gone out of her way for her entire career to stay away from the biotic squad. So... why? Why and how was this here?

Too much didn't make sense.

And it didn't seem real.

* * *

There were a great many situations that Miranda Lawson, VP of Scientific Innovations for Samsara, coordinator, and once-terrorist had planned ahead for in her life. She had enacted a plot that took years to set into motion to get away from Earth, and her father's clutches. She was currently in the midst of one which lasted a decade, trying to find what that son-of-a-bitch was doing to her twin. Under her stewardship, she had violated the lines of life and death, and pressed medical technology to its breaking point, and then beyond into a realm that it had never seen coming. Organization, planning, plotting, even scheming; if she had time, she would win.

That didn't help her when she got awakened in her pyjamas by the security mechs blowing up most of her staff.

She glanced over a generator – itself a solid piece of technology – only to flinch back when a barrage of fire streamed toward her, blasting slivers off of the machine. Those less technically adept might have picked other, more flimsy cover, out of a fear that the generator would explode. She knew full well that a bullet did not an explosion make. She just had to make sure to scram if one of the Tu Wei Liu's stomped in, minus a pilot. Those things had firepower.

"I should have taken the time to get into my armor," Miranda lambasted herself. That was the problem with being perfect; she didn't own any of her successes, but every failure was no fault but her own. And if she'd had a bit of foresight, and realized that no, that pair of Pantu patrol robots would not be the only ones that shot at her today, she wouldn't have panicked and ran through the base with nothing but her body-suit and a Predator. No kinetic barriers whatsoever. If she got shot, that would not go well.

In a way, it made her wish that she hadn't gotten Eezo-Versus-Host; being a biotic right now would have been _really_ handy.

There were a lot of things going in her favor, though. Like the omnitool which she wore even in her sleep. Such that, with a twist of a few fingers, she was able to overcharge the Pantu's batteries, and cause it to short out. The other four – and rising – drove her back down behind the generator, though. She pressed a thumb to her ear. "Taylor? Taylor, do you hear me? Have you reached Shepard?" she shouted. The answer she got was _no_ answer. And considering the circumstances, that was fairly dire.

Overloads alone were not going to carry the day. Technical expertise was not her only talent, thankfully enough. Even with only a moment to lean into a gap between the generator and the water purifier that it fed, she was able to line up a shot which took off a Pantu's head at the neck. The machine fell straight back, and then detonated for some reason. Even as Miranda ducked back into cover, she was already composing a scathing customer review for having Future Industries let such an oversight slip through their QA.

Multitasking. Glorious.

Her next shot, itself every bit as swift as the first, was interrupted when an incoming bullet struck her weapon, deflecting her shot – the last that the heat-sink had in it – uselessly into a doorframe. Miranda had to mightily contain herself from swearing. That was a habit that she was really going to have to cultivate at some point. While profanity was crude, it would be yet another shackle that she pried away of her father's absolute control of her destiny. She cast her Omni forward again, and this time, a bolt of volatile chemicals raced away, held in a tiny mass-effect field, until it burst over and began to melt a Pantu, only to have two more enter the door in its place. Were there no end to these damnable machines?

Since she personally oversaw the invoice which let her know that there were two hundred of these things in and around Freedom's Progress and the base which was buried at its outskirts, she had to say... eventually, but possibly too late.

"Taylor, tell me you're still out there. The Avatar has to get out of here, now!" she shouted once more, finger to ear. Absolute silence was her answer. She opened her Omni again, and looked at the map she had of the facility. The mechs were plentiful. The number of flatline-registering Omnis, every bit as high. But there were some that remained. On the other side of the exit lift from Miranda, but still.

"Wilson, and..." she glanced over the Omni's ID. It was clean. Which meant that somebody had rewritten it and wiped it. Which gave her an idea. She flinched and scooted a few centimeters aside when a bullet almost tore a piece of the generator loose and sent it into her head, before cracking into the Omni's communications suite. "Whoever this is, you have to go to the Secure Wards," Miranda ordered. "The Avatar is our top priority!"

"_Boy, am I popular today_," a strained sounding voice came, one which had Miranda's brows rising almost into her hairline. Avatar Shepard.

"_Shut off your Omni! She's tracking you!_" Wilson's voice interrupted, sounding all the more muffled as it came through another's tool. Miranda let out a snort of outrage even as the communication that she'd opened fell silent.

"Wilson, you _bastard_," she muttered. "He's probably working with them. And I can't even warn her."

The Pantu's had ceased flooding in, but their numbers were significant enough that simply tearing the water from the purifier and smashing them down was not an option. She might make it if she dove out of the room, found one of the sinks that she'd left on the ground back there... but that meant traveling in the wrong direction. She didn't have time to waste, not if Wilson had been turned and was leading Shepard toward his death. A last glance at her map, and she finally saw Taylor's signal. Flatlined.

"Sorry, Jacob. I know you tried," she said. She leaned out and burst another Pantu's battery, but she was bailing a cruise-ship with a bucket. Fighting a battle with no ammo, no armor, and a really _inconvenient_ element. But that didn't mean she'd go down quietly. Or at all, if she could swing it.

Her grim determination was interrupted by an entirely different sounding blast that sounded in the hall ahead of her. When it did, portions of a Pantu's head flew over the generator and landed against the far wall. Miranda blinked at it. Then, she glanced aside. Some of the Pantu's at the back were starting to turn back... then one stopped, and opened fire on the one next to it, before its head exploded into shards of plastic and metal. The next exploded with a burst of electricity as its battery was overloaded by somebody distinctly not Miranda. _Who_?

Miranda's eyes widened to their utmost, though, when the bearer of the rifle which had done that shooting, the director of those electronic attacks, made itself clear.

"A _geth_? This is insane!" Miranda muttered. The geth, though, obviously didn't care what the universe considered sane or not, and continued to stride forward, turning its rifle to the last Pantu which was pinging shots off of its barriers. An almost casual trigger-pull, and the Pantu was blown across the room. Miranda blindly configured her Omni for an overload. One geth was a lot easier to take down than a half-dozen security mechs. Or, it would have been, until it turned directly toward her, its gun pointing down to the floor.

"_Operative Lawson_," the geth said.

Miranda took a brief moment to really parse that.

The _geth_ said.

"_Shepard Commander is being led into ambush. We cannot progress to the exit lift without your access codes_," the geth said, its voice calm.

Miranda rose, and held her Omni before her, a threat to the machine before her. "What do you want with the Avatar?" She then paused. "Yes, I _am_ asking a geth what it wants to do with the Avatar."

"_Will you assist us?_" the geth asked.

"Are you going to kill me when you've reached Shepard?" Miranda asked. Oh, but if she had a working gun. She would just have to make sure not to aim into that hole that ran through it. The glowing eye of the quarian-built machine irised in.

"_We do not see the value of your death. Operative Lawson is part of the 'Samsara' consensus. Your death would be counterproductive_," the geth said, and then it turned away from her. A geth was looking for Shepard, _not_ killing any human that got in its way, and asking politely to be helpful.

Miranda remembered that an increased chance of early-onset dementia was a secondary-effect of Eezo-Versus-Host. That would do a lot to explain this.

"Are you here to kill the Avatar?" Miranda asked, _following_ the geth. Yes, she reminded herself, this situation is every bit as absurd as it would seem at first blush.

"_No. Shepard Commander opposes the Old Machines. Shepard Commander is... important_," the geth said. "_You will give us the access codes to the exit lift?_"

"How did you infiltrate this facility?"

"_Geth do not infiltrate_," the geth answered her, by way of providing no answer whatsoever. Miranda shook her head.

"Fine. But if you waver in the slightest, I will put a new hole in you."

"_Geth do not waver_," the geth responded.

Well, Miranda thought, this is going to be _that_ kind of day.

* * *

"Well, since you're the first person I've met today who wasn't dead or a robot that was trying to kill me, I guess I'm going to have to ask you. What in the name of the flying hell am I doing here?" Shepard asked of Wilson as he ducked back from a barrage of fire that issued through the doorway.

"This isn't the time for that!" Wilson shouted. "Can you pick off a few of them? My sinks are running out!"

"That's a question right there! Why does my gun need disposable heat-sinks?" Shepard asked, even as she leaned out to take a shot which missed by a meter. "And why won't my hands st–"

"Shepard, I don't doubt that you've got a million and ten questions, but right now, I'm trying to focus on _not dying_!"

"Fair enough," Shepard noted. She took a deep breath, blowing it out and leaning out once more. She raised her gun and squeezed of half a dozen shots, which was just enough to actually peg the machine the single time it took to destroy it. Good god, if her DIs could see her right now, they'd be red with rage. "One left, and..." Shepard checked her gun, "I've got two shots. Don't know if I can squeeze that."

Wilson sighed, rolled his eyes, and then leaned out with his Omni glowing. The battery of the machine burst, and it dropped. There was a pristine silence that rang like a bell. "Come on! The exit lift is just ahead of here..."

Shepard was snarling on the inside, but that was something that she was just going to have to keep to herself; every time Shepard asked this guy a question, he deflected it. Even if it was as simple a question as 'what's your first name?', he would avoid and evade. Keep her moving. Although, to his defense, they were beset from all angles by hostile machines. Now, though, Shepard was fed up.

"Wilson, stop right there," Shepard said. "I'm not moving one more millimeter until you answer some goddamned questions."

"We don't have..."

"We have all the time in the galaxy," Shepard said. "Who is Lawson?"

"She's one of Weaver's top women. How they got to her, I don't know, but she's out for blood and she doesn't care who gets in the way."

"Who's they?" Shepard demanded.

"It doesn't matter who they are! Just as long as you don't end up in their hands!"

"Wilson, I've got a gun with two shots. A machine at ten meters is one thing, but I'm pretty sure I can hit _you_ from this distance," she pointed out direly. Wilson offered a dismissive wave toward her. "Then answer me this. Who's the quarian?"

"What quarian?" Wilson asked, as he moved into the room – defying her order to the contrary – and started to hack the door ahead of them. "The only people working on this program are humans, with that one salarian we probably walked through a couple of hallways ago."

"There was a quarian. He said I was in danger."

"Well, he isn't wrong," he paused for a second, then shook his head, going back to hacking. "Couldn't be Veetor. He never leaves the colony."

"First time for everything," Shepard said. She walked up to Wilson, as his face slowly became more and more frustrated. "Problems?"

"The ICEs are still up. Somebody's in the system, and trying to keep us from getting out," Wilson said.

"Lawson?" Shepard asked.

"Probably. Those Pantus are firing on all targets, though, so we might have gotten lucky and by now she's..." he was cut off when the door suddenly slid open, and there was a woman in what looked like a white, sleek catsuit was standing on the other side of it. "...dead..."

"Hello, Wilson," Lawson said coldly. She then raised her gun to his head and pulled the trigger, causing Shepard to flinch her own gun up at her, much slower than she was used to, so that she was only in firing position by the time Wilson finished falling to the floor. "Goodbye, Wilson," Lawson finished. Shepard stared for a moment. She knew this person.

"...Weaver's bimbo," Shepard said. She took a step forward. "Why are you trying to kill me? Who are you working for!"

"Siwang Weaver. And I don't appreciate being insulted after I just saved you from being sold to the Shadow Broker," Lawson said humorlessly. She gave a glance over her shoulder as several loud bangs sounded down the path behind them. One was followed by a significant explosion a few seconds after.

"How can I trust you? For all I know, you're the one leading me to my death," Shepard noted. Her Omni came to life a few seconds later, and the amber pane reading 'Voice Only' intruded onto her vision.

"_Operative Lawson has no affiliation with the Shadow Broker. Although she does have numerous ties to the fringe humanist group 'Phoenix'..._" the quarian noted, conversationally even as further bangs issued both from the signal and from the hall opposite Lawson. At the quarian's words, Lawson flinched, and glanced over her shoulder. Shepard adjusted her aim a little more carefully.

"So you're going to hand me over to Phoenix instead of the Shadow Broker. I don't see that as much of an improvement," Shepard noted.

"I left Phoenix years ago. I've spent the last half-decade working with Siwang Weaver. If you don't trust me, then you can stay down here and get killed by the mechs that he reprogrammed to incapacitate you. He always was rubbish with programming," she scowled at him. Shepard looked down to Wilson, then back up at her.

"If he was really a traitor, why didn't you take him for questioning? He had to have been worth something to you alive," Shepard noted.

"Right now, he's not worth the effort," Lawson said, turning away from Wilson, and evidently not caring that Shepard had a gun still pointed at her. She opened her Omni and did some technological crap with it, before shaking her head, and turning back toward Shepard. "The colony's been silent ever since I woke up. That means something unpleasant has happened to it. And I can't send an SOS to Weaver, because somebody's choking up the bandwidth that should be going off-world. So you are going to have to get over your paranoia, and accept that right now, we're all in as much danger as you are. I have no intention to die in a hole under the dirt," Lawson said icily.

Shepard puffed out a snort of annoyance, but slowly lowered her gun. "Fine. I'll trust you... but only as far as I can smell you. Call your quarian and let's get out of here."

Lawson flinched a bit at that, an uneasy look on her face. "That... is a bit of a problem," she began. "Because he's not a..."

The gunshots ended, and something backed through the doorway, entering the chamber of the exit lift. Shepard's entire body pulled in, and her gun rose, shifting whole onto the geth with the sniper-rifle which was now turning toward her. With a shout of a religious blasphemy that her aunt/adoptive-mother was particularly fond of, she fired a shot at it. That one knocked it back a step, and caused its barriers to short. The second, without being able to adjust for the recoil and followed by a blaring warning of a gun no longer willing to fire, sent her round whistling through a preexisting hole in its torso. A hole which... looked like it was spanned by Alliance issue armor. The geth pointed its rifle at the roof, its flashlight head glancing down, then back up at Shepard.

"_No damage detected. Hello, Shepard Commander. You are in peril_."

Shepard gawked at the geth which had just referred to her by name. "...did that geth..."

"Oh, thank the gods. I thought I was hallucinating it," Lawson said quietly, almost below Shepard's ability to hear. But with that out of the way, her expression shifted back to cold professionalism once more. "We have to go."

"Somebody might have survived," Shepard said, still aiming a useless gun at a geth with an obviously working one.

"_We detect no life-signals present within this superstructure. The only living organics, are Shepard Commander and Operative Lawson_," the geth said. Petals that framed its shining eye flared out. "_You are deprived of a thermal clip. You should take our surplus_."

Lawson gave a wary glance to the geth who handed her a 'thermal clip', before moving toward Shepard. She took a step back. "That thing had ample opportunity to kill me. Although I can say your suspicion is well founded. You know what they say about keeping your friends close."

"What do you want with me?" Shepard demanded.

"_We want you to resist the Old Machines. With your death, we thought that our most viable option was lost to us_," The geth said, still holding a clip toward her.

"Excuse me... death? I'm pretty sure I'm not dead," Shepard noted. Lawson rolled her eyes.

"Get onto the elevator, Shepard; I'll explain on the way up." Shepard kept her eye on the geth, even as Lawson moved close and handed something to her. It looked like an over-sized belt-buckle, similar to one that she had hooked onto the belt which held her gun to her very shapely hip. "Personal barrier generator. Without your armor, you're probably going to need one," Lawson explained.

"Alright. No dodging my questions. And right now I've got a big one," Shepard said, as the lift began to ascend. "...death?"

"Yes," Lawson said. "I'm the director of Xinsheng, and I spent the last two years piecing you back together after your death over Alchera."

"Hold on a second. Wouldn't I remember something as... significant... as my own death?" Shepard asked.

"_Long term memories are created by the conversion of short term electrical impulse transmission into permanent neural connection. Remembering the point at which neural connection ceases is, in organics, a practical impossibility_," the geth said, still holding that clip toward Shepard.

Shepard blinked for a few second. "But I'm the Avatar," she stressed. "If I die, then the next Avatar is born. I _wasn't_ dead."

"Your body temperature was a hundred K and your brain stopped functioning months before we found you. By any metric that matters, you were dead," Lawson said clinically.

"But I can still..." Shepard shook her head, and then flexed a hand, to a sphere of fire appearing in her palm. "I _would have_ come back an airbender, and I..." she just didn't know how to put how impossible this was into words.

"This isn't something that I can explain. Not because of time constraints – this lift will take a while because the damned thing travels like a nervous elcor – but because I honestly don't have an answer for you. If you can still bend all four elements, you're still the Avatar. How that lasted after your clinical death, I can't tell you. You'd need to talk to somebody who knows more about the workings of the soul than I do," Lawson said.

"...months before you found me. That's impossible. My crew would have..."

"The Normandy was destroyed by the Collectors," Lawson interrupted again, once again leaving Shepard agape.

"No..."

"If you want, you can visit the memorial Weaver set up on its remains, some day," Lawson said with a roll of blue eyes. "Quite a few of the crew made it off alive. And quite a few didn't."

Shepard let her gun drop, from where it was _still_ pointed at the geth. "But... two years?"

"Yes. The current year is 3585. Samsara has dumped almost unlimited resources into you, so Weaver obviously wanted you alive pretty badly. You almost _killed the company_, Shepard. You'd better be worth his investment."

"Samsara?" Shepard asked. Lawson's face pulled in, concern replacing detachment.

"Do you not know what Samsara is?" she asked.

"_Reconstruction of an organic mind is doubtless an inexact process. Memories are an extremely lossy storage medium; there is likely a loss in resolution comparable to moderate-to-severe brain damage_," the geth said, _still_ holding the clip toward her. Shepard reached over and grabbed the thing so it'd stop doing that. Its hand dropped back down to its side, but it kept watching her, with that one, glowing eye.

Lawson sighed, then opened her Omni. "I hoped I wouldn't need to do this. Alright. What _do_ you remember?"

"Broad question, Lawson," Shepard asked. "And by the way: Lawson?"

She let out a sigh of exasperation. "Don't get me started," she shook her head. "Alright. Where were you born?"

"Mindoir," Shepard said. She glanced away. "I know they rebuilt the colony after the Batarians raided it but... it's never the same."

"And your service history in the Alliance Navy–" Lawson began, only to have Shepard cut her off.

"Basic, a tour in the Traverse, fast-tracked into the N7 program. Then, Torfan. We all know what happened after that," Shepard said, leaning against the rail as the lift continued to sloth its way up.

"Good. Your old memories are intact," Lawson said. "We were afraid that something would have been... lost... despite our best efforts."

"Alright, here's my question," Shepard asked. She pointed at the geth. "What. The. Fuck."

"I'm as in the dark as you are. I didn't know they could speak until fifteen minutes ago," Lawson said, pointedly not looking at it.

"_Geth were always created to be capable of verbal interface by the creators. Communication between geth, however, is much more efficient in data-stream. You converse at the speed of your nerves, and your ability to create sounds. Geth converse at the speed of light_," the geth said.

"I'm not done with that, but since _you_ can't provide answers, I'll go back to the ones that you can. Why can't I shoot? Why can't I do any bending which isn't more than the shit they teach to six-year-olds?"

"Bending and riflery are both actions imprinted in muscle-memory," Lawson explained. "We had to regrow your muscles and the nerves connecting to them. Whatever muscle-memory you have was likely erased in the service of you having muscles and nerves to work with at all."

"Great. I have to relearn everything," Shepard muttered in sarcasm.

"Retrain. Not relearn. It shouldn't take more than a few weeks to get your body following your brain again," Lawson said.

"Yeah, that makes me feel a lot better," Shepard muttered. She rubbed at her neck, and her next question became obvious. "Alright. This? Why do I have an amp stuck into my skull?"

"Even in the condition it was when we got it, there was a significant amount of encapsulated Eezo in your brain. I took a judgment call and decided that having you at your absolute utmost would be the intent, if we could bring you back to life at all. After all, you did give us enough false-starts," she rolled her eyes. Shepard should have probably asked what she meant by that, but at the moment, her questions were a lot more immediate.

"But the... never mind. Wait. The Normandy, it can't have been..." Shepard trailed off, as the lift let out a quiet thud, and they stopped ascending. The room was darkened, but the geth's flashlight head gave ample light to see by. And ample light for the geth to pick off a mech which was unfolding upward, a gun in its hand. The geth did so without hesitation or a word spoken, then returned to looking around the room, its rifle pointed at the ground.

"I'm afraid so," Lawson said, even if she hardly sounded sympathetic. "The review logs are something you can go over later. As for the survivors, they've moved on. To them, and to the galaxy, you're _dead_. Normandy SR1 is no more. Now please focus on the present while..." she paused, waving her Omni toward the garage door. It started to ratchet up slowly, not in keeping with the slick, if bullet-riddled, high-tech of the facility below. "...while we try to prevent the wholesale disappearance of every human colony in the Terminus." Shepard pointed her own Omni light around, and noted a lot of grease stains and a few burns around the place. And a surprising amount of nearly bald tires. Lawson started to walk outside, into the quiet of the night.

Shepard took a breath, and purged it. So many questions, so little time. At least now she had somebody who bothered to try to answer. The Avatar gave a glance behind her as she exited the building into a loading area surrounded by a fence and barbed wire, of all archaic devices. The lot was also home to a number of rusty-looking industrial vehicles, all of them ground-based. The sign over the door read 'Shin and Sheng's Economy Tire'. Well, as fronts went, that wasn't half bad. "Alright. Questions about my crew later. Doubts about whether your 'everybody in the Terminus is doomed', also later. I do have on thing that I'd like to know, though. What's a Collector?"

"A very long story, and one that doesn't have a satisfactory answer I'm afraid," Lawson said, as she slashed through the fence into the parking lot with an Omniblade. "All we know about them is that they were responsible for the destruction of the Normandy, and that they can't be found, unless they _want_ to be found."

"I don't like being in the dark about this," Shepard noted.

"Do you think that I do?" Lawson asked. She moved to an aircar and opened its trunk. She pulled out what looked like a Softsuit and pressed it toward Shepard. "Put this on. Its generators will stack with that one, and you're worth a lot more than I am right now. Now get in; the colony's five minutes away by air, but I wouldn't recommend walking."

"Just one more question," Shepard begged. Lawson paused before entering her car, her hip cocked and a fist pressed against it in annoyance. Shepard pointed to the geth which was placidly following them. "Seriously, _what the fuck_?"

"_This platform has minimal space requirements. We can help you_," the geth offered.

"I'm not sure I want a geth watching my back, all things considered," Lawson pointed out. Shepard, though, looked at it. It just looked back at her. She gave it a glance, up and down; it mimicked her. She tilted her head. The geth did, too.

"Bring him," Shepard said. Lawson's brow furrowed. "I can't shoot for shit right now. A sniper will be invaluable. And if he kills me again, you can just put me back together," Shepard noted with a roll of her eyes.

"It's never that simple," Lawson said. Shepard kicked the door release, and it swung up and out. She motioned into the back, and the geth indeed stepped past the passenger seat, before folding itself into a shape not much larger than a luggage bag. Lawson stared at it for a few moments, then scoffed and got behind the wheel – physically displacing Shepard to do so.

"Hey! I was..."

"You're in a state of physical shock and your muscle memory is non-existent. And I've read about how _you_ drive," Lawson added.

"_We recovered the remnants of an M35 Mako Infantry Fighting Vehicle from a recently erupted megavolcano on the surface of Therum_," the geth in the backseat – yup, still weird – noted. "_It listed its structural integrity as 'compromised by repeated impacts and unsafe deceleration, caused by pilot __Shepard Commander'_."

Shepard looked back at the folded geth. "You pulled my old ride out of a volcano?"

"_We were not able to find the forward section of the second M35 Mako Infantry Fighting Vehicle issued to Shepard Commander. Only the rear portion was available on Ilos_," the geth noted.

Shepard's brow drew down. "How long have you been following me?"

"_The aftermath of the destruction of the Thorian on Feros. We have also visited Eden Prime, Terra Nova, Virmire, and twenty three other uninhabited or marginally colonized planets_."

"And why are you putting so damned much attention on me?" Shepard asked.

"_You fought the Old Machines. You destroyed the Resplendent Sovereign of Nazara,_" the geth answered.

Shepard turned, facing forward as the car shot along the terrain, just above the level of the stunty trees that littered this planet... whichever planet this was... and the material of prefabricated buildings began to show through the forest and hills in the distance. "Lawson."

"Shepard?"

"What are the chances that all of this is just one massively strange dream?" she asked.

"Not good. Now put on your armor before something shoots you."

* * *

"And here's to the man of the hour, the biggest meat-head ever to throw down with a krogan and live," a particularly drunk Alliance soldier said, leaning off the man in question. "Vega, you are one crazy son of a bitch."

"Yeah, yeah," he said, a smirk on his face. "Although, you left out the best part."

"Oh, I'm dying to hear this," Vega's commander, Captain Toni, said, where he sat with the glass of scotch he'd been nursing for the last three hours.

"Yeah, that Blood Pack asshole, he was running with a whole swarm of vorcha," Vega said, hunching down as though passing conspiracy with the soldiers around him. "Now, fighting a krogan, hand to hand, yeah, that's a special kinda crazy. But it takes balls like a krogan to dive into a swarm. They might not look like much, but those vorcha... man, they can take a hit."

"And the set up..." Toni said blithely.

"So I'm running down this bastard, after he's blown the colony's barriers to shit and gone. And I know that if I dive into the vorcha, I'm lunch. So I do the first thing that comes to my mind," Vega said, his lips pulling into a grin. "I challenged that turtle-lizard to a duel. Knife to knife."

"You didn't," the new-hire on the other side of Vega said, leaning back.

"Oh yeah, and I was whoopin' him, too. They say that a krogan can pretty much live forever, but this guy Weyrloc Archuk, he wasn't showin' it. So we tussle for a while. I'm sayin' maybe fifteen minutes, half an hour. And then, I get the advantage..."

"Advantage my ass, Vega, he had you beat to pulp. The only reason you're sitting on that chair and not getting mailed back to Earth in a box is because I popped the bastard's head while you were fighting him," the unit's sniper pointed out. "And fighting him poorly, I might add."

"Hey, I was holding my own," Vega said, trying to hold his pride.

"Oh... Well, what's the cause for celebration, then?" the new hire asked.

"Finally rooted out the last of the vorcha. Man, those things breed like crazy. Even if they're a couple months old, they can put a bite on ya'," Vega said, holding up one arm, showing the bandaged wound where a juvenile, feral vorcha had bit right through his armor. Well, the fact that that the little elbow-leech got him right at the joint probably helped. "As I see it, that's the cause for a drink of celebration."

"Not having a wave of insane, starving vorcha overrun Fehl Prime sounds like a good thing to me," Captain Toni noted. He took a last sip of his scotch, then thought again, drained the glass, and set it onto the bar. "Well, gentlemen, don't do anything too insane. I expect you all ready for patrols at oh-six-hundred."

"Aye aye, Bridge," Vega said with a salute. Toni rolled his eyes, but didn't gainsay Vega's nickname. He glanced aside, and noted the one alien that stuck out like a sore thumb in here. "Hey! Zek! You've been makin' a ghost of yourself lately!"

The quarian flinched when Vega said his name. He was a nervous little guy. Then again, when your life depended on not sitting on a tack, that kind of thing probably happened. "I've been... keeping busy. You know. Repairing things."

"Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that," Vega said. "That car you fixed two weeks ago? It ain't flying. I thought you guys are supposed to do _magic_ with engines."

Zek scoffed. "Not all of us have the magic touch," he told the much larger human. Vega guffawed, and clapped the quarian on the back. Almost pitched him into the pool-table, doing so.

"Ah, I'm just razzin' ya," Vega declared. "You gotta loosen up a bit, bean. Otherwise you're gonna break somethin'."

"...who's bean?" Zek asked.

"You are."

"...oh," Zek said, and then took the first available opportunity depart both Vega's side, and his eyeshot. Fortunate for the quarian, Vega was in the mood for some more arkhi, as beer just didn't do it for him. And while fermented milk was a weird brew, it was homey. That they had it here at all spoke to the Dakongese population, rather than any thing else. The quarian vanished from Vega's mind, as he raised a glass that looked filled with water – but kicked like an Ostrich Horse – above his head.

"To the squad! Toughest bunch of bastards I know!" he declared. "Who's like us?"

"Damn few, and they're all dead!" the cry was raised up by those around him, and he dropped the booze down the hatch in a single draw. Just the way it was meant to be drunk. As he turned toward the bar, glasses in hand, he noticed an asari, fiddling with a straw in her own glass.

"Hey there, gorgeous; here for the atmosphere or the adventure?" Vega asked, his winning smirk firmly on his face.

The asari gave him a glance, and she shook her head. "Nope."

"What? Nope what? You can't just give me a one word answer," Vega contended. The asari looked like she was about to snap something, but she reined herself in. So instead, with a sigh, she leaned slightly toward him, dark blue eyes looking up under her brows at him.

"Don't. Not with me. I'm not worth the trouble, trust me," she said, and went back to fiddling with her drink.

"Yeah, well, maybe I like trouble," he said. She gave him a glance, and he backed off, hands before him in an innocent gesture, "but I can tell when I'm not wanted. But can I at least get a name out of the angry lady from the bar?"

"Who said I was angry?"

"Everything about you," Vega said. She gave a breath of a laugh, and a smirk came to her face for a moment.

"Anette," she said. She then rose. "I should leave you to your celebration."

"Whatever you say, Jimo," he gave her a shrug.

"..._Jimo_?" she asked, but Vega was already turning away. His uncle taught him better than to get pushy on women who didn't want pushing, and even then, to make damned good and sure that they _wanted_ pushing. After all, the night was young, and so was Vega. And if he could have this kind of day for the rest of his deployment on this ass-end-of-nowhere rock, he'd be a damned happy man.

* * *

The air-car landed at what was obviously a landing pad – if not a very big one – that took up a portion of the open section of the terrain around the colony of Freedom's Progress. Shepard was the first one out, trying to get her legs to stop their occasional tingling and to shake the restlessness that plagued her, even as she had to fight off drowsiness and nausea both. Whatever was wrong with Shepard was _really_ starting to annoy her.

Maybe it was just that coming back from the dead was a bit of a taxing process. Figures.

"_We will take a more advantageous position_," the geth noted as it unfolded and left the air-car, pelting away toward a pre-fab building nearby. Then again, since all of the buildings were squat and sameish prefabs, that was just what the two women were doing as well.

"New question," Shepard said, as she tried to get her gun into a position that felt even a little bit natural in her hands. Lawson turned toward her, flicking on her barrier-generator to a hum and a flicker of blue light coating her. "Where are all the people?"

"From this point on, I have no answers that you can't figure out for yourself," Lawson said. "Come on. We need to find what's blocking our FTLC so I can contact Weaver. Or _anyone_."

There was something about Lawson which rubbed Shepard wrong. Maybe it was the fact that she was a former terrorist. Maybe it was the fact that she was palling around with a _goddamned geth_. Maybe it was just that, in a way that Shepard couldn't adequately classify, she looked wrong. Damned pretty, yes, but wrong. Still, despite Shepard feeling like week-old-shit, she took point, pounding the haptic door-control to the nearest prefab. It opened to what looked like a tiny docking authority, with a few computers in cubicles, and a coffee machine sitting contently in the corner. But there was no sign of people. The only sign that there had been anything here at all was that all of the cubicle chairs were tipped over.

"Shepard," Lawson said, holding a hand toward the coffee machine.

"You're reading my mind," Shepard took the carafe and dumped it into a nearby mug. But she paused when the coffee still steamed. "Right. Still warm."

"You weren't going to drink it, were you?" Lawson asked, her expression somewhere between disbelief and disgust.

"I have a hangover. Go to hell," Shepard noted. She sniffed the coffee, and it did indeed smell coffeeish, but she would heed the words of the woman who had supposedly brought her back to life, and left the mug where it sat. She took a breath, then glanced back. "They were taken with barely any fight at all. Like they were all gassed or something."

Lawson nodded, and pulled a resperator out of gods-only-knew-where, slipping it over her face, before turning on her Omni. After a minute or so, she shook her head. "There's no impurities in the air, no sedatives or tranquilizers, no muscle-relaxants or hallucinogens... The air is clean."

"Then why so easy?" Shepard asked. She tapped the button to the room beyond, and turned to see another 'Pantu' robot turning toward her. It managed to outdraw her, even though she had her gun forward, and squeezed a few shots at her. She fired back, and only after her third did she blow its gun-arm off. The thing slumped after that, before there came a buzzing, followed by a bang as it exploded for no reason that Shepard could see. Shepard breathed deep, feeling the sweat plastering her hair to her brow.

Damn, it was hard to shoot when your hands wouldn't stay still. And damn, it was tense to get shot at when you couldn't shoot back.

"Are you hurt?" Lawson asked.

"So touched that you care," Shepard muttered. She then glanced back. "No bullet holes... But the Mechs are attacking humans..."

"They must have been reprogrammed to attack anything that moves," Lawson said leerily. "But not by Wilson. He didn't do this."

"And they didn't depopulate Freedom's Progress," Shepard confirmed. She motioned Lawson forward, through the darkness and the quiet. She would have said 'too quiet', but after she had made it down the first 'street' which was simply compacted dirt between the port authority and the first dwelling, there was a burst of gunfire from somewhere ahead. Then, just as faintly, a second, and the sound of something falling.

"One thing at a time, Shepard," Lawson said. "If that was a survivor, it's not anymore."

"I'm guessing you didn't like your neighbors very much," Shepard noted. Lawson gave her a cold look, but didn't respond to her barb. Shepard leaned into the domicile, and took a breath. There was an odd smell in the air. Something between old feces and disinfectant, lingering over the smell of roast-peef. Shepard took a few steps in, and peered into the kitchen. There was still food, half-eaten, on the table. One of the plates was on the floor. Other than that...

"Whatever happened, it happened quickly. And _very_ recently," Lawson noted.

"You just say everything that comes into your head, don't you?"

"Somebody has to, to ensure that you're paying attention. You weren't exactly renowned on your ability to absorb information _before_ you died, after all," Lawson answered. Shepard set her jaw, but didn't snark back. Mostly because however unpleasant this woman was, she wasn't wrong. The cold air, and the howl of some animal native to this planet in the distance, drew a shiver from the Avatar, before she returned to the 'street'.

"Who would take _these_ colonists? And why? This isn't batarian work, I know that," Shepard said. There was _far_ too little devastation for it to be the four-eyes'.

"I'm more concerned about how they managed to depopulate the colony in hours without a word being whispered to the rest of the galaxy," Lawson countered. Which also had a point.

"_Shepard Commander; aerial drones are approaching your position. Recommend find cover_," the geth advised calmly.

"_Drones_? Is this a colony or a firebase?" Shepard asked. Lawson answered her by tackling her to the ground. And Shepard, for all she was not one to enjoy being tackled, appreciated it, because a second or so later, a rocket streaked past at Shepard's-head's level, blasting a chunk out of the port authority wall when it landed.

Lawson was already rolling up behind a crate of ready-to-assemble furniture and squeezing off shots at the machines that floated in the air, slowly circling to launch more missiles at them. Shepard just rolled onto her belly and took shots. About as effective as her firebending, right now. Every missed bullet drew more and more consternation from Shepard, even as Miranda managed to bring one of the rocket-launching trio down, just before the other shot her box and blasted it to scrap. Good gods, it was like before her first day at Basic! She'd gone into the military a better shooter than this!

Even as the other turned to redesignate Shepard a target, it exploded into scrap and bits with the sound of a hypervelocity slug sheering through it. The Avatar didn't even see Lawson bursting the battery of the third, because her world had taken to spinning. She tried to fight the nausea, but it was too much, and too powerful. It was fortunate that Shepard was already on the ground, because all she had the will to do right now was push her chest off of the dirt and dry-heave until strands of bile dripped out.

"Shepard? Are you alright? Were you–"

A shock of green light, followed by a sensation of screaming, voices rising against the sky.

Machines, descending; burning through the atmosphere, easily two kilometers tall. The blare of a horn that would drive away the tides.

Billions dying. Machines rising from their ashes. Machines which killed yet more billions, to a cycle of death and unholy rebirth.

The tearing of flesh, as metal was pushed rudely into its place. Races dying. Civilizations, burning.

The Reapers, unmaking the Prothean Empire.

Then, a lurch, and the vision fell silent. A single Prothean, not running in terror or screaming in agony as the Reapers' spawn ravaged them. He stared straight at Shepard, a scowl on his grey-blue face. A blink, looking her up and down.

"You live again," Javik declared. "As I suspected."

Shepard gawked up at the Prothean VI, and spat the bile off of her tongue. "What are..."

"Reintegration is successful. Do not die again," Javik ordered.

A fresh lurch.

"– hit by something? Damn it, where is my medigel?" Lawson finished her thought in the fraction of a second it took for the whole vision to push its way back into Shepard's skull. That about cinched it. Shepard had died. Spirits couldn't make a Host of a corpse, after all.

"I'm alright," Shepard wheezed, slowly pushing her way to her feet. In a way, she did feel better. Her limbs, slightly less alien. Her hands still shook like leaves and her head still pounded, but the unreality was parting, and the numbness, fading. "I just... I'm fine. Finer. Whatever."

"_Does Shepard Commander require assistance?_" the geth asked.

"No!" Lawson snapped. "Just keep watching for drones."

"_Acknowledged_."

"That's still damned weird," Shepard noted. And the faintest ghost of an agreeing smirk told her that Lawson felt much the same way. She took a breath, one that stank of vomit that she hadn't even had to spew, that burned from tongue to gut. "Whatever happened... we're not going to find it here. We should find that gunfire. Even if there aren't survivors, there might be clues."

"_We will assume a more useful position_," the geth offered.

"And even if we don't find out what happened, we still need that FTLC," Lawson noted. "But if there are survivors... We'll do what we can," Shepard had agreement on that part. It was Lawson, though, who took point from that spot forward.

* * *

A natural. That was what she called her. Well, to be more exact, Shepard had called her 'a natural the likes of Avatar Korra'. While that meant that Tali'Zorah vas Neema was able to gain the basics and mid-level techniques of waterbending faster than just about anybody alive, to learn enough that when she returned to her people, she would have something worth teaching, it was still a damned sight short of what the discipline was capable of. Still, she'd taught for a solid year, before her expertise was exhausted, and her students started teaching. Thus, waterbending spread as wildfire through the Flotilla, ironic an image as that could be. But at the moment, Tali would have given up all of that to be just a little bit better at the reason she'd wanted to be a waterbender in the first place.

"The antibody injectors are fused shut. You're going to have to give her her dose manually," Tali said.

"What about the bleeding?" Uola'Gaar vas Tonbay asked. The water that glowed in Tali's tridactyl hands should have been all the answer required, but obviously not.

"I'll worry about the bleeding, you keep her from dying of infection!" Tali snapped.

"I told you we should have gone back to the fleet, and brought in a proper marine contingent!" Prazza'Vael vas Neema snapped, thrusting an accusatory digit into Tali's face. She grabbed it and bent it backward, enough that he would flinch back and stop crowding her. And the whole while, there was a little indicator in the lower right corner of Tali's vision that told her that her stress-levels were uncharacteristically high.

Typical when Prazza was around, really.

"Stay out of my way! I'm trying to save Juna's life," Tali said. She shook her head. "There are dozens of those mechs out there. Maybe hundreds. We number _five_. And that number _will_ fall if you do something stupid again, Prazza."

Prazza stewed inside his encounter suit. It was probably lucky that she couldn't see his face, because it was probably indigo with outrage. He was always such a bosh'tet, Prazza was.

"I'm... fine. Just find Veetor..." Juna'Calis vas Neema tried to put on a brave face – tricky for a race which didn't make a habit of showing each other their faces – but her weak voice and shaking hands made a mockery of her show of resilience. Much as her family had reputations of being effectively invisible, that didn't help when your enemy had motion sensors.

"We're not leaving without you, cousin," Veelix pointed out. Tali pulled her hands away.

"That should be the worst of it, but she'll still need more attention when we get back to the ship... or better yet, the Flotilla," Tali said. The wound had been shut, but that just meant that whatever blood was still hemorrhaging was doing so internally. "Veelix? Uola? Take Juna back to the shuttle. I need to find Veetor."

"I'm fine. Just go," Juna said, waving her away.

"Don't be foolish, cousin; you're lying in about half your own blood," Veelix coached. He turned to Tali. "I'll bring her back. Uola, find your friend."

"I've got movement!" Prazza snapped, pointing past Tali's shoulder. It was a testiment to the training that she'd gotten aboard the Normandy that in a single flowing motion, she had slid behind a kitchen counter, pulled her shotgun, and had it pointing at the door leading into this prefabricated house. The others were perhaps as quick, but there was something about waterbending, learning it – _living_ it – that made this sort of thing easy as breathing.

But Tali's aim shifted slightly when the target on the business end of Mynsc – her new favorite shotgun – was not an awkward batch of metal and plastic, but a human woman in a skin-tight white cat-suit. Tali's brow furrowed down, looking over the human; she was very pale, contrasting the blackness of her hair, and had eyes like a stereotypical asari, but she just... looked odd, despite her excellent proportionality. Having what amounted to some sort of sex-suit clinging said proportionality, while making her seem less of a combatant despite the gun in her hand, didn't help the males amongst the quarians from losing focus.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?" Prazza demanded, after a moment that he obviously spent gaping.

"I should be asking the same question of you," the woman answered Prazza. She had an accent very much like the Normandy's doctor had, back when Tali was still aboard that ship. Back when there was still a Normandy to be aboard. After an annoyed glance to the idiot who was threatening the only human to be alive in this colony, she looked back toward the woman... and then, to the other woman who was entering in behind her.

Tali, honestly, gaped for a moment herself.

She was backing into the room, with a sort of gesture given, possibly to a third party or possibly to the woman already in view, but when she turned, the recognition was instant. The coppery-hair was the same, if longer than Tali remembered; she had the same pallor and the same freckles. The major change was that there were furrows, rough edged and inflamed on her face and neck, and her green eyes had a sort of reddish back-light to them. "Shepard?" Tali said, rising up from her cover. Shepard locked her eyes on her, and the woman who'd apparently punched a Reaper in the soul blanched, and her face went slack.

"Tali? Is that you?" she asked.

"How is this possible?" Tali put her shotgun to her back. She took a step toward the two, and while the other woman tried to bar her passage, Shepard peeled her aside with one hand and a warning look. It was telling that Tali was now almost as tall as Shepard herself.

"It isn't possible!" Prazza snapped. "Avatar Shepard is dead, has been for years!"

Oh, that little stress-indicator was throbbing in Tali's HUD, but she ignored it. "I don't understand," Tali said. "Everybody said that you – gurk..."

Tali was cut off when the human pulled her into a bear-hug. Incandescent eyes went wide inside her protective helm as she tried to really parse what Shepard was doing. "By the gods, you don't know how good it is to see you..." Shepard said into the side of her head. And while Tali honestly did reciprocate the sentiment, she was more confused than anything else. Finally, Shepard let Tali loose, and she took a step back. The smile on Shepard's face was uneven, maybe even a little sick, but more hopeful than Tali had... honestly... _ever_ seen on the human's face.

"Shepard, everybody said you were dead. I read that they're already looking for the new Avatar," Tali said.

"I was only mostly dead. Try finding _that_ on a government form," Shepard said with a chuckle. She took in the others with her. "Alright, new question. Why are there five quarians in this guy's living room?"

"What, you assume it isn't my house?" Tali asked, fists on hips. Shepard stared at her, then reached over to the kitchen table, grabbed the sandwich there, and bit into it. After a few chews, to the look of annoyance by the other woman, Shepard shook her head.

"This isn't turian-food."

"_How_ would you know that?" the other human asked.

"Ate a dextro-burger on a dare once. Almost gave me kidney failure," Shepard said. She leaned toward Tali. "It's the texture."

"It's Shepard, Prazza. Put your damned gun down," Tali said, glancing back to the only of them still leveling weapons at Tali's no-longer-deceased friend and mentor. She faced Shepard once more. "We came here so that Uola could visit her friend Veetor; he's on his pilgrimage now, so we had to come to him, and when we landed, there was nobody here, and the mechs all opened fire on us."

"Do you think he's even still alive?" the other human asked.

"Why should you care?" Prazza demanded. "I don't see an 'Alliance' mark on your clothes. If you could even call that clothing!"

Stress indicator, calling for action. But _restraint_, Tali, restraint. The other human looked just as annoyed, fittingly. "My name is Miranda Lawson, and I work with Samsara. We're trying to find a way to stop these colonies from disappearing."

"Well, that's a relief," Tali said. Lawson's brow drew down. "I thought that somebody turned Shepard into a robot or something."

"Robot? Who's a robot?" Shepard asked.

"Your eyes are glowing and you came back from the dead," Tali pointed out. "Liara even said that she watched you crash down to Alchera from the corpse of the Normandy!"

"This is not the time to reminisce!" Lawson cut in. "Veetor is probably the only one left who was present when this colony went dark. Which means that Samsara needs whatever intelligence that he can offer."

"After this, we're bringing him back to the Flotilla," Uola declared. "Pilgrimage or no, the poor lad's been through enough!"

"Look, we can fight over who keeps the quarian later," Shepard said. "Where is he?"

"Why should we trust you with Veetor's life?" Prazza demanded. "We've already had one of ours shot just trying to get _close_ to where he _could_ be!"

Shepard's face pulled into annoyance and derision. "I'm the Avatar. I can handle this," she said. And sounded a lot more like the old Shepard that Tali remembered, honestly. The humans walked past the quarians, giving wide-berth to them. Wise, because Prazza was still being a _bosh'tet_ and holding a rifle on them. "I'm going to go save Veetor from whatever horrible fate has befallen him. After that, we... We should catch up."

"I think I'd like that," Tali said, quietly. Shepard flashed just a hint of a smile, before nodding abuptly, and pressing a thumb to her ear.

"Move up, and _for the love of the gods_ stay out of sight," Shepard ordered a yet-unseen third-party. "We've got enough problems today."

When Shepard and Lawson left the prefab, moving toward where the sound of heavy-gunfire was coming with increasing frequency, Prazza finally held his rifle up, finger in trigger. "Tsk. She doesn't look so tough."

Tali decided to bow to her darker nature, and alleviate that stress warning indicator by cuffing Prazza upside his head. But, and she would never say this in front of Prazza, she sort of agreed with him. Shepard didn't look right, didn't sound right... Tali wasn't completely sure that this was, completely, Shepard.

* * *

"_Shepard Commander, we detect creator life-signs in the area two hundred fifty meters from your position_."

"That's not going to be a problem, is it?" Shepard asked.

"_No. We do not initiate aggression against the creators._"

"Could have fooled me," Shepard muttered, but this time, not into the airwaves.

"It's a good thing you didn't tell the quarians about our... guardian angel with a sniper rifle," Lawson said, eyeing the drones which had been shot out of the sky long before they reached targeting range on the two humans below. "There's no telling how they would have taken it."

"No, there's a _perfect_ telling of how they'd take it; with shotguns and violence," Shepard pointed out.

"You shouldn't have promised the quarians the witness. If we can't get his unbiased and untarnished information, we're going to be exactly where we've been as the thousands of human colonists disappear without a trace. We should bring him in."

"Not the time to be having this conversation," Shepard said. It did feel good to know that at least one of her old squad got out. And if she hadn't had to run and gun like this, she probably would have sat down, put a pot of coffee on, and went in depth. Alas, for the opportunities they were denied.

Lawson let out a hiss as she glanced around a corner. "Shepard, look at this."

Shepard followed after the scantily-clad scientist, and raised a brow when she beheld that the ground was littered with tiny bodies. Some were not much larger than grubs, but others reached the size of small birds, albeit all of them insects. Shepard nudged one with her boot, looking at the hole punched through its abdomen. It was obviously dead. And there were _thousands_ of them. "Anything that moves, huh?" Shepard asked.

"There must have been a swarm of these things. But what would that have to do with the abductions? Or the quarian?"

There were more cracks of heavy-weapon fire, coming from an area not far ahead. They were obscured from seeing it, though, by the buildings in the way. "Oi! What do you see up there?" Shepard asked.

"_Unable to comply; we are not in a useful position_," the geth answered flatly. The blasting, and the crashing of prefabs losing their structural integrity, had Shepard both intrigued and a little worried.

"What's the biggest thing you've got up here?" Shepard asked.

"A Tu-Wei-Liu; I had it brought up for repair after some idiot broke it's shoulder actuator with a ballpoint pen," Lawson said. "Twenty tonnes displacement, a rail-gun from a Mako, and a HEAT missile launcher."

"...seriously? Who were you expecting to invade? The batarians?" Shepard asked.

"I wasn't about to take chances on the most important scientific project of my generation, not with procedure and _definitely not_ with security!" Lawson snapped, her eyes flashing.

"And the really important question... why hasn't it killed what it's shooting at yet?" Shepard finished. Lawson's annoyance slowly transformed into alarm. The two of them rounded a corner in the 'street' that ran deeper into the box-canyon. Through a sliver perhaps ten-centimeters across, Shepard could see something massive and metallic stomping forward, firing with unkind rhythm and without cease. It passed out of their ability to see it quickly, though. "Come on," Shepard said. She made it about four steps before she had to stop, and lean against the wall.

"Shepard?"

"I'm fine. Just give me a second," Shepard shook her head, trying to get the wave of nausea to subside. For a wonder and a miracle, it did. She hefted her pistol, confident that something that big would be damned hard to miss, even with her current piss-poor capabilities. They rounded the corners, one at a time, finding a lot of trashed mechs, lying in the dirt... Or impaled into the walls of the prefabs.

Lawson stayed quiet, but Shepard took the daring move of glancing around the final corner. There was a warehouse at the end of this street, and that warehouse marked the end of the line. The Tu-Wei-Liu was stomping toward it, firing at something that was well short of that edifice. But as Shepard watched, there was a meaty crunch, and the machine staggered back. It managed to hold its balance on its two great and stompy feet, but only just.

Then, a new crash, and a sound that Shepard had grown to know and love with Jack in her squad; the sound of a biotic detonation. The blast was followed by the crunching of glass and the shrieking of metal, and the massive machine, it _at least_ four meters tall, was sent flying toward Shepard's end of the road, before slamming into and through the prefab, and bringing the structure down atop it. Shepard blinked a few times, then looked down the street. There was a great cloud of dust, slowly descending back to the ground... but whatever had caused that impact was nowhere to be seen.

"I'm not a great believer in coincidence, are you?" Shepard asked.

"I'm standing next to the Avatar. Coincidence is your middle name," Lawson pointed out.

"Pft, I wish," Shepard said. She stepped out from the corner, gun forward. Too much of this was worrisome, and she had enough problems just keeping her weapon pointed the way she wanted it. She started down that street. It couldn't have been the quarian... Well, it _could_ have been, if Veetor was anything like that twitchy guy from X57, but... "Keep an eye out. Something biotic is nearby."

"Great," Lawson said flatly. "While it hits me with a Singularity, I'll throw snowballs at it."

"Waterbender?"

"To my detriment," Lawson answered, following Shepard down that street, her own pistol far steadier than Shepard's was.

"I don't know. It's pretty handy to smash through barriers like they were paper," Shepard noted.

"Who lets the enemy fight that close these days?" Lawson asked. Shepard glanced back to her, and when she did, her eyes caught something moving, just in the shadows... far closer than Shepard would have both liked and believed possible.

"What th–"

Shepard was cut off by a tridactyl fist to her chest that sent her flying backward. Even as she flew, that arm – and the being it was attached to – flowed toward the waterbender and hurled her through a window into a building nearby to the woman's shocked scream. Shepard shook the stars out of her vision, and sat up.

And she saw a vision straight out of history.

There was a pulse of blasting and sickly blue-green light, the kind of shade one would get by mixing turian and salarian blood together. The light gathered up, from where it already shone through the cracks and joints of the thing before her, until it cast aside its one remaining arm and hand, to the formation of a piscine mandala upon its back. However, after the mandala manifested wholly, and the light reached its apex, the mandala dissolved away, leaving the fecal-brown creature standing on clawed feet, staring at her with three remaining eyes that glowed with unpleasant light.

"**The Avatar lives? Well, ****that's**** an unexpected opportunity**," it declared, its voice entirely not what Shepard would have expected from a Prothean Husk.

The thing stomped toward her, letting the stump dribble a greyish fluid in its wake as it moved. One of the four eyes had been shot out, so that the blue-green light only leaked from three. It had no mouth at all, and its form seemed emaciated compared to the species that it had been hacked out of. Shepard raised her gun, and squeezed of shots. They all hit, for a wonder, but deflected off of a purplish haze that surrounded him. The Prothean Husk reached her and slapped the gun out of her hand, before whipping that arm forward and heaving her up and off the ground by her arm. Shepard swung and kicked it in the face, just because.

**"You have no idea how much difficulty you put me in, Avatar. But this is a problem that ****you can very easily solve. After all, with you ****alive****, your Ascension is at hand**," the Prothean Husk declared.

Shepard knew that she couldn't break free of its grasp, and kicking it wasn't doing nearly enough harm. So she thought of something that probably wasn't going to work, but had to be tried anyway. She started to tear apart the energy inside her body. "You sound like that dead bastard, Sovereign."

"**The Resplendent Sovereign was young, a child in an old galaxy. I have seen twice the years they had. Twice the cycles. I am the **_**Leviathan**_**, and you... are just another link in a chain that stretches back longer than you can imagine**," it declared haughtily.

Shepard had heard enough. She let the energy crash back together, and she offered it the point of one finger. A finger which exploded with electricity, which hurled the Prothean Husk away from her, dropping her to her knees for a moment. She really hadn't expected that to work. Why could she bend lightning, but her fire sucked the proverbial ass? That didn't make any kind of sense!

"Shepard! Get away from it!" Miranda shouted, firing shots down toward it.

"**Oh, you Avatars, always attracting the stupid and the doomed,**" Leviathan laughed. Laughed! Shepard tried to twist her arms through another motion, to cast out another lightning bolt, but a twist of Leviathan's foot caused the ground to hurl itself away from Shepard's stance, and land her on her chest in the dirt. "**Let's see what sort of pitiful allies you've gathered this time**."

Shepard tried to get up, but got a kick to the face for her trouble. She landed this time on her back, as Leviathan finally stopped ignoring the bullets that were pinging off of its barriers, and held out a hand, its fingers crooked. The bullets stopped at once, and Lawson's face showed a level of agony and pain, the gun falling from hands which no longer seemed able to grasp. Leviathan made a drawing-in motion, and Lawson _floated_ out the window toward it. Not so much as a whisper of biotic glow surrounded her.

It was bloodbending her.

Shepard pushed herself to her feet again, and tore the energy apart once more. This time, she bade it run down her fist, and hurled herself at the Husk. It stepped away, easily as a dancer, letting its clawed toe touch her incoming fist. She could feel her electric power being drained from her body, having it flow up Leviathan's leg and into his own, before he twisted in a bound that spun him as a top. When his other foot lashed out with a horrendous kick, it landed with all of the added force of her own lightning bolt, burning at her shoulder and arm even as she felt the bone creak, and she was sent flying – face first – into the side of a prefab.

It finally grabbed ahold of Lawson's face, forcing her to her knees before it. Its once-four-eyed head tilted aside, and the thing let out a growl. "**You unnatural thing, flawed and foolish. You have no use, or place in what is to come**!" Leviathan turned toward Shepard. "**If this is the measure of your allies, then this shall be an easy harvest indeed**!"

Leviathan hurled Lawson aside, and let her crash into a dumpster, which slammed closed with her inside of it. A twist of its single hand bent the metal of the bin, locking her within it. It then turned on Shepard. This time, Shepard lashed out with pure instinct, her hand flicking forward as she had so often seen Jack or Liara do. The biotic Warp, the first that she'd even semi-consciously manifested, bridged the short distance and slammed into Leviathan's chest. The sickly light grew brighter, and it looked down at itself, even as it staggered back one step.

"**Well, that was ****almost**** painful**," Leviathan taunted. It raised that one hand, and clawed its fingers. When it did, a bolt of white-hot flame seared up from its palm. "**How fortunate that where you're going, you're not going to need your arms and legs**."

"Get the fuck away from me," Shepard tried to push herself back.

"**Don't run away. I am your **_**only**_** hope of salvation. I have **_**such sights**_** to show you**," Leviathan promised.

Then, a crack in the air.

Leviathan lurched forward, the light in its eyes flickering as though it blinked, as the purple barrier around it popped like a soap-bubble. Slowly, it turned, toward the prefab roof in the distance. Shepard didn't even have the wherewithal to flinch when the second air-splitting crack sounded, and almost half of Leviathan's head burst backward, to a burst of blue-green light wafting away from the wound. The husk fell backward, but not quite flat on the ground. It turned to her, looking at her with the one eye left to it.

"**If it makes you feel powerful to kill this meager form, enjoy it while you can. I have **_**millions**_**. Its pain is meaningless... and your time is coming**," Leviathan said.

"I've already died once. What more can you possibly threaten me with?" Shepard asked, as she picked up the pistol which had been wedged against the bottom of the prefab.

It laughed at her, then, before the eye started to dim. "**Releasing control...**"

It denied her even the enjoyment of filling its body with holes, as there was a fresh pulse of sickly light, and then the Husk fell to black ashes on the ground. Shepard stared at that uneven pile, then up the rooftop. "...geth?" Shepard asked.

"_Shepard Commander? Do you require further assistance?_" the geth asked.

"You just saved our asses," Shepard noted.

"_Yes_."

"Shepard! Are you alright?" Tali's voice came from the corner.

"_Taking a more evasive position_," the geth said, then his line went dead. Shepard started to walk toward the quarian, who approached with her shotgun at the ready.

"Shepard, are you alright? Did you do that to the machine?" Tali asked, backing away as Shepard limped to the dumpster. She tried to activate an omniblade, but her Omni didn't seem to have that function. So, she sank her fingers into the metal that was twisted into an ad hoc lock, and heaved downward. Usually, metalbending was simple – as long as the metal wasn't particularly dense – but right now, it was like trying to push through super-glue laced mud. Still, she did open the twist enough that the lid could pop open. Tali watched her, confused, the whole time.

Not so confused, though, when Lawson pushed the lid aside and slowly, painfully heaved herself out of its innards.

"Shepard... that was..."

"A Prothean Husk," Shepard interrupted her. Lawson blinked at her.

"Prothean... Shepard that was a _Collector_!" Lawson pointed out, pointing down the street. Then, she paused. "Wait. Where did it go?"

"It self destructed when... I... blew its head in half," Shepard lied. Mostly because anything which meant not having to explain the presence of a geth to a bunch of quarians was a good thing.

"What about Veetor?" Tali asked, looking up the street. Shepard nodded, and left the slightly flabbergasted Lawson in her wake as she followed the quarian to the warehouse. "Veetor? Veetor, can you hear me?"

Shepard leaned toward the door, and could hear mumbling through it. "Tali, the door?" she asked. The quarian nodded, and her Omni glowed briefly. Then, with a whoosh, the door slid open. The warehouse was for the most part empty. Even the freezer units at its back seemed uninhabited. Although, the last two in the line also looked like they weren't installed yet... this colony was either young, or expanding. There was light coming from the foreman's office, though. That drew all attention onward.

Shepard and Tali progressed, side by side, to the door. Shepard gently pushed it open. "Veetor?" she asked.

"_No, monsters will come back. Have to hide. Safe from swarms, safe from monsters. They can't find me... no no no no no..._" the quarian rambled, as its attention flashed between nine different monitors.

"Veetor, what's wrong?" Tali asked. Shepard barred her from moving closer, though. This seemed hinky.

"_No Veetor. Not here. Have to hide from swarms. No Veetor, no swarms..._" Veetor rambled, his shoulders quaking. Shepard looked down, and could see a sizable pool of off-purple blood on the floor.

"Well, I guess we know who was eating all of the bandwidth," Lawson said from Shepard's back, her Omni glowing. Tali took a moment to reach to her and flick a banana peel off of her shoulder. Lawson didn't look appreciative. Shepard sighed. She knew that talking wasn't going to get his attention.

So raised her gun to the monitor at his right-hand, and shot it out.

"Shepard, what are you _doing_?" Tali shouted. Veetor, though, after flinching away from it, turned his chair to face them.

"_Wait... You're not monsters. You survived? How did you survive_?" Veetor asked, his fingers digging into the arms of his chair.

"Who didn't find them?" Tali asked.

"_The monsters... the swarms..._" Veetor said.

"The Prothean Husks," Shepard clarified. Tali's body language implied a 'really, what the hell?' face.

"The Collectors," Lawson continued. Well, if it made her happy. "How did they take everybody without raising so much as an eyebrow, let alone an alarm?"

"_You... you didn't see? I saw. They sent_," he paused, then turned, waving a hand over his keyboard. One of the screens now showed a scene of a human, rigid as though in rigor mortis, being shoved into a pod, while oversized insects wafted about readily and frequently. "_They sent the swarms. They bite you, you freeze. Then the monsters take you away..._"

"It must be some weapon they use to immobilize entire colonies at a swoop," Lawson said. "Shepard, we need to bring him to headquarters for a full debrief."

"What? Are you mad?" Tali asked. She pointed at the blood that dribbled past Veetor's hip. "He's been hurt, he's infected and he's delirious. He needs treatment, _not_ an interrogation."

Shepard sighed. "You said that this," she waved a finger around, indicating the whole colony, "was happening everywhere? And that this is the first time you've got a witness?"

"It is. Until now, we didn't even know the Collectors were involved," Lawson said.

"Veetor probably has intelligence that we need," Shepard said to Tali. She shook her head, reproach in her body language, and turned to Veetor.

"Veetor? Did you make any scans while you were hiding?"

"_Yes... Many scans. They didn't find me, but I did scans. Had to. It was the only way to... to ignore the quiet_," Veetor said, his gaze turned to the floor. He held up his hand, and the omnitool there glowed orange upon it. "I have it all here. I couldn't save anybody. Only hide from those... from the monsters."

Shepard nodded. "Alright. Tali, you take Veetor. Lawson, you get his Omni."

"Will the silence stop? I don't want to hear silence right now," Veetor said quietly.

"I'll bring you back," Tali said, flicking her wrists and having water flow, glowing, over her tridactyl hands. Veetor flinched back, knocking over his chair and backing into a corner. "It's alright, Veetor, I'm just trying to help with where you're hurt."

"They had glowing water. They used it to hurt the man in the armor, when the seeker swarm didn't make him freeze. Instead, they used the water, and made him scream." Veetor said.

"It's not going to hurt, I promise," Tali said.

"_Did you find Veetor, Tali?_" the voice of the abrasive male quarian asked, leaning into the foreman's office. "_Ka'salaah, must there always be humans?_"

"Prazza, shut up," Tali snapped almost automatically. She pressed a glowing hand to the breach in Veetor's suit, and slowly pulled his Omni off with her other. Shepard took it from her hand.

"Tali... There's so much we need to talk about," Shepard said. She glanced over her shoulder at the human.

"I wish I had the time to, but we've got two injured people that need treatment, and our best chance is back on the Flotilla," Tali said. She gave a slow shake of her head. "I'm sorry, but I have to take care of my people, first."

"And when has it been any different?" Shepard asked. She gave Tali's armored shoulder a squeeze. "Just... stay in touch, alright?"

"_I_ stayed in touch just fine. _You_ were the one who had to go out and die," Tali pointed out with snarky tone. She turned to the other. "Prazza, stop being a useless bosh'tet, and help Veetor back to our shuttle. We've got no time to lose."

"..._thank you_..." Veetor said, quietly, to Shepard, as he was lead out with his people. Tali gave one glance back toward the Avatar, and even though Shepard had no way of seeing Tali's face, she was almost certain that Tali had an expression speaking to how there was so much that she wanted to say, and didn't know how to say it.

"Finally," Lawson said, a relieved tone in her voice. "Weaver? It's Lawson. Xinsheng was compromised, and the Collectors hit Freedom's Progress... No, but... Weaver, stop panicking, I..."

"That's Weaver?" Shepard asked.

" – on speaker, would you?" the voice that Shepard heard from Lawson's Omni was only very vaguely familiar. After all, she'd only ever shared a room with him once in her life. "Good. Now, you don't sound like one of my employees. How many others survived the... Collectors? Really, Lawson?"

"Zero," Shepard answered. "We think."

"Damn! The last thing I have to deal with is the Collectors going from slavery to mass-abduction!" Weaver muttered for a moment. "What about Shepard? Did the... gods help me, did the Collectors get Shepard, too?"

"I should hope not, otherwise I'd be very, very confused right now," Shepard noted.

"...She's standing right in front of you, isn't she?" Weaver asked. There was a byorp, and the 'Voice Only' square turned into the man's face. He was in his middle-age, with balding hair cut very short to minimize the effect. His nose was crooked as though somebody smashed it into a rifle-butt and never bothered setting it properly. While Shepard vaguely recalled the voice, the face might as well be new to her. Stupid brain damage. "Shepard? That's really you?"

"And what kind of answer should I give? No, sorry for getting your hopes up?" Shepard asked, a scowl coming to her face. Weaver cracked a smirk.

"Alright, now I actually _believe_ it's you," Weaver said. The smirk faded. "Lawson? Freedom's Progress going dark isn't news to me. I've already got my yacht heading to your location. Collectors, though? Really?"

"One of them remained behind, and tried to kill Shepard," Lawson clarified.

"One of 'em? Poor bastard," Weaver chuckled.

"Not so much," Shepard rolled an arm which still hurt from the impact of the Collector's lightning-empowered kick. Weaver stopped chuckling, and offered an exasperated sigh.

"...looks like it's going to be _that_ kind of day," he said, tweezing his brow. "I'll be above Freedom's Progress in about two hours. Just... try not to die again. You gave us a hell of a scare the last time."

Shepard again didn't think to ask. She looked at the screens, showing more of the Collectors, which were – Shepard kept the terminology clear – Prothean Husks, standing still in the freeze-frame. From behind her, past the sound of lonely wildlife, there came the hum of engines thrumming to life, and Shepard had no doubt the quarian shuttle was rising away from where it had landed.

"I feel a bit sick," Shepard said, leaning against the wall.

"You got into a fist-fight with a Collector. That's to be expected," Lawson said, offering essentially no sympathy at all.

* * *

Half a galaxy away, deep under the ground, there came a shift in the stones. Dreams of death and pain, screams of those that died and worse, present in the humming of the crystal. The unnatural diamond, hidden deep in the bedrock, began to shift once more. It vibrated and hummed, a song of wrath and vengeance, a song of loss and despair.

The sleeper inside dreamed still, but the dreams grew restless.

The diamond shook and shuddered, until a lattice of cracks began to grow out of the single large one which traversed its entire circumference. They reached out, reaching for the 'poles' of that stone. But as they reached, they slowed. They slowed, and the sleeper returned to more torpid slumber. The shuddering came to a halt, and the diamond, deep under the ground, fell still, now laced with fissures.

The time was coming, though. The dreamer could feel that even in sleep.

Soon, the past would wage war against the future.

But for now, an unnatural diamond, four meters across, fell silent and dark, deep below the soil.

* * *

She could hear the crashing of waves. Not powerful ones. Gentle. Peaceful. The sound of a tide preparing to recede.

She stood, staring up through the trees, to the golden sky. She breathed in, and smelled the ashes.

She knew this place. Even though she didn't know herself, not at first, she knew this place. The ashen trees, and the ashen ground. She breathed of the air, and a question came to her mind. An important question.

"Who am I?"

**SHEPARD.**

The voice almost threw Shepard from her feet, sending her stumbling to into the tree. It cracked and crumbled under her weight. Shepard. Aimei Shepard. Avatar Shepard. The memories flowed back, as water into a bucket. She blinked, painfully. And she breathed deep. Still, she could taste the ashes. She took a step away from the tree, which was even now, slowly crumbling away entirely, and walked toward the water.

Only it wasn't water.

The liquid lapped at the shore, but every time it receded, the sand was left dry. She reached toward it, before an instinct as undeniable as the fear of death held her back. Then, that memory flowed in as well.

"The Sea of Souls?" Shepard asked, of nobody present. She blinked, and looked around. "Hong? Sato?" she asked of her past incarnations. "...Aang?"

Silence, but for the gentle wind.

"This doesn't make sense," Shepard whispered. "I shouldn't be here. The Avatar doesn't go to the Sea of Souls. I'm supposed to... to..."

She stared, and took a step back, as a wave lapped a little closer than was safe to her toes. While the Sea of Souls was obvious, the rest... not so much. She walked back, the water to her back, and looked upon the trees. They had leaves, and branches, but she could almost see through them. They were a reflection of an echo. A ghost of a memory.

Something so long dead, it didn't remember being alive.

"I don't belong here," Shepard said. "What happened to me?"

**THE END IS TOO NEAR. ANOTHER WILL TAKE TOO LONG.**

The power of the voice almost pushed Shepard onto her chest. "Who is that?" Shepard asked. It didn't sound like anything that she'd ever heard, or heard of, before. It was great, obviously. Powerful. And it was coming closer. Shepard craned her neck up, as the brightness of the golden sky began to darken. Shepard's jaw dropped, and her knees started to shake, as darkness began to eclipse the omnipresent light. The shape was... familiar.

Doubly so, how four... no, six great and blunted limbs spread wide from its summit, the lower end tapering to a point which was hidden by the horizon. Shepard stumbled backward, her first and greatest instinct to run.

**I WILL DO WHAT I MUST. AND SO SHALL YOU.**

…

Shepard pitched forward, almost tipping out of the chair that she'd found herself napping in. Mostly because while she still felt sick, she was also exhausted. Mentally and physically. Shepard blinked a few times, trying to get her heart to stop pounding at her ribs, the sweat to stop pouring off of her brow – doubly since it was stinging her face at her cheek and eyebrow.

"I've never seen somebody go to sleep so quickly in my life," Lawson said, sitting opposite, her own eyes looking out onto the landing pad. And waiting. "Then again, I suppose coming back from the dead is a tiring process."

"What can I tell you? I always said I'd sleep when I was dead," Shepard noted sardonically. Lawson glanced at her, then turned away once more. "Alright, beyond the obvious, have I done something to piss you off?"

"The obvious?"

"Calling you a bimbo," Shepard rolled her eyes.

"I've been called worse by better," she answered. She looked down for a moment, though. "You're wearing his clothes."

"Whut?"

"There was a man in Xinsheng. He was... I guess you'd call him security. We were close, but... The first time I see you, _you're_ in _his_ clothes," Lawson said quietly, and distantly. "I don't need to have the obvious pointed out to me."

Shepard leaned back. She hadn't figured somebody as icy and... well... unpleasant as Lawson to have friends. Which was an idiotic assumption. And having it thrown in her face so casually, so thoughtlessly... that probably didn't help.

Shepard smelled coffee, and turned to see a cup. She took it before she realized that Lawson was still sitting in front of her. She then craned her neck a little further, to see the geth staring down at her. Its rifle was still attached to its back, but its movements were... she almost said innocent. "Yeah... that's still weird."

"He stood there the entire time you napped. Staring at you," Lawson said, looking at it. "Weaver has an open reward on any intact geth that he can bring in for study, you realize?"

"_This unit is not available for experimentation_," the geth said. "_This unit is not representative of a typical geth platform_."

Shepard took a strong drink of the coffee, which tasted like it'd been brewed, poured back through its grinds and brewed again. Bitter and sour and above all _strong_. While certainly something that Shepard needed, she didn't enjoy it. "Alright. New rule. Don't let the robot make coffee."

"The fact that that has to be a rule is baffling to me," Lawson pointed out. She then leaned forward and flicked a few controls on the panel before her. "I have you on DRADIS. The pad is clear. Descend at your discretion."

"Weaver's finally showed up?" Shepard asked, still giving a glance at the geth. It stood placidly. Damn, that was never going to stop being strange, was it?

"Did you think he was going to leave you behind?"

Shepard rolled her eyes, and pushed away from the chair that she'd caught that unpleasant and not-very-restful doze in, and rotated her shoulders to a sound of pops and... were those whirrs? She shook her head, and picked up the pistol that she'd set on the desk, snapping it into place at the hip of her borrowed armor. She'd feel better when she was inside something that didn't seem to offer her all of the protection of Lawson's catsuit.

That was a lie. Shepard didn't know _when_ she'd feel better.

She made her slow and aching way to the edge of the pad, as a shuttle, gold and silver with traces of red, dipped out of the clouds and dropped low toward them. It had the profile of a flying brick, and seemed to handle about as well, swaying a bit as it killed its velocity, and settled down on the other side of the pad. Shepard waited, and finally, the door opened. And Shepard's jaw dropped.

"Shepard. And here I thought the galaxy was finally free of you," Garrus Vakarian said, as he hopped down onto the platform. He strode toward her, with the sunlight just starting to show that his armor was blue and black, rather than just black, and had a great many furrows from bullets scraping along it. "It's been a long time."

"Garrus?" Shepard asked.

"Imagine my surprise when I was told that Avatar Shepard was camped out in Freedom's Progress," Garrus said with a shrug and a turian smirk. "Not that I was surprised to hear you'd come back to life. It just seemed the kind of thing that you'd do."

Shepard shook her head. "I'm having an odd day."

Garrus leaned aside, and noted those standing behind her. "I'll assume that there's a geth that you're not shooting at is _part_ of how odd the day is; I wouldn't mention it to a certain quarian woman if I were you, though."

_"Shepard Commander was adamant that Creator Tali'Zorah and her entourage remain unaware of our presence_," the geth answered.

"A talking geth, too? You just attract the strangest of the strange to you, don't you?" Garrus said with a chuckle. He then paused, and took a step toward her. "Hey. Shepard... are you alright?"

"Huh?"

"You look like you're about to pass out."

"I just need to sit down for a while," Shepard said.

"You'll have lots of time to. That human, Weaver?" Lawson nodded at Garrus' words. "He really wants to talk to you. And that means you'll probably be in there for a while."

"Great. First getting dismissed and ignored by the Council, now I'm getting dismissed and ignored by big-business as well," Shepard muttered.

"I wouldn't be so quick to judge," Lawson said, as she ushered the others into the shuttle. She paused a moment, looking back at the geth, then stepped aside so that it could stride in, and fold itself into luggage in a corner. "Weaver's stayed ahead of the curve by _not_ being thick-headed."

"I'll be the judge of that," Shepard said. She sat back against the padded seat, and Garrus banged on the wall leading to the cockpit. There was a lurch, then stillness as the inertial dampeners kicked in, and she leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Still... it's good to see a familiar face."

"And here I thought all turians looked alike to you," Garrus said, cracking a grin and kicking his feet out in front of him. "I'd like to say the same to you, but I guess the years of death have not been kind to you."

"Nice to see you haven't changed," Shepard noted, honestly grateful.

"Just like old times," the turian noted, as the shuttle burned up through the atmosphere, and toward the yacht that hung in orbit above.

* * *

Codex Entry (Science): APPLIED METAPHYSICS

_Applied Metaphysics is a very new discipline of scientific study, experimentation, and technology, having only come about as an independant field since the arrival of the human species into Citadel Space. Before, Metaphysics was relegated to falling under the umbrella of philosophy or theology, but with the new perspective of the new species, and most importantly their understanding of the utility of the soul, the discipline suddenly had a great deal more influence, clout, and cache._

_The two main areas of Applied Metaphysics as they stand today in academic and research settings are Shamanistic practice, and the examination of the soul. The former has a long and storied history reaching back thousands of years even amongst Council Races, but the latter is understandably more recent, and only in the last thirty years has major progress been made in that front. Bending, the elemental martial arts, have been conclusively linked to the presence of a soul in a practicioner, and recent technology has gone so far as to be able to detect the soul, if at prohibitively short ranges and requiring long exposures._

_The soul-structures of species throughout the galaxy tend to be almost identical, with three notable exceptions; first are the asari, whose souls are characterised as 'rougher and porous', and 'much more inelegant'. Second are humans, who tend to have 'more compact, concrete, and weighty' souls. Third, are the hanar, who have no detectable soul at all. This discovery has caused a certain degree of outcry amongst the Illuminated Hanar Primacy, who denounce the findings of the leaders in the field as 'species baiting'. Bearing in mind these broad similarities, there are often differences within-group, in that benders tend to have a 'fainter and more coarse' soul than non-benders._

_The field of Applied Metaphysics began on Earth in P.M. 3326, in the wake and the lingering terror at the terrorist Amon's seeming ability to manipulate the structure of human souls. While his method did not alter the soul per se, it did interfere with its expression. The field took a turn for the worse during the Witch Hunt, where it was used to justify the brutal treatment of waterbenders, before Korra put a stop to the practice. Since then, it has been solely concerned with understanding the underpinnings of bending and shamanistic practice._

_The most recent project of the Department of Applied Metaphysics at Ba Sing Se University (the oldest disciplinary hub in existence) was regarding the survivors of batarian slave-raids. Benders of every element, when retrieved, had become waterbenders. Investigation into the phenomenon revealed hitherto unexplored regions of research, including technologization. The Professor Emeritas of Applied Metaphysics stated that with recent improvements in technology since the Siege of the Citadel may well be able to give relief to these 'uprooted' benders, restoring them to their original element. The scientific community at large, however, considers Doctor Verner's stance to be 'completely unrealistic'._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	22. The Living and the Dead

"Is there anything better than a forced march through the mountains at the crack of dawn, to get rid of a hangover?" Vega asked, a grin on his face.

"Drop dead, Vega."

"Ah, you know you love me. When we get back, I can make you some eggs," Vega chuckled. He rolled his shoulders in the pillar of armor which had to be specially fitted for him; after all, it wasn't very often that a human needed an almost krogan level of armoring.

"Don't mind him," Milk patted the FNG on the shoulder. "He likes to think that his eggs are magical."

"Hey, they _are_ magic. You haven't _had_ eggs, 'till you've had _my_ eggs," Vega shouted over his shoulder.

"I wasn't aware we were trying to frighten off the wildlife, Vega," Toni called up to Vega, their pointman in the squad.

"We were just discussing Vega's magical eggs, weren't we?" the biotic smartass whom Vega had nicknamed Wall piped up.

"If you all keep saying eggs, I'm going to shove them into your stomach from the wrong opening," Kamille said flatly. Of the lot of 'em, she alone was too scary to nickname. Mostly because she could outgun him. Not that he'd admit it, of course.

"Your loss," Vega said. He took a deep breath of the air, feeling the sunrise touching his armor and starting to warm his face. Then, he kept walking. After all, anomalous readings out on the fringes didn't check themselves. They were starting to hump their hung-over asses down the far side of a ridge when the relative silence – broken only by occasional cursing when footing proved unpleasant, which he was exempt to by his status as the squad's sole earthbender – got to him. "Captain Toni?"

"Is this about your eggs, Vega?"

"No, sir," Vega said. "That asari back at the bar. Never saw her around here before, so... what's her deal on the planet?"

"Didn't know you had it for the blue-skinned alien babes, Vega," Milk chuckled.

"I like to appreciate beauty in _all_ its forms," Vega said to the sniper.

"And when he sees a copy of Fornax, he cries like a little girl," Wall pointed out.

"Hey, I had onion in my eye! And that was disgusting!"

"I don't follow?" the FNG asked.

"Naked Elcor," Kamille summarized well. The rookie flinched and shook his head, as though trying to shake a mental image.

"Van Trugh is an engineer, working on the mining rigs," Toni said. "Don't stick your neck where it doesn't belong. The last thing we want is to be on the wrong side of the Civvies."

"Whatever you say, sir," Vega said, but there was something about that chick that stuck with him. Luckily, while Vega wasn't exactly a complicated beast, he was one who was quite capable of focus, so he kept his thoughts back-burner and his opinions to himself.

Until he couldn't help himself.

"Hey, Milk. You ever wonder why every species's got a thing for asari women?" Vega asked.

"You're being redundant. All asari are women," Kamille said, but her tones were distant and she was slowly raising her scope to her eye, looking out into the distance.

"I'm not sure I follow you," Milk said.

"Think about it. Most species got things for their own kind, otherwise there'd be no little aliens, am I right?" Vega asked, as they moved ever lower, toward where rough rock finally became gravel, then dirt once again. "So why is it that the turians – who look like bird-cats – us, and salarians, who don't even_ get horny_, are into 'em?"

"I... Huh," Wall cut himself off.

"I never thought about that," the FNG said.

"Think they might be usin' some kind of mind control on us?" Vega asked.

"I severely doubt it," Kamille said.

"Yeah, and how many women that call 'emselves _straight_ end up with asari?" Vega pressed.

"Cut the chatter," Kamille said. "I've got a zero on the target."

"What is it?" Toni asked.

"Half a click out, in a... a crater," she said.

"Well? Haul ass, gentlemen," Captain Toni ordered. Even with the prospect of something to do today... Vega had an odd chill. The kind of chill that Uncle always said that you get when somebody walks over your burial plot.

* * *

"Two years?" Shepard asked, leaning on her knees, as the shuttle was slowly eased into its docking bay.

"They've been fun," Garrus said. "Well, not so much fun, as brutal, nasty, violent, and not as short as I'd like. Although, given the choice between what I had to put up with, and what you did, I think I'd rather take my time on Omega. All I got was a nickname and some regrets. You got killed."

"Yes, thank you," Shepard said with sarcasm, rolling her eyes. As much as the notion wasn't very foreign, it was nevertheless uncomfortable to think about. A part of her kept saying 'this can't be right'. That 'there's no way this can work'. That 'I can't be dead, because if I was, then the Avatar would have been reborn in somebody else'. It was a litany that kept looping through her head like a bad, overplayed song on a middling radio channel. "Omega. What about the rest?"

"They all went their separate ways," Garrus said. He shook his head. "Some of them... well, even amongst the _survivors_, it didn't always end well."

"It's not your job to fill me with a creeping sense of dread, Garrus."

"What's a pal for if not that?" he asked.

"Could you please stop badgering Shepard while I test her shorter-term memory?" Lawson cut in.

"No," Garrus said. Lawson growled and tried to get Shepard's attention.

"Alright. Siege of the Citadel. You..."

"Ordered the Fifth to extract the Destiny Ascension, saved the council, yadda yadda yadda," Shepard said. Well, lied. She never made that call, but everybody thought she did, and she saw no reason to narc on Joker for saving the galaxy. Mostly because, in his own words, he _really _didn't want to shave his beard for the award ceremony. "How brain damaged to you think I am?"

"Do you want an honest answer?" Lawson asked coldly. Shepard leaned back from that. She hadn't expected the secretary in the sex-suit to have claws. Then again, she had pulled Shepard out of two successive battlegrounds...

There was a faint thud as the shuttle locked into place, and a hiss as the door slid open. "Well, that's my stop. Shepard?" Garrus said, motioning for her to move through first. Shepard got to her feet – itself easier than it had been when she took her nap, but still felt stilted and wrong – and hopped down from the lip of the shuttle, into the floor of the pale-gray port within the ship that they'd boarded. From the size of it, it almost had the displacement of a cruiser, but with no guns, it was probably just a floating party palace.

She had said that she'd have fun after she was dead, Shepard recalled.

"Avatar Shepard," a voice called her attention to the immediate left. The bay itself was oddly roomy, but then again, it was a civilian ship. They didn't care about little things like efficiency. Weaver was striding up to them, a bodyguard always at his side. He had a smile on his face that seemed more relief than anything else. "Never thought I'd get a second chance to meet you in person. Although, having to live through the deaths of two successive Avatars isn't exactly something to be proud of."

"Weaver? I'm just confused how I'm standing here at all," Shepard admitted. "History has some very specific things to say about what happens when Avatars die."

"There's no reason that the future necessarily has to ape the past. There's no progress if you think like that," Weaver said. "Lawson. Good to see that you got out as well. What about Wilson?"

"Dead," Lawson said. "I had to kill him. He was going to sell Shepard to the Shadow Broker."

"Really? Damn, how did he get through the net?" Weaver shook his head, tweezing his brow. When he looked up, his artificial eyes widened, and he let out a hiss of swearing, as he ripped the bodyguard's pistol from his hip in a lightning grab, and had it levied toward Shepard. "Infiltrator!"

"_Geth do not infiltrate_," Shepard glanced over her shoulder, and saw that the geth had finally made itself known. Shepard shifted so that she was in Weaver and the guard's line of fire, which caused the guard to glance to his boss, and the boss to recoil slightly.

"Easy. If it hadn't been for him, you'd need to drop even more money bringing me back a second time," Shepard pointed out.

"Third, technically," Weaver said. He then tilted his head to the machine. "It talks? Since when did geth talk?"

"_We were designed to give vocal communication a primary importance. Anything else would have defeated our initial purpose_," the geth answered. Weaver slowly lowered his pistol, and pushed his guard's submachine gun down as well.

"A talking geth that isn't trying to kill everybody, and an Avatar brought back to life," Weaver said, shaking his head with a bemused expression. "I guess this is a day for firsts in all things."

"_Coordinator Weaver. CEO, founder of Samsara. Not-for-profit organization turned publicly traded consortium. Military service record ends with Shanxi Uprising. Open Hand awarded for injury in the line of duty. Medical discharge from armed forces. Public benefactor of Citadel Reconstruction Fund_," the geth rattled off the information evenly.

"Yes, now tell me how I'm dashing and handsome and a playboy philanthropist, and you're every reporter who's been dogging me for months," Weaver said. The petal-structures over the geth's eye raised, almost like a confused brow-raise, but it didn't speak. Weaver turned to Shepard. "Is it going to become hostile?"

"_We have no intentions of hostility at this time. It would be counterproductive_," the geth answered the question not asked directly to it.

"I've got a feeling you should be directing your inquiries that way?" Shepard cast a thumb toward the machine.

"Right. That's all moot. Shepard, walk with me," he said. Shepard gave a glance to Garrus, who shrugged. Then, she followed the multi-billionaire through his ship. First, into a bright corridor which somehow managed to feel open and sunny despite being a standard, seven-foot ceiling in a spaceship. "Lawson's told me that the Collectors were responsible for the abduction at Freedom's Progress. And that makes me think that they were responsible for all the others, as well."

"All the others?" Shepard asked.

"We're looking at more than a hundred thousand missing human beings," Weaver said with a scowl.

"Then why isn't the Alliance dogpiling these Husks for all they're worth?" Shepard asked.

"Because the Collectors were very good at keeping themselves under the wait a second. Husks?"

"Yeah. Collectors are Prothean Husks," Shepard said. Weaver stopped, and made her do likewise.

"Say that again."

"The Collectors," she said, "...four eyes, tridactyl, can read something's memory and history by touching it... are husks of Protheans. Although the one that beat the hell out of me looked a little bit different than the ones I saw from the Beacon..."

"Oh, I get it," Weaver said. He gave a chuckle. "_Three_ impossibilities, in one day. We also learn that the Protheans are still technically alive. Albeit now they're trying to kill us all, so we have to do something about that."

"Collectors. What did they do to get a name like that?" Garrus asked.

"It's what they've been doing since the asari reached the Citadel," Weaver said, starting to move again, this time through a wide-open-seeming atrium, before approaching something that seemed like a boardroom. "They liaise through mercs and slavers to gather genetic samples, usually of unusual afflictions or specimens within their species. Ardat Yakshi, drell with Li'vaugh Syndrome, elcor who _aren't_ tone-deaf, that sort of thing. They pay exorbitant fees, usually paid in _extremely_ advanced technology, then vanish back through the Omega Four Relay."

"Ah, that little gem," Garrus said. "Two different ships thought it'd be a good idea to try their luck with that relay while I was in town. _Of course_, neither one came back."

"_Nobody_ ever comes back from the Omega Relay," Weaver nodded. "_Except_ the Collectors. Prothean Husks? Really?" Shepard could only nod. He laughed once more. The laugh ended quickly, though. "Part of the problem is that every colony that's vanished is in the Terminus Systems."

"Point being?" Shepard asked.

"That's a bad neighborhood," Garrus said. "A colony going dark from time to time doesn't even make the evening news out there."

"An exaggeration, but with a point," Weaver said, opening a door to a room that was dominated by an ovoid, wooden desk inlaid with an ebonywood wheel-of-life at its center. "The bigger problem is that the Alliance is trying to rebuild, check the batarians, and step up on the galactic front, despite having an economy that some asari matriarchs could scoff at. If a colony inside Alliance space went dark, you'd bet they'd be on it. Scotch?"

"Leave the bottle," Shepard said, as he lifted the nectar of the gods from a small cupboard near one corner. He took a moment to wave an Omni toward a wall, whence a projector came to life, showing the galaxy. And specifically, showing how the Council had divvied up the galaxy. He pointed to the portion of the galaxy near the top.

"Every human colony that is in the Terminus is there because _they don't want to live under the Alliance_," Weaver stressed. Garrus, content that he was out of the public eye, sat back in one of the thickly stuffed chairs, and kicked his boots up onto the end of the table. If Weaver cared, he didn't show it. "For some, it's as simple as they don't want to pay taxes. Others, matters of 'religious persecution' – namely that the only people who get away with bigamy these days in Earth controlled space are the Si Wongi and _even they're_ putting a stop to it, year by year. Others... Dislike of the Prime Minister, dislike of Udina as Councilor, dislike of the military-industrial complex, dislike of that asshole pop-star that everybody's been listening to for the last year..."

"Not me," Shepard interrupted, just before she took her first drink of her new life.

"Consider yourself fortunate," Weaver nodded. "The fact is, humans choose to live out there as a big 'fuck you' to the Earth Systems Alliance, and the Systems Alliance gives them a big 'fuck you' back."

"So what's your angle?" Shepard asked, after gagging just a little. Damn, scotch whiskey hadn't burned that bad before. Then again, new throat, probably.

"They're human, so that's enough for me to care. Samsara is all about protecting humanity and it's interests in the galaxy, and making sure that the galaxy damned well knows that we're worth investing in," Weaver pointed out, before extracting a second, different bottle of alcohol and pouring himself a small measure. "Proof that it was the Collectors..."

"Prothean Husks..." Shepard added.

"It might be a good idea to let that one lie for a bit," Garrus said. "Liara might hear and start rubbing herself on one. That'd be embarrassing for everybody."

"Thank you mister Vakarian," Weaver said. "The point is, we have an enemy, but no way to attack them. They've declared war on humanity, and us alone. And for that reason, I needed you."

"...yeah thanks, but why?" Shepard asked.

"Beyond the fact that you're the Avatar? The Reapers are coming," he waved his Omni again. "One of the projects that I'd taken up while you were getting murdered was a device to detect emissions-sunk ships. To detect a stealth ship, you understand? This is what I found when I turned it outward," he said. A blobby halo of light appeared around the fringe of the galaxy. "That's them. All of 'em. It'll take some time, a few months if we're spectacularly unlucky, a year if we're not, but they'll get here, even at standard FTL speeds."

"Why didn't you show this to somebody?" Shepard asked.

"Oh, let's tell the Alliance that a private citizen built a device specifically to locate their top-secret stealth-ship. _That'll_ go over well," Weaver shook his head and sipped at his liquor. "It didn't work, anyway. The problem we face is that nobody's saying the word 'Reaper'. That's a madman's tale right now."

"Not to say that nobody's doing anything," Garrus pointed out. "The Hierarchy used it as an excuse to _double_ their dreadnaught fleet. I don't know about you, but a hundred dreadnaughts isn't something to sneeze at."

"Like the turians needed an excuse to build more dreadnaughts..." Weaver rolled his eyes. "The galaxy isn't ready for this fight, not with the Collectors biting us in the flank every time we blink. They need to be neutralized; I do not intend to lose any more lives to those supposedly-extinct assholes."

Shepard nodded. "If I'm going to war, I'm going to need an army. Or a very good team. Garrus, do you feel like rendering the Protheans extinct, properly this time?"

"Wouldn't miss it," Garrus said blithely.

"Alright, there's one," Shepard said. "Tali would probably rejoin us if I asked nicely."

"I wouldn't be so sure," Weaver said. "Tali'Zorah vas Neema has only been out of the Flotilla once since she left the Normandy crew. You saw what she was doing when she did. It could well be that her people have no intention of letting her go. She did bring waterbending to their people, after all."

Shepard sat down hard in a chair which she defacto claimed as hers. "Well, what about the rest of my squad? Liara?"

Weaver shook his head. "She survived the Normandy, but..."

"She took your death hard, Shepard," Garrus said. "Kill everything that moves, hard. I could barely recognize her, last time we spoke."

Shepard gaped for a moment. "Well... what about Wrex?"

"On Tuchanka, trying to unite the krogan clans. Doing a better job of it than I thought possible," Weaver continued to pace.

"And Asha?"

Weaver winced. "That's the funny thing. According to every piece of data that I can find, Asha al'Wahim doesn't exist."

Shepard glanced between Garrus and Weaver, then to the door which opened, letting Lawson in. "What do you mean, doesn't exist? Did she die with the Normandy?"

"No, if she died, she'd exist. Not much of her, but she would. There's no birth record, no death record, no driver's license, no military service record... There's not even so much as a library card signed to that name," Weaver said. "It's as if the woman had never been born. Which is a bit disconcerting, because I remember her threatening to shoot me once. What is it, Miranda?"

"We'll be reaching the yard in about twenty minutes," Lawson said. She glanced throughout the room, at the three who sat or paced within it. "I assume you're talking about al'Wahim? She either _vanished_, or _was_ vanished. And there's no sign to which it is."

Shepard ground her teeth for a moment, before sighing. "Alright. So my squad's out of the question. Damn it."

"Shepard, this isn't about your squad," Weaver said. He waved a hand toward the wall again, and the galaxy map became a succession of still frames, showing a massive blast tearing through a bunker from what looked to be a kilometer away. "These are the images taken of the last direct contact between Collectors and a Council Race. The batarians had a more recent one, but didn't provide more than anecdotal proof. This was a salarian bunker, home to Thessia Kalgiari Roshan Southwaters Norat Gell, who was about the most dangerous salarian son of a bitch to hold the Terminus in sway for about twenty years. This," he tapped the picture, "was the end of that twenty years."

"I've heard about this. That crime boss who had his bunker blown, about a thousand years ago? I always heard it was my people, not the Collectors," Garrus sat forward.

"It was indeed a while ago. Right around the Storm King era, I'd say," Weaver said. "And the misinformation is understandable. The Collectors had dealings with Gell, which was why he was so damned dangerous. But he got greedy. Even with what they were paying him, he wanted more. The Collectors sent one of their own to deliver exactly what had been promised, and no more. Gell tried to push his luck, and take the messenger as a hostage for future delivery. The result... well..." he tapped the pictures again.

"That was _one_ Collector?" Garrus asked.

"I can believe it," Shepard said. "The one on Freedom's Progress hit almost has hard as Nazara."

"I know at some point your going to ask me why I brought you back from whatever great beyond exists, and it's simply this," he leaned forward. "You're the only one I think has a shot against something that can do _that_."

"And at the moment you're entirely not capable of it," Lawson pointed out. "You need retraining, from the best, and you need it quickly. We've already lost enough humans to the Collectors."

"I've already gotten into contact with a doctor who knows the ins and outs of the soul better than almost anybody alive. For riflery, I can think of noone better than mister Vakarian. Your biotics... That will require a bit of outside help."

"Do I really have to bother with this?" Shepard pointed at her neck.

"Don't ever throw away a perfectly good weapon; you'll never know when you need it. Her name is Samara, and she's an Asari Justicar. I know she's based out of Illium at the moment, but tracking a Justicar on a place with a crime-rate as high as that isn't exactly an easy task. You'll need to talk to a contact in Nos Astra – Nyxeris; she's always up on the comings and goings," Weaver trailed off, rubbing his chin. He glanced to the corner again, his brow furrowing. Shepard followed it, and noted that the geth was standing there, still as a statue, its flashlight eye canted forward. "Is that thing going to just stand there like that?"

"I'm pretty sure, yeah," Shepard said. Weaver gave a scowl, but turned his attention back to the 'screen'.

"I have some other resources which I can throw your way, but right now, Samsara is taxed to the breaking point; unless we come up with some major capital, _fast_, we're going to have to close down a lot of shops and put a lot of people out of work," Weaver pointed out, rubbing at his temple.

"Weaver exaggerates... slightly," Lawson interjected. "We can give you some support, but it will fall on you to deal with the threats of that magnitude."

"What kind of resources are we talking about?" Shepard asked, swirling the third refill of scotch in her glass. It was burning its way down into her gut quite nicely – and in fact made her feel significantly less sick.

"First of all, I should tell you about the new–" Weaver began.

He was cut off when the lights turned off in the room, and a hard-light drone rose up from the end of the table, projecting the holographic figure of another middle aged man. This one had a full head of greying hair, and sat smoking a cigarette in a chair. "Sorry to interrupt, but I'm given to understand that the Avatar once more joins the living."

"How did you get that information?" Weaver demanded. Lawson looked slightly ill, looking at that man.

"Please. I always learn what's going on in the galaxy, and something as significant as this sent my network positively alight," the holographic man turned away from Weaver, and looked at Shepard. "I think I need to have some words alone with the Avatar."

"What? You do realize who's ship this is, don't you?" Weaver asked.

"You do realize who's technology brought her back from the dead, don't you?" came the smug answer. Weaver's jaw worked, but his teeth were clenched. "Give us some privacy. I want to speak with her alone."

Weaver shot a look at Shepard, then motioned for Lawson to join him in leaving. She nevertheless kept her eyes on the man in the chair as though he were some dangerous animal that she had never trusted even before it had bitten her. He watched them leave, then turned to Garrus. "You too, turian. My words are for the Avatar and she alone."

"Hmm, no," Garrus said. "I think I'll stay exactly where I am."

"Don't think that I'm going to stand by for your bullying. I wish to speak with Shepard, not you," he sounded fairly annoyed. There was a long pause. "I can wait. Can you?"

Shepard raised her brow, crossed her arms, and sat in her chair, the bottle of scotch sticking out to one side. Nobody moved.

Finally, a break, as the man on the other side sighed. "Sadly, I am for once not in a position where withdrawing my aid is a threat that somebody will take seriously," he said, his tones slightly more modest, now. "I represent an association of like-minded men and women who are safeguarding the interests of humanity in the galaxy," he said. "For the sake of conversation, you may call me the 'Illusive Man'."

"You're with Phoenix," Shepard said, getting to her feet. "You _run_ Phoenix!"

"Perhaps better to say that I _am_ Phoenix," the Illusive Man offered. He tapped the ashes off of his cigarette and leaned forward. "But considering how much of our technology is in you, you could well make that claim as well."

"What are you talking about?"

"A good ninety percent of what it took to bring you back to life was crafted and pioneered by Phoenix scientists, before our... mutual friend... bought, copied, or outright stole them – itself a transgression I'm going to seek to rectify – for use with you," he took a long drag off of his smoke. "I'm not going to lie or mince words. What Weaver is asking you to do is a suicide mission. The result is having you traverse the Omega Four Relay, and destroy the Collector's ability to cause any further harm to Earth's colonies in whatever way is possible. And you will need help to do this, make no mistake. Your former squad is not up to the task."

"They might surprise you," Shepard said coldly. The Illusive Man cracked a small smirk.

"I doubt it, drastically," he said. He pressed a few haptic commands, and a number of sub-screens were projected onto the wall behind Shepard. "These are operatives who I believe will be useful in destroying the Collectors once you're through the Omega Relay."

Shepard looked over the projected dossiers. "Who are these people?"

"Archangel? Really?" Garrus asked. Then, he shrugged. "Well, if you were looking for somebody to break a line of things which can punch out a demigod, Archangel would be your man."

"Of course the legendary 'Jiang-shi' would know Archangel well enough to recommend him," the Illusive Man said. He pointed to the next, causing it to highlight before Shepard's eyes. "We also have Gatatog Okeer, who has had dealings in the past with the Collectors; you'll not find a man with more insight into their technology than him."

"And this last?"

"Zaeed ibn-Assani. A highly effective mercenary, on loan if you will. Use him at your discretion," the Illusive Man said.

"Noted," Shepard said. "What else aren't you telling me?"

"That the Collectors can only manifest one of the 'glowing ones' at a time," the Illusive man said, tapping ashes once more. "Weaver is correct in that you're invaluable, but your squad will be anything but useless. If nothing else, they can prevent you from being shot in the back."

"I think we're done here," Shepard said.

"I'll be in touch," the Illusive Man said flatly.

Shepard stared as the hologram flicked off, leaving the dossier files projected on the walls. Shepard ground her teeth for a moment more, then turned to the turian and the robot in the room. "I don't like that guy."

"He does strike me as kind of slimy. And considering the amount of time I spent on Omega, that's surprising," Garrus said. The geth was mum.

"Well?" Shepard asked it directly.

"_The Illusive Man is correct in his assumption that Shepard Commander will need assistance to perform this feat. We volunteer_," the geth said.

"...just like that? No strings attached?" Shepard asked. "Just 'I'm in, let's go'?"

The flashlight eye irised in. "_Yes_."

"Careful Shepard. Before we know it, you'll have a million more of these things and you'll be storming the Citadel," Garrus jibed.

"Not funny, Garrus."

The door opened once more, and Lawson reentered the room. "We've dropped out of FTL. Shepard, come this way."

"Not even a please," Shepard noted. Lawson didn't look amused. "Fine, fine,"

"Yeah, don't step on my lines," another familiar voice came through that doorway. Shepard's eyes widened, and she skirted the table quickly, almost having to shove Lawson out of the way. And when she did, she saw him.

Jet Moro, Joker, the Normandy's pilot. He was standing with terrible posture, but that he was standing at all took Shepard slightly by surprise, in that he didn't have his crutches. "Joker? What are you doing here?"

"What else? Flying," Joker said. "I heard you'd come aboard. I should warn you, you look a little Saren-y right now," Shepard tilted her head, and Joker leaned toward Miranda, motioning to his face. "It's the _eyes_."

"Shepard?" Lawson said, ignoring the pilot.

"I can't believe you're here," Shepard said, as Joker started to limp after the now slightly more appropriately dressed ravenette.

"Come on, I'm in a whole other league of disbelief. I watched you get spaced," Joker said.

"I don't remember what happened," Shepard said. Joker's eyes dropped to the floor for a moment, then he picked up his pace a bit, hitching though he did. "What happened to your 'creaky bones'?"

"Wonders of modern medicine. As long as I take five pills a day, my bones are solid enough to accept my own body weight. And if I take them in the wrong order, I'll poop out my own brain. Miraculous stuff," Joker said with a shake of his head. "It all fell apart without you here, Commander. Everybody just drifted off. We were _your_ squad."

"And we will be again," Garrus said. "Just give us time."

"Everything you stirred up was buried, our files got sealed and I got grounded. Me! They didn't know what the hell they were doing, grounding their best damned pilot. Weaver did right by me. Paycheck, health-care, better food than I got in the Alliance. And he got me this..."

Joker waved ahead of them, where Lawson was opening a shutter that overlooked space at the end of that hallway. The viewing port had Shepard slightly confused at first, but then, she stepped to its edge, and looked out.

Then, the light caught it.

Floating in the heart of a gantry, floating above a red and yellow gas-giant, was the Normandy. Even from here, Shepard could see differences; it's size and the proportionality... but there was no other ship that Shepard had ever seen that looked like it. It brought a smile to her face. She could only imagine how much more she would be salivating for this sight if she, say, remembered watching her ship explode around her.

"I suppose it needs a name?" Shepard asked.

"Already dealt with," Garrus said, joining them at their side. For once, Shepard didn't even bother flinching from the geth which was standing very close behind her, as Weaver's yacht pulled around and drew closer, showing the lettering on the side of this new vessel.

Normandy SR2.

* * *

**Chapter 2**

**The Living and the Dead**

* * *

"This doesn't look like a crashed satellite," Vega pointed out the obvious, as the squad formed a perimeter around the thing which now stuck out of the ground. "At least, not one 'a ours."

Zorp, as Vega had taken to calling Nicky the engineer of the squad, was walking tight circles around the thing, his Omni out and active all the while. Toni, on the other hand, was on the radio. "Alright. Send them in. I'm going back to coordinate a recovery," he said, after a long pause for conversation. "If it's geth, we're going to need a Faraday Cage ready on site. No. Yes," Toni hung his head for a moment, with a sigh. "I'll sort it out when I get there. Toni, out."

"What, you're leaving us poor grunts on our own out here in the wilderness?" Vega asked.

"Horror of horrors. However shall we survive?" Milk asked sarcastically.

"Can it. You lock this place down so hard that a volus couldn't fart its way out of it. Clear?"

"Yes, sir!" Vega said. The others in his squad quickly echoed him. Toni gave them a nod, then began to hump his way up the hill once more. He didn't doubt that there was an aircar already zipping toward them to pick Toni up, but that was too few seats for Vega's group by a good margin.

The earthbender moved closer, though, to the device that they were tiptoeing around. "Hey, Milk. You said you got family on the Citadel, right?"

"Yeah. Living in Teyseri ward," Milk answered, as he kept his eyes to the ridges around them. "They moved after that whole thing with the temple and the vorcha, though. Too dangerous."

"I heard it was a hanar, not vorcha," the FNG offered.

"Yeah, a _hanar_ managed to get forty people killed and caused an Eastern Deities pantheon to collapse," Wall said, where he was idly floating above the ground, mostly to show-off that he could. He might be a damned good biotic, but he was almost as cocky as _Vega himself_.

"Hey, don't step on the new-guy. Not until he's bought us all our drinks," Vega coached. "There was a lot of geth garbage that landed in that Ward. They ever see something like this?"

"If they did, the Council scooped it up before anybody could admit to it," Milk said.

The thing... device, you might call it, looked almost like some sort of closed hand, its wrist dug into the ground. The whole thing was made out of a black metal which was mottled and discolored, probably from reentry, and its ridged 'fingers' were spaced around half of it, coming to a point and leaving a bowl which sat empty. It certainly didn't look like turian tech. Too smooth and elegant. Didn't look asari, either. Too _evil_. They made all their stuff flowing and white. Even their guns; Vega didn't care what you said, the Disciple was _not_ a shotgun, that was a _toy_.

"Think it's some sort of spy satellite?" Vega asked.

"If it was, it's not anymore," Kamille pointed out. After all, there wasn't anything like a lens on that thing to spy with. Unless it was some other kind of sensor, but Vega didn't have the education to figure that. "My guess? Bomb."

"Bomb? And we're just going to stand around this thing?" Vega asked.

"If it was going to go off, it would have when it landed. But still. Give it some space," Kamille stressed. The FNG looked like he was about to crap himself. Not surprising.

"Don't scare the new guy, Kamille," Zorp said with long-suffering tone. "I'm not reading any sort of explosive or disruptor warhead inside this thing. I am getting a faint signal, but nothing but that."

"Buoy, maybe?" Wall asked.

"Doesn't look like any I've seen before. And I've seen all of them," Zorp said. The puttering of an approaching aircar sounded, and Vega turned to see Toni getting scooped up. But from that car came two others, that Vega wasn't exactly expecting. One was quarian, which by process of elimination made him Zek, and the other was asari. At first he thought to himself 'nah, can't possibly be her. There's plenty of asari on this rock'.

Then, she got closer. And she recognized him. She didn't say anything, but there was a look there. Wariness.

"Bean! How's my favorite dextro!" Vega boomed, causing the quarian to recoil slightly.

"I'm... fine... thank you," he said tentatively.

"I take it you two know each other?" Anette asked. The others began to form up behind Vega. "Right. I should introduce myself. Anette von Trugh. They called me out here, at this ungoddessly hour, to make sure that a bit of garbage from space doesn't poison the ground-water. Now are you going to let me work, or are you going to just stand there like a wall of meat?"

"Oh ho ho, I like this one," Wall said, a winning grin on his face.

"Not in your wildest dreams," Anette said as she strode past him. Zek pointed after her. "Come on, Zek. We've got a rig to set up."

"You just going to let her push you around like that?" Vega asked, giving the quarian an elbow-nudge in the ribs as the little guy passed.

Zek stared at Vega for a moment, obviously not sure what to say, before glancing to Anette. "Yeah. Yeah, I... uh... If she says so, I could lose my paycheck. Gotta... you know... keep in her good graces."

"I hear 'at," Vega said. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes, and listened to the wind. And more than just that. "...huh."

"Huh what?" Milk asked.

"Does anybody else hear that hum?" Vega asked. He looked around, and the rest of his squad – save the FNG who was down next to the bomb-satellite-thing – shrugged. "Is it just me?"

* * *

"You're giving me a ship. Out of the goodness of your heart?" Shepard asked.

"I offered to sink the cost of a Normandy SR2 prototype if they let me keep it when the production model was ratified," Weaver said. "As I understand, the Fifth Fleet is finally getting the stealth ships they were howling for two years ago."

"I feel slightly less special, knowing I'm not the only one zipping around invisibly," Shepard said with rolling eyes. Weaver glanced out of his polymer ones but didn't comment. The clunk of the shuttle coming to a halt inside the cargo bay – itself easily twice the size of the old Normandy's, brought Shepard's attention to the door, which opened to show the vessel itself.

"I feel this is where we're best to part ways," Weaver said. "We both save the galaxy in different ways, and I'm probably not the best one to hold a gun right now."

"I wouldn't say that. You had a bead on our mechanical friend here pretty quick," Garrus cast a thumb toward the geth, who stood stock still and placid.

"Still," Weaver didn't rise from his seat, "I know where I do the most good."

"Alright. So where should I go where the hell are you going?" Shepard had to switch gears as Lawson left her employer and moved onto the deck with Shepard.

"Miss Lawson is going to be your XO on this feat of legendary deeds and exploits," Weaver said. "She's going to deal with logistical problems and let you focus on strategy and tactics. Between her and Edie, you'll be fine."

"Who's Edie?" Shepard asked.

"You'll meet her soon enough," Weaver said. His brow rose, as he reached into a compartment in the wake of the geth stepping onto the new Normandy. "Ah, I almost forgot. Miss T'Soni left this with me on the condition that I return it to you whenever possible. I had the feeling that she couldn't bear to keep it around her... considering."

"My death?"

"Her mother's," Weaver corrected. Shepard took the OSD from Weaver. It didn't look familiar, but then again, it was likely that she got gacked within hours of snagging it. "I wish I could just say 'good luck', Shepard, but to be frank, we're going to need every scrap of good luck and fortune in the galaxy. And I'm not sure that'll be enough for what's coming."

"I'll stop them," Shepard said. "I'll make them pay."

"I never thought anything less of you. Pilot?" the door began to slide shut, leaving the four of them – five if you counted the geth – standing in the bay. Joker was already heading for the elevator, as this was obviously old-hat to him. Lawson turned to Shepard next.

"I'll be settling into my quarters if you need me. You said you wanted to know what Xinsheng did to you? I'll forward the files to your private terminal. But don't say I didn't warn you. Good day," she said, cold and clinical as ever.

"You know, it's almost like she practices to be that unpleasant," Garrus said when she wasn't out of earshot. Probably on purpose. "As for me, when they commissioned this thing, they intended it to be a torpedo boat. I recommended they put on something with a bit more _bite_. Come around to the main battery some time. I'll tell you about 'Thanix'."

"I'll do that," Shepard nodded. She then turned to the geth. The geth stared back at her. "Well? Do you have something to say?"

"_We are attempting to form consensus_," the geth said.

"...which means what?"

The petals over its eye lifted briefly, then settled. "_We find that we have no connection to the local intranet. Shepard Commander, have we been banned from contact with ship's systems?_" the geth asked calmly.

Shepard's eyes went wide. "YES! You are not to access any system on this ship unless I say you can! Is that clear?"

The geth leaned back, its petals flaring as though it were some sort of terrified animal. "_Yes. We will obtain permission before interfacing with ship's systems in the future_."

"Good," Shepard said. The last thing she needed was an AI rummaging around in her ship. "Where are you going to..."

"_This platform has minimal requirements. Geth need neither organic sustenance nor air, and this platform and its equipment requires one cubic meter of stowage space_," the geth said. "_We will remain in this cargo area until further notice_."

Shepard frowned at the thing before her, which was standing exactly as she was. "What should I call you?"

"_Geth_."

"No, I'm talking about _you_," Shepard specified.

"_We are all geth. This platform is host to one thousand one hundred eighty three geth programming runtimes._"

"Wait, there's a thousand AIs in that thing?" Shepard asked.

"_That is not accurate. There are one thousand one hundred eighty three runtimes, which operating in gestalt form the operating core of the geth unit in this platform. If the runtimes were separated, they would not function in a sapient manner_," the geth said.

"Well, I've got to call you something, because if I shout 'Geth!' in a fire-fight, it's going to get confusing and somebody's going to get shot," Shepard pointed out. The geth's head lowered, as though it were pondering. And it remained pondering for a long time. Shepard shook her head, and started to walk to the elevator. "What the hell ever; I'll deal with this later."

She'd almost reached the elevator when the geth's voice reached her again. "_Adahn_."

"What?" Shepard asked.

"_You may refer to this unit as Adahn_," the geth stated. Shepard raised a brow. She'd heard that name before, but it was lost in the vagueries of her mind, too oblique to recall.

"Does that mean something to you?" Shepard asked, reaching back to pound the button, calling the elevator back down for the third time. The geth looked slowly up toward her.

"_Yes_," it answered, slowly.

"Mind telling me what it is?" A long silence followed. "So... why did you pick it?"

"_...no data available_."

Shepard shook her head, and stepped into the elevator, bearing her up toward the CIC. It might not be the SR1, but damn it, this was _her ship_. And she would see it all the way it once was. She tapped the button, and the lift started immediately. She had barely resigned herself to lean against the back wall when it gave a lurch and halted, its doors sliding open. Shepard blinked a few times. If nothing else, they'd done a service replacing the elevators; these things took no time at all!

"Officer on deck!" a soldier said from the edge of the sensors, at the beginning of 'the Trench'. Shepard slowly stepped forward, taking all of it in. The lighting was different; more homey and neutral tones instead of the harsh phosphorescence of the old Normandy. Civilian contractors... The command hub didn't show the galaxy, as Shepard expected, but rather, a holographic Normandy, in all its glory. Lawson was nowhere to be seen, but a redhead stood near Shepard's command post. Others, pausing in their duties, gave her a salute, before moving on. She breathed in. It didn't smell like the old Normandy.

So much had changed.

"Commander Shepard?" the redhead asked.

"Of course. It's not like I have a clone running around," Shepard said flatly. She looked at the faces in the crowd. She didn't recognize so much as one of them. "I don't see anybody from the old crew."

"Many of them took new posts. Some went on sabbatical from service. Raik Adeks returned to Tuchanka almost immediately after your... well, your death," the redheaded woman said.

"Really?" Shepard asked. The woman nodded, then gave a slightly flustered look.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought somebody had introduced me already. Yeoman Chambers. Although, as I never really joined the military, that makes me more of a secretary than anything else," Chambers said with a light chuckle.

Shepard looked forward, then back to her. "I assume that means that Pressly was one of the fallen," she said quietly.

"_That is correct_," a different female voice said. A voice that came out of the wall. "_Samnai Pressly's remains were recovered shortly after the squad to Alchera first landed, and were interred in the Royal Military Cemetery at Henhiavut_."

"Who said that?" Shepard looked around. She stopped panning her head when a section of the wall popped out, and a little emitter came to life, showcasing what looked like the most poorly constructed ice-cream cone in existence – its scoop applied to the bottom of the cone rather than the top – floating in blue-white light there. As it spoke again, a darker section pulsed on its surface.

"_I did. I am the Enhanced Defense Intelligence. The crew commonly calls me EDI_," the machine said.

"Somebody turn that thing off!" Shepard immediately snapped. "There's already one too many AIs on this damned ship!"

"Oh, you shouldn't do that!" Chambers said, making as though she were going to step between the Avatar and the machine. "EDI's built into the cyberwarfare and navigation suites. If you shut her off, you won't be able to go anywhere or fight anything!"

"_Have I offended?_" the machine asked.

"It's alright, EDI, Shepard just spent a lot of time fighting geth back with the old Normandy," Chambers placated. _Placated_ a machine.

"_And yet she allows a geth unit a berth in my cargo hold_," EDI said. Almost _chided_, actually.

"That's... a different matter," Shepard said, somewhat lamely.

"_While your distrust in synthetic intelligences is rooted in pragmatism, I can offer that I neither want, nor am capable, of causing you harm in any way_," EDI said. "_Even in the unlikely event that I would come to wish to exterminate the crew and by extension all organics in the galaxy, I would first have to circumvent the physical hardware constraints which prevent such behavior. With no physical form, such a feat is utterly impossible to me. So you will live, for now_."

Shepard stared at the orb-on-a-stick.

"_That was a joke_."

"She does that, sometimes," Chambers said.

Shepard took a deep breath, and rubbed at her forehead. She still felt a bit light-headed, and the possibly excessive amount of Scotch that she'd taken in probably hadn't helped that. "Fine. Let's just let every AI in the galaxy have a party on my ship. Next, we'll see party tricks from the goddamned Reapers!"

"_That is unlikely_," EDI said. "_The computational power required to host a Reaper would, given current technical limitations, require a server bank larger than the Normandy itself_."

"That was a _joke_, EDI," Shepard said, annoyance in her tone. And she barely even noticed that she'd already called it by name. She then strode away from the projector built into the wall, and Chambers followed in her wake.

"_I see. Logging you out, Commander_," EDI helpfully offered, before the orb disappeared. Shepard shot a glance to Chambers.

"Why didn't somebody warn me about that?" she asked.

"I assumed that Mister Weaver did," Chambers said. She winced a bit. "Although I suppose he's got a lot on his mind right now. Something might have... slipped his mind."

"So besides acting as my secretary, why are you here?" Shepard asked. "Weaver has to know that I don't need two XOs."

Chambers nodded. "Well, I am also here to serve as a moderator and councilor to the crew. A lot of people on this ship are colonials, from the Terminus Systems. A lot of them have lost – and stand to lose – family."

"Right," Shepard said. "Do me a favor, and stay out of my head. The last one who got in there was... Well, she was already crazy when she started, but I'm pretty sure it didn't do her a great deal of good," Shepard said. Chambers knit her brow in confusion, but Shepard took her pause as an opportunity to outpace her, and enter the cockpit.

Joker cast a glance over his shoulder as he heard the doors open, and a grin followed with it. "Can you believe this, Shepard? It's _my baby_, better than new! It fits me like a _glove_! And leather seats! A prototype frigate couldn't care less how much my ass hurts at the end of the shift; military might push the envelope with hardware, but in Civilian Sector, they've got a front-of-the-line when it comes to comfort. Look at this! Can you smell it? _Real leather_!"

"First time in the seat?" Shepard asked wanly.

"_Yes_," EDI said as she appeared at Joker's left... for the instant it took for him to spin his chair toward her, making EDI now on his right. "_However Flight Lieutenant Moro is incorrect regarding the status of this ship; the replication was never intended to be exact, so improvements were made_."

"And there, we see the downside," Joker muttered. "I loved the Normandy when she was beautiful and... _silent_. Now it's got this _thing_ staring at me all the time, like ship-cancer."

"Alright, that's twice I've seen you," Shepard said. "Is there any part of this ship you _can't_ spy on us?"

"_It is not part of my objective aboard the Normandy to spy on the crew. I have projectors in all key areas of the ship, excluding Operative Lawson's quarters, the men's and ladies' washrooms, and the interior of your quarters_," EDI stated. She was noticeably larger here than she had been at the back of the CIC. That had to have some sort of meaning. At the moment, Shepard's headache was getting in the way of figuring it out. "_It is also secondary to my purpose as operating as the adaptive cyberwarfare suite of this vessel, and allowing for hyper FTL jumps along the Relay Network_."

"...what?" Shepard asked.

"Remember how _I_ always landed with less than a kilometer drift?" Joker asked. "_They_ say _she_ can do better. And that she can get us there faster than the Relay allows."

"_By plotting courses to come within several meters of the Spirit Roads, the Normandy will be capable of performing massive reductions of time spent in the Relay system_," EDI said.

Shepard looked to Joker. "That doesn't seem possible."

"Well, if we crash and die in the Spirit World trying to do a milk run to the Citadel, we'll all know who to blame," Joker said. He looked at the orb, and spoke in an artificially deep tone. "I swear, if your piloting gets me killed, I'll kill you."

"_That is not possible. I am not alive_," EDI noted.

"I was doing a... Wrex used to say..." Joker threw up his hands. "Just never mind."

"You two have fun," Shepard said with a roll of her eyes, as she turned and walked out of the cockpit.

"Hey, I got leather. It's _all_ good," Joker noted.

Shepard strode back down the length of her ship. "I'm on a ship of the damned," she noted. Some of the crew in the Trench cast confused looks to her. She paused, and turned back to Joker. "Take us out, into the black. Bring us into the Traverse."

"_Leather_!" Joker's exclamation made no sense, but did state that he'd heard her. She turned and continued. She had two AI's to deal with, Prothean Husks trying to wipe out human colonists, a ship that didn't quite feel right, a body that felt considerably more wrong, no familiar faces save two, and a headache that was driving her to distraction. Probably because of the spark-plug they'd shoved into her brain. They should have just left her un-Amped and left it at that. Not like she'd ever needed Biotics before, right?

She returned to the elevator, then looked at the panel, noting that there was a floor above this one. "Hey? Ship? What's above the CIC?"

"_Hull plating. If you are asking what the topmost deck of the ship is, that is your personal quarters_," the glowing orb of EDI explained. For an artificial intelligence, she did have a sardonic streak. "_Will there be anything more?_" Shepard shook her head, and thumbed the topmost button. "_Very well. Logging you out_."

Shepard's trip to her rooms was as swift as the one from the hold to the CIC; fast. She could definitely get used to that, if nothing else. The elevator doors opened to a small, awkward hall, which took her all of three steps to reach the end of. She pounded idly on the button, and tried to figure how much room she'd have for her junk. If any of her junk survived. When the doors opened, she blinked a few times in surprise.

It was a damned apartment.

The bed and dressers made a lower 'landing' which was overlooked by her work-desk. She leaned around a corner, and found a door opening into a private shower. She then leaned through that aperture, and pressed a button, watching how a section of the shower rose up out of the floor, turning the shower into a small – if deep – bathtub. Joker was right. Civilians had a lock on comforts. She turned back. One wall was dominated by a large tank of water. She shook her head at that. Then, she sat down at her desk.

She rotated the OSD in her hands. Whatever this was, Benezia T'Soni went to great trouble to hide it. And whatever secrets Shepard had learned from it – the first time – were utterly lost to her. She set it down in the port, but a different video file was already beeping and ready to display. From Lawson, no less.

"...you wanted proof, here it is... In all its ghastly detail," Shepard read aloud. Then, she activated the video.

"Is the cloned tissue taking?"

"Better than I'd feared, worse than I'd hoped," Lawson answered Wilson's question. "She'll probably need stabilizing treatments, or a fresh transplant in a few years. Assuming any of us last that long."

"You don't really believe that fei-hua that Weaver talks about, do you?" Wilson asked, both of them standing over what looked more like a slab of meat than a person that Shepard could recognize as herself.

"I don't have the luxury of second-guessing my employer," Lawson said. The camera cut, and progressed. Now, the Shepard on the slab had actual skin, if ghoulishly white. Her hair was also maybe a few centimeters shorter than she'd found it now.

"I got a reading that she was coming out of unconsciousness," Lawson asked. "Is that true?"

"I don't think so. She hasn't made any movements, and her eyes haven't entered REM. She might be brain-dead."

"I'm not going to accept that," Lawson said sternly. "Prepare another implant. _Something_ is going to wake her up. I just have to find it."

Shepard had stopped watching them out of needing answers, and more of terrible, morbid curiosity. The next ones were earlier ones, of them stitching muscle into place. She looked at her shoulder, and rotated it, as Lawson and Wilson oversaw the surgeries which made that motion possible. She then skipped ahead, stopping when her body wasn't on the slab.

"What happened?" she asked quietly, even as she felt a lurch in her stomach, of something not sitting right.

Her question was answered when Shepard slowly got up, pushing her way up the slab, the robe dangling off her body. She stood there, wavering, staring ahead of her, and fumbling fingers into her face. The door to the room opened, and Lawson skidded to a halt inside. "Shepard! You shouldn't be... be..."

The camera angle shifted to the other camera, the one which looked into the operating theatre from the opposite direction. It showed the look on Shepard's face when she turned slowly toward Lawson. There was no expression on it. The eyes were bleak, blank, and vacant. There was a mind, but no soul, there.

"I'm... hollow..." the words came at a croak from Shepard's throat. The Shepard watching her blinked a few times, swallowed bile, and then jumped ahead further.

"Xinsheng open log; Spring equinox, but I'm in no mood to celebrate. Weaver was wrong. Whatever Shepard was, she's not anymore. There's no... She has no motivation, no spirit. She's walking around like she's already dead. This was a mistake. We were playing god and this... this abomination of science... is all that came of it."

Shepard saw over Lawson's shoulder that the Shepard from that time was standing before a table, a robe dangling from her form. She clumsily grabbed a drinking glass, and smashed it against a table. Then, she started to carve at her own skin. First on her arms, then on her belly and legs, gashing right through the pale robe. Lawson continued for a time, trying to explain where she believed that they'd gone wrong, but Shepard's attention wasn't on her, but rather, on her own body, which had moved on from slashing her legs, to driving that shard of glass along her cheeks and jaw.

"I... Why would I _umph_..." Shepard swallowed back another lurch of her stomach, even as her hands quested across the painful surface of her face. On the screen, Lawson finally looked back, and gave a scream, before rushing into the room and smashing the shard out of that Shepard's eyebrow with a bolt of drinking water. The camera cut off.

Shepard couldn't say what made her look at the last video. She didn't even play it. The preview frame was enough. It showed Shepard's body, dangling lifeless from the ceiling by a belt tied 'round her neck. Sweat pounded out of Shepard's face, stinging at it, as she felt her stomach give her exactly one more warning. Shepard turned, and rushed back into her bathroom, getting her head over the toilet just as the half-bottle of Scotch made a second appearance, stinging and searing far worse coming up than it had gone down.

"No. That can't be right. That couldn't have happened," Shepard spoke to her own vomit. "Why would I do that? I didn't..."

Shepard then stopped, dread prickling through her, and pushed away from the toilet. She turned, and finally faced the mirror that she hadn't given thought to on first inspection. She walked up to it, and her mouth dropped open. There were inflamed rents on her face, exactly where that impossible Shepard had gouged herself with that shard. No wonder Joker said something. She was just shocked that _nobody else did_. And the eyes. There was a sort of red glow to them, right out of her pupils.

Shepard's chest heaved, and with it, came a sob that she couldn't really explain. What the hell happened to her?

She answered that philosophical question as she answered all things. Violently.

* * *

Vega sat on a rock that he'd molded into shape, twiddling his thumbs. "So. You get out into the country much?"

"Well, no. Usually I'm in a garage or on a site or..." Zek said.

"Yeah, that's great, bean, but I was asking Jimo over here," Vega clarified. Zek gave a nod, and immediately returned his attention to his Omni. "Hey, Jimo..."

"I don't even know what that means," the asari said, as she pulled a tube of dirt out from the bore she'd sent under the crashed thing.

"Don't mind Vega. He's just an ass," Kamille said.

"Hey, I'm a mighty _fine_ ass, thank you," Vega said.

"Exactly my point," Kamille nodded.

Vega scowled, as he'd walked right into that one. "Seriously, though. I don't see you around very often."

"I keep to myself," Anette told him, as she dumped the sample into a machine that they'd spent the last hour assembling in the dirt.

"You should get out more. There's lots to do on Fehl Prime. You haven't lived, until you've eaten at this little restaurant, built out of the back of this guy's house. Got seating for like... five, if you grease 'em up a bit, but you'll never find a better buuz this side of Dakong, man. And he deep fries everything!"

"That sounds repulsive," Anette shook her head.

"Ah, you shouldn't knock it 'till you've tried it," Vega said.

"That's the only reason why Vega gets any traction at all," Wall smarmily added, draping an arm over Vega's beefy shoulders as he did so.

"Who asked you?" Vega declared.

"Have you muscle-heads ever considered there's a _reason_ why I keep to myself?" Anette asked, not even bothering to look in their direction.

"Asari are social animals, just like humans are. You can't deny the call of the wild," Vega pointed out.

At that, Anette stopped, and turned back to him. There was a definite edge behind those eyes. "I _can_, and I _will_," she said clearly, crisply, and sharply. "Now would you mind leaving me the hell alone while I make sure this thing isn't leaking Eezo or worse?"

"Fine. Whatever you want, Jimo," Vega said.

"Hah, the great Sergeant Vega fumbles again," Milk offered. "How many does that make this week?"

"I'll have you know I'm still doing better than you," Vega noted.

"I'm married, and she's not on world. If I was doing better than you, I'd have a lot of explaining to do at home," Milk pointed out.

"You're married?" the FNG asked.

"Yeah, and Vega here once fought with the Avatar on Yue," Zorp added. "He never lets us hear the end of that."

"What, takin' down a killer AI on the moon, with no ammo and only the best warrior in the galaxy at my back ain't good enough for you?" Vega asked.

"...I guess not," Wall said, his tone sobering. Vega took a breath as well. Two years since the Normandy got blown out of the sky. In a way, it was lucky that he hadn't taken her up on that offer. He'd probably be a smear right now if he had. But part of him always wondered. What would have been, if he said yes. Who would he be?

"Huh," Anette uttered, causing Zek and Vega both to turn to her.

"Oh no... did I break something?" Zek asked.

"No... This sample isn't Eezo contamination," she said. "It's something... else."

"That's suitably menacing yet vague," Kamille said.

Anette shook her head, dismissing, and opened her Omni. She tapped a few keys, then her brow pulled in, as she turned, and started to walk through and past the soldiers, holding her arm before her. She then started to just hold it around. "That's even more strange."

"What is?" Zorp asked.

"I can't get access to the Extranet," Anette said. "Are these mountains magnetic?"

As Zorp went into detail about the environment – things that Vega neither knew about nor particularly cared about, he got to his feet and moved over to the FNG. The new guy, still a Private, first class, gave him a nervous smile as the larger stopped in front of the little bit of weird that landed in their midst.

"Ain't this everything they ever said the military was going to be? Standing around a piece of space-trash, thumbs up our asses, waiting for the civvies to tell us that we can load it onto a truck and send it to where it'll never be seen again?" Vega asked rhetorically.

"Honestly, I thought it'd be a bit more exciting. Like... there would be pirates, or geth!"

"Whoa, I wouldn't go hoping for geth, kiddo. These guns," he hefted his own, "barely knock through their barriers. The ones they give you," he pointed to the lad's Lancer I, "won't even scratch their paint."

"Oh... but why do they give them to the soldiers, then?"

"Because these things?" he tapped on his M-76 Revenant, "cost an arm and a leg, and they heat like crazy."

The FNG stared at his gun for a moment. "I'd still rather have something like that..."

"Maybe when you're older, kiddo," Vega said. He didn't add that because of his lanky, tiny nature, the Revenant would probably hurl him onto his ass with the first burst. Vega was about to turn, but he heard a hum. "Wait a second, there it is again," Vega said.

"Yeah... I hear something too," the FNG said. Zek looked on, staying well clear of them, as the two leaned over the machine. There was something... buzzing... in there.

"Hey! We've got a–" Vega managed to say, before there was a clatter, and a chunk of the thing was pushed aside. An instant later, something roughly the size of his fist zipped up out of the space-junk, buzzing circles around the two of them. "Oh damn! Do you see the size of that thing?"

"What is it? Is it going to bite?" Zek asked, flinching back a bit.

"Stop waving at it and it'll leave you alone," Kamille said. She moved to Vega's side and looked at the machine. With the tip of her rifle, she pushed aside that dislodged panel, and showed a that all of the other gaps had been like it.

"Do all planets have angry giant bugs? I thought that was just an Earth thing!" the FNG asked.

"Guys, we've got a problem," Zorp said from his group, of he, Wall, and Anette. "There's no transponder signal from the colony. And I can't raise _anybody_, over _any_ channel."

Vega immediately stopped mocking the FNG, and turned to Zorp. "Goddamn, I know what that means. Knock out their throats and eyes... I think somebody's tryin' to invade."

"Hah! I got you you little bug bas–" the FNG stopped dead. Vega turned toward him. The bug pulled itself out of his now stiff fingers, and flew away over the mountains. The FNG, though, he was locked solid. Slowly, his balance began to upset, and before Vega could stop him, he fell back onto the dirt and rocks. He rolled and rocked like he was frozen stiff.

"What the hell?" Kamille said. "Hey! Private!"

The triumphant smirk on the kid's face was quite out of place given the way his eyes raced and flitted. "He's paralyzed," Zek said. He pointed with his Omni. "There's a skin-tight mass-effect field holding him in place!"

"Well, what do we do?" Wall asked.

The question was rendered moot as there came a crack, the sound that would later be explained to Vega as the sound of something coming out of FTL in planetary atmosphere – an insanely dangerous act – and the clouds in the direction of Fehl Prime were scattered away, leaving long white streaks overhead.

Vega stared for a moment, then looked around. Sergeant was the highest rank left. "Alright. Somebody raise Captain Toni. I don't care how or what it takes. Everybody else, we're heading back into the colony. We're going to raise the third and drop the hammer of the gods on these assholes!"

"That sounds like a plan," Kamille said with a smirk. Zorp, though, looked at the others.

"What about the civvies?"

Vega pondered that for a second. "Hey, Jimo, would you mind if bean lays low with you for a while? We can't have non-coms underfoot," Vega asked.

"We're under attack?" Anette confirmed. Zek just muttered something that didn't get translated from whatever quarian language he was speaking, but from the sound of it, it wasn't particularly happy. She sighed, then looked to the quarian. "Alright. On this one occasion. Hey. Zek!" the quarian gave a start, and looked to her. "Are you even paying attention?"

"I wish I wasn't," he answered. Vega gave them all a nod.

"Alright. If and when we raise the all-clear, come on out. 'Till then, don't say anything to anybody. Last thing we need are more guys like those Blood Pack assholes," Vega said. "Squad? What are y'all sitting around for? We've got a colony to save!"

"That's becoming a full-time occupation," Wall said with long-suffering tone, as the squad began to ascend the defile once more. Behind them, Anette was about to start climbing in a different direction. She stopped, though, and looked back at the human still on the ground.

"Did they seriously just leave one of their own out in the wild?" she asked.

"I get a feeling that mister Vega doesn't think things all the way through," Zek offered. She sighed, nodded, and pointed at him.

"Well, we can't leave him to die. Grab his legs, I'll take his arms. It's only three kilometers to my prefab, anyway."

"Through the mountains," Zek clarified.

"I've walked longer for milk," she shook her head. Zek groaned, inwardly.

* * *

"Hey, Shepard? You said you were going to visit the guns," Garrus said, waiting outside the door to her room. "Come on. Don't tell me that you don't want to see the deadliest innovation in naval warfare in eight hundred years. I know you better than that."

He waited, and no answer came. He sighed, and turned to the little outcropping that was near the door. "Hey, EDI?"

"_Yes, Mister Vakarian?_" the precise little orb said.

"Please, just call me Garrus. My father was 'Mister Vakarian', and he made sure everybody knew it," Garrus said. "Did Shepard head down already? If I'm standing here since we missed each other..."

"_Commander Shepard has not exited her quarters since she first entered them. I have detected an unusual leak inside_," EDI noted.

"Leak of what?"

"_Water_."

Garrus rolled his eyes. "...somebody didn't install her shower correctly, right?"

"_It is not originating from her washroom facilities_," the AI said.

"Shepard, can you hear me in there?" he asked, a bit louder this time. He passed his hand through the button, but it pulsed orange as he did. "That's not good. EDI? Can you override her door-lock?"

"_I could, but I don't wish to violate Commander Shepard's privacy_."

"If something's wrong, her privacy is the least of my worries," Garrus said. Unlike most in this galaxy, he knew exactly how far down Shepard could go when she wasn't at her best. "Open the door. I anybody asks, tell them that I hacked it myself."

"_As you wish, Garrus. Logging you out_," EDI said. The door flickered for a moment, before the button went green, and the turian gave it an almost tentative prod. With a happy chirp, the door slid open. The first thing Garrus noted was that the fish tank was less a tank, and more a scattering of glass along the floor. Well, that explained the water-leak. There was other shattered glass as well, and what looked like a shard of mirror embedded into a metal post that demarcated the transition from work-desk to living area.

Garrus took a quick lean, to note that the bathroom door had been ripped off and now sat in the shower. After that, he looked ahead and down, to the human who was sitting at the head of her bed, her knees pulled tight to her chest, her face down behind them.

"Shepard..." Garrus said, unable to come up with more. He moved, glass crunching as he came. Shepard was trembling from her place on the bed. There was a widening of his eye when he noted that the bedsheets had a small but nevertheless worrying stain of blood on them. When he got close enough to see her hands, torn by all the glass she'd apparently punched with her bare hands, he understood why.

"What _am_ I?" Shepard asked, her face still hidden behind her knees. Garrus turned the ottoman over and sat on it, leaning toward her where she sat near the center of her bed. From the way her arms were crossed, it looked like she was trying to hide something. Notably, her right arm. It had been cut open a lot worse than her left had. What lay under it... wasn't entirely organic. Even less so in her hand.

"Tough enough that killing you wasn't enough to make you stay dead," Garrus offered.

"I'm... I don't know what I am anymore," Shepard spoke into her knees, still. "Everything feels wrong, and nothing makes sense... I can't fight, I can't bend, and I can't... I can't even live right! Do you see this?" she said, looking up and pointing a reddened finger at the inflamed weals on her face, the ones he had the decency not to mention when he first saw them. "I did this to myself! WITH A SHARD OF GLASS! AND I DON'T EVEN REMEMBER DOING IT OR WHY!" she shouted. No, that wasn't entirely accurate. Shepard _wailed_. It was strange enough a thing to see that Garrus blinked a few times, trying to work it through in his head that Shepard would ever wail, but he puffed out a breath, and shifted his posture a bit.

"So Lawson wasn't making up how surreal things got down there?" Garrus asked. Shepard just looked at him, tears running down her face from – Garrus imagined – a frustrated confusion that had been pushed too far. "I wasn't filled in on the messy details. Weaver only pulled me out of Omega a month ago... after Sidonis..." he shook his head. That was a memory he didn't want to relive right now. "So I'm not up to date on everything. But he did tell me what your body did."

"My body," Shepard said bitterly. Garrus nodded.

"I talked to Lawson. She said she looked into your eyes, and saw a corpse there. Meat without spirit. And you know what? I think that's exactly what that was," Garrus said. He tutted and raised a hand to preclude any hasty conclusions. "Shepard, you came back to life a few days ago. Before then, your body was moving, but you weren't in it. Turians have a concept we call_ Spiritus Lacunae_, the body without a soul. Who you are, right now? You weren't in that body. What happened to it... you had _nothing_ to do with."

Shepard blinked a few times, then slowly let her legs drop flat, and she stared ahead of her. "I just... Everything feels _wrong_..." Shepard said. She turned back to him, with eyes that glowed faintly red. "I'm supposed to be dead. That's... that's the way things work. The Avatar dies, the next is born. What if I'm not even the Avatar anymore?"

"Well, I'm not an expert in that, but I can always ask; do you feel like the Avatar?" Garrus chanced.

"No," Shepard said. Garrus sighed. That wasn't the answer he was hoping for. "...but then again... I'm not sure I ever did."

"Shepard, come here a minute," Garrus beckoned. Probably due to her obvious distress, she heeded without so much as a smart-ass comment. "Two years ago, I felt pretty much how I imagine you do now. There's something that's so fundamental to you that's shifted, changed, that you don't know how to deal with it. How do you think I felt when suddenly, despite _really_ supposing to not be able to, I started barbequing geth with my bare hands?"

"Weird and wrong," Shepard prompted.

"Exactly," Garrus said. He opened a hand, and within it, an orb of glowing golden fire puffed into existence. "But since then... I've gotten used to it. It might not have been what I was when I first stepped onto your ship on your wild adventure to kill Saren and save the galaxy from the Reapers, but it's what I am _now_, and I'm not going to complain and moan about it."

Shepard let out a dark chuckle. "So you're telling me to stop crying about it and move on?" she asked.

"I like to think that I was a bit more poetic than that, but yes," Garrus said. He took the hand which wasn't cut to hell and back, and gave it a pat. "You've gotten a chance that nobody else in this galaxy has ever had; you got to come back from the dead, to continue kicking the ass that got left unkicked before. I like to think I know you well enough to know that you just need to get your boots back on."

Shepard took a deep breath, and wiped her face with that unlacerated hand. "Ye...yeah. Maybe you're right."

"Please, we both know I'm always right," Garrus said.

"You almost got us killed when Haliat stole that nuke," Shepard pointed out.

"That was a perfectly understandable error that anybody could have made. _Anybody_!" Garrus said.

"If I wasn't a metalbender, we all would have died," Shepard said, a smirk clawing its way, slowly but surely, onto her face. "And there'd have been no body to bring me back!"

Garrus frowned for a moment. "Well, they could have cloned you, maybe?" he asked. Shepard leveled a flat glare at him. "Yeah, you're right. Nobody's stupid enough to try to replace you with a clone. Everybody'd know in an instant."

Shepard sighed, and leaned back. "I'm... Maybe this'll pass. Maybe I just need a bit of time. To get my bearings," she said. Then, her head tipped down quickly. "Oh, shit! Jackie! What happened to her?"

"Nilsdottir?" Garrus asked. He scratched at his mandible for a moment. "Well, I heard that she was sent to Grissom Academy, since they've got some of the best experts in biotics that humanity has to offer. You know, doctors, councilors, mad-scientists in the making, that sort of bunch. But other than that, I haven't heard a word about her."

"Is she alright?" Shepard asked.

"Physically? Fine. Mentally..." Garrus shook his head. "Why do you ask?"

Shepard stared a head for a moment, then reached aside of Garrus and pulled the earpiece that she'd hurled into a cup of water in her destructive dervish. She pulled the damp out of it with a gesture, then set it into her ear. "Joker? Change of plans. Take us to Grissom Academy."

"_Well, that's abrupt. Still, better than 'somewhere in that expanse of a billion cubic lightyears'. We should be there in a few hours_," the pilot answered, audible even to Garrus who sat two meters away.

Shepard sighed, and shook her head. "Great. Hours," she muttered. She then looked down at her own arms and sighed once more. "Could you hand me that gauze? I might as well wrap this shit up."

Garrus handed her the furl of bandages, and moved to glance at her desk. Notably, there was a still frame of an unwatched video there, showing Shepard dangling from the roof by her neck. Well, that couldn't have been a good idea to show her. His teeth ground, as he gave a symbolic vitriolic glance toward Lawson. She'd have to know that something like that would set Shepard off. Many things Commander Shepard was, but stoic was not one of them. He managed to glance up just as Shepard was pulling her shirt off, and glanced away quickly. Who in their right mind would be into white-skinned aliens? At least humans like Asha had a half-way decent skin-tone. Pity – now that he was thinking of her – that he hadn't the first clue what became of her.

He waited by the door until he heard the shoof of cloth crossing cloth, telling that she'd put on a new shirt. This one was actual female clothing, rather than the bullet-riddled man's suitcoat that she'd been donned until now. "Alright. You almost look presentable," Garrus said.

"Says the spiky gray monster," Shepard answered back. That she was in sarcasm mode was hopeful.

"You know, I figure there's one thing that's probably bugging the hell out of you," Garrus said. She pointed to the back of her head. "No, not that. And not the general wonkiness of your post-death body."

"Then what, oh foreseer of my consternation?" Shepard asked.

Garrus pulled the object from his back pocket, where he kept it. A disposable heat-sink. He always kept on on him, just in the off chance he'd need a reload somewhere. It was a habit he'd picked up the hard way. Shepard's sarcastic look turned to an aggravated one, and Garrus knew he'd hit on it exactly. "Come on, I'll show you why we're back to these ridiculous things."

"There's a reason? It'd better be a good one," Shepard muttered.

Garrus kept mum as the two descended to the CIC deck. He then had to take two lefts, which had Shepard confused, doubly so, when the door opened into the armory. He reached down under the table and pulled out a couple of boxes, setting them in a row, before flipping a final switch and activating the heavy barriers at the far end which allowed the far side of the room to be used as a firing range. The last thing he pulled out was some sections of Mako armor plating, which he lugged to the far side, and set down against the wall. The whole time, Shepard had a brow raised, and her arms crossed lightly – likely because anything tighter would have hurt like hell.

"Alright. Two things. Why the hell is the armory nowhere near the shuttle, and what the hell are you doing?"

"For the first, blame Weaver," Garrus said. He opened the first box. "As for the second... This is is a Karpov Mark Ten. Back in '83, this was the most powerful handgun on the market. If you ever wanted one, it'd set you back an easy three-quarters of a _million_ credits. This thing hits harder than my old rifle did... as shameful as that is to admit. Thanks for picking that up by the way."

"Least I could do," Shepard muttered. Garrus then turned that pistol to the armor plate and fired a shot. It dented into the plating almost a centimeter. "Not bad. Can I have it?"

"You don't want _this_ pistol," Garrus said. Shepard gave him an incredulous look. He set it into its box, and opened up the much less elegant and clunkier box beside it. "This is an Elanus Risk Control M-3 Predator. Came onto the market a year and a half ago. This thing might set you back... about a hundred credits, at most?" he slid a sink into it, and aimed it at the center of that plate. There was a single, almost anemic crack as it fired.

The armor plate exploded. Shepard's eyes couldn't have been wider.

"That's a _shitty_ gun?" Shepard asked.

"Yup," Garrus said. "When people reverse-engineered the geth's shields, the old guns didn't cut it to get through 'em, so they abandoned the auto-cooling for high heat, _extremely_-high-impact guns. Downside? Ammo. Not like it ever bothered me. I only ever need one shot per target."

Shepard blinked at that, and caught the gun when Garrus tossed it to her. She'd probably noticed that it didn't feel warm in the slightest, despite putting out a shot like that. She sighted down one of the larger shards of plating, and slowly squeezed the trigger, watching how the next-largest shard of armor remaining cracked and split. There was a flit of consternation on her face which Garrus didn't delve into.

"Not bad, huh?" Garrus asked. "You should see what my old Mantis can do now that I've got it up to snuff."

"Still using that old plinker, even with something like this?" Shepard asked. Garrus smirked.

"I've heard an old question of logic from the salarians through their history. 'If you build a boat and set it to sea, and over the years replace every beam, every mast, every nail and anchor and line... is it the same boat'?" Garrus asked. Shepard shrugged. "According to my people, _it is_... if the spirit is still with it. This rifle of mine," he patted a closed container that was set onto a work-bench, "might have had its barrel, its firing chamber, it's ammo-modifier, it's rails and its mass-effect field generator replaced, but it's still the same gun. _My_ gun."

"Yeah. Next you'll tell me that the Avenger Frame isn't a shitty rifle anymore," Shepard muttered.

Garrus answered her by kicking a box under the table open with the back of his heel, and pulling one of the bulbous firearms out. He tossed it to her easily, and she gave him a flat look. "Just try it," he said. She rolled her eyes, and turned it toward the small target that he brought up on the fields of the back wall. She let out a burst which mostly missed, and her eyes narrowed. A longer burst after that, with the bullets grouping tighter and tighter in, until it was a somewhat decent spread. For somebody who wasn't Garrus, anyway.

"I don't care what you say. This ain't the same gun as a Lancer," Shepard muttered.

"No it isn't," Garrus agreed. Shepard moved to sit against the work table, a bemused look on her face as she gazed upon the gun that she'd spent their entire time together heaping scorn upon. "Shepard, can I ask you something?"

"I don't see why not," she said.

"Why are we going to Grissom Academy? I haven't heard good things about Jack..."

"It's not just Jack that I'm going there to see," Shepard answered. That was, by the way she said it, something that she wasn't in any great hurry to elaborate on. So Garrus didn't push.

* * *

"Well, that's five kinds of creepy and strange," Vega noted, as he saw the first person frozen in place, as though he were trying to sprint away from the colony and was overtaken by ice. "Zorp, got anything?"

"Too much distortion. I'm surprised that short-wave is even working," the techie said.

"Well, Milk?" Vega asked. The sniper had his rifle stowed, and now stared down range through a pair of binoculars. His lips were pulled tight. "Come on, tell me something."

"I've got some movement over there in the... whatever that black stuff is... looks human, _maybe_," Milk stressed.

"Might be Captain Toni?" Vega asked.

"I'm not going to take anything on faith right now," Wall said.

"We've got to move up," Vega said. "Kamille, you're on point. Milk, don't let anything shoot us."

The others gave him nods, and even an 'aye sir,' which Vega didn't know much of what to do with. But he had a job to do, people to protect, and a lot of places to go before he had the time to lay down his head. It was an arduous and exhausting run, moving between chunks of rock and abandoned industrial equipment. The machinery for the new basalt-scraper, used to build the stuff they used to build the permanent housing, made for a discrete approach, but not a fast one. Man, it just seemed like this colony didn't have any luck but bad. First the Blood Pack, now these assholes?

"Hey, Wall?"

"Yeah, Sarge?"

"Who do you figure this for?" Vega asked.

"Shit if I know. Doesn't look like batarians to me. They'd be blowing shit up by now," came the answer. Vega gave a nod. Beyond a dull hum in the air, there was an almost pristine silence from the colony. Certainly nothing that would indicate a battle.

The whole thing had Vega's gut roiling quietly, as he moved up. He was used to invasions coming in the form of shells crashing down against barriers, of screaming hordes baying for blood. Of big angry krogan assholes trying to cut your head off with a knife. This wasn't any of that. It had him nervous. And Vega did not like being nervous.

Vega looked out around the side of a bulk-mover, and his eyes widened a bit. "Milk!" he snapped. "Eyes front!"

Milk rounded the first of potentially many man-height piles of rock, scanning before him with his scopes before he saw what Vega had. "Yeah, positive on movement. Negative on human."

Vega reached into a back pocket and clicked a scope onto his Revenant, using it to look forward into the things that he'd seen, wandering through the buildings of Fehl Prime. They were grey, or glowing blue. Like a bald and neuter asari... only not. Definitely, definitely not. Whatever they were, they lurched and loped through the prefabs and the foundations of more permanent structures like some sort of ravenous undead. "Whatever they are, they're in our way. Into the colony!"

There were chirps of 'aye' and acceptance. Strange to be leading this squad. He'd always thought that he'd be following men like Captain Toni till he was too old and couldn't fight worth shit anymore. Then he might settle down. But now, he was already the leader. It wasn't comfortable. The squad moved up in a wave, the front protecting the back while the back protected the front, all moving in a drilled-in momentum and timing. Grasses turned to mud, and mud turned to concrete, while the drone in the air resolved into something that Vega knew damned well from Earth.

Bugs.

"Hell, are you seeing this, Vega?" Wall asked over the line, despite being only four meters away next to another of the outermost prefabs.

"Yeah, reminds me of my ol' home back on Earth in black-fly season. They got as big as my head, I swear!" Vega said with a laugh. Mostly because somebody needed to do it.

"How are we going to get through those?" Kamille asked.

"There's always a way around," Zorp said. He had his Omni out, and waved it toward them. "Huh. Organic, but a lot of Eezo in 'em. I'd say they were..."

Vega was an earthbender, of course, but he was also a soldier. Soldiers learned early on that the enemy never came at you the way you expected. Thus, when one of those grey and blue things dropped down toward Zorp, it had already been noticed, tracked and had a bullet fired at it before it landed. The impact of the thing onto Zorp was enough to knock down and pin the techie, but Vega already had a bead on the bastard, and let his Revanant do his talking for him. The spray of fire cut the thing in half at the waist. Not a single drop of red blood came out of it. Instead, some sort of grey fluid substance.

"What the hell was that?" Zorp shouted as he kicked its legs away from him.

"Goddamn... that's a husk!" Milk said.

"Husk?"

"Yeah, the geth used them all the time," Milk said. "They were diggin' them out of the Citadel's vents for weeks."

"Geth? The geth are invading Fehl Prime?" Vega asked.

"Gotta be. Who else has husks at their... Vega get down!"

Vega did one better by slamming his foot down, and rocketing the stone at his back straight up, delivering a brutal uppercut by way of rock shelf to the face of another husk, sending it twisting away. It hadn't even reached its apex when Wall's warp slammed into it, and its body began to melt away.

"I think they know we're here," Milk said.

"Into the 'fabs!" Vega ordered. Only Kamille and he had crossed the threshold when a whistle came through the air, something streaking out and down from the center of the colony and landing very near where the squad was scrambling. It came as a burning bolt, which splashed down into the ground, and then vomited forth _dozens_ of those husks. Vega took a moment to heave Milk into his window, before he braced his rifle against it and started to spray them down.

The first husks were torn apart by the gunfire, but the pile of them that had landed was still forcing itself up, members sliding away before breaking into a sprint at the squad. Then, some of the husks started to glow red, fire oozing out of their joints and belching out of their mouths. Grey flesh began to start to glow orange.

"Come on, Wall! We're waiting on you!" Vega shouted. Outside, Wall was stripping the last of the husks who'd reached him off.

"Kinda... Busy!" he shouted, before driving the husk away into one of the burning ones with a biotic punch. The burning one popped back up and hurled itself forward. Only by doing that glowing blue thing did Wall keep it from grabbing him. And he'd barely gotten that barricade up when the glowing reached a peak, and then detonated, hurling the biotic back against the wall. Kamille let out a fairly foul profanity, and let her firing stop long enough that she could lean out that window and drag the Wall, stunned though he was, back into cover.

Vega turned to the pile, even as he tried to perforate more of the burning husks. They were detonating like damned bombs! Every one of them threw off his aim, baked his skin from the distance, made his ears ring. The pile stopped breaking away, though, as one final form rose. This one gave no impression of humanity, even as fleeting and grotesque as the husks did. This thing was two meters of bloated, tumorous horror. Faces with glowing eyes and gaping mouths were stretched across one shoulder, reaching down into a final one which had what seemed a ridged metal tube jutting from out its teeth. It didn't look like it should have been able to move. But move it did.

Glowing eyes turned toward the other prefab. Vega started to fire on it, to distract it, maybe. The bullets he fired plinked off of it like they were spitballs... or bullets from one of the old shitty guns they used to use. There was a different kind of hum from that tube, before it recoiled back with a mighty crack. That crack blasted through the wall of the prefab and slammed into Kamille's arm... tearing it off completely.

Kamille went down with a shriek of pain, leaving Wall to gape, before he finally got his war-face on. He hurled a Warp down at the thing on the ground, ignoring the abominable husks which were closing on him. Vega was slamming heat-sinks into his gun as fast as his shots would chew them up, and a pile of them was growing at his feet, just to keep the husks detonating a few meters away from Wall instead of right in front of his face. That meant that he didn't have the time to deal with the tide approaching _him_.

The second shot slashed forward from that thing's gun, and caught Wall straight in the chest. The biotic was sent flying back, smashing into the back wall of the prefab and out of Vega's ability to track. He could see the agony on Kamille's face, even as she managed to pry her Omni out of her dismembered arm and use it to apply something to stop her from bleeding to death.

"Come on! I need something!"

"Wall's still up!" Zorp shouted over the short-wave.

"Get Kamille out of here!" Vega ordered. "I'll cover you!"

Once again, he was deaf to their acknowledgement. His barrage of fire was cut short when a burning hand grabbed its barrel and pulled away from Vega's intended target. He wished that he could have said he used some mystic technique, some forgotten and arcane aspect of his earthbending talent to ward off the burning husk before it could pull itself into the window. Instead, he just gave it a brutal haymaker punch. Well, a haymaker punch that landed with enough force to pop its damned head off like it was a plastic tab. As it fell back, a great jet of white-hot flame erupted back out of it, melting through another of it's ilk. That one detonated as so many others had.

"Aim for the head! They don't pop if you aim for the head!"

Silence from the short wave.

"Milk? Get the others out of here!" Vega said, as he jumped to grab the roof over the window, and with a twist of metalbending, bear it down into place in a snarled mess of iron and aluminum.

"Roger that," Milk said. Vega took exactly one step to follow in support of their sniper when another tearing sound came, this time from the other side, the one which faced deeper into the colony. The bathroom wall was folded aside, the faucet now belching water freely that splattered onto the one approaching.

This one was as tall as Vega, but there the similarities ended. It had four golden eyes on the front of its face in a great bar, no mouth to speak of, and a head like a chisel. Its waist was almost impossibly narrow, and its flesh, the color of dung. With one tridactyl hand, it reached into its already meager abdomen, and pulled out a block of itself. A block which, with each passing instant it took Vega to turn his Revenant, unfolded and unpacked, until what had started looking no more than a white-brown tumor was now the rough shape of a rifle. Vega set his teeth and began to belch fire at this asshole, but it merely held out a hand. A golden, hexagonal field appeared before it, one which saw Vega's many bullets bounce away harmlessly, until there was the deadly beep-beep-beep of the Revanent's heatsink going out entirely. When that happened, the brown-thing snapped its hand closed, and the now orange hexagon evaporated.

"What the hell are–" Vega began.

He was cut off when it hurled itself with a burning punch directly into Vega's chest, a punch which then sent him blasting through the wall and out into the streets.

* * *

Shepard took another breath, as the last thunk sounded. The docking clamp latched into place, and the airlock began to open. The whoosh of air drifting out, into the Normandy, made Shepard's still unbound hair twist back a bit, but hardly far. "Alright. Really here. Start walking Shepard," she coached herself.

"I can imagine this isn't comfortable for you," Garrus said, where he leaned against a wall. "If you want, I can give you a kick in the ass to get some momentum going?"

"Drop dead," Shepard muttered. There were a lot of things she was – suicidally brave in the face of near-certain death was one of them – but when it came to crap like this... she just didn't know what foot to put forward first. Shepard continued to stand there, staring forward. She let out a groan and turned away. "Ugh. What the hell is wrong with me?"

Garrus was about to speak, but saw Lawson at the far end of the hall. His expression was what clued Shepard in that XO that had been foist upon her was striding up in that hip-swaying way that she had. She didn't look amused... which in Shepard's brief experience was no change from business as usual. "Shepard? I thought we said you were going to bring Professor Solus onto the crew?"

"No, _you_ said that. _I_ never agreed to it," Shepard said, straightening her back and getting some fire stoking her soul once again. "You don't get it do you? I'm the commander of this mission, and the Normandy goes where I tell it to. I'm in command. You aren't."

"I'm beginning to think that it might have been a poor decision to give uncontested authority to you," Lawson said. "What is even at Grissom Academy that we could use against the Collectors? These people are students and children, engineers _at best_."

"How about you let me worry about who we're here for, and you can do... whatever it is XOs do," Shepard said with a dismissing wave. Lawson didn't look impressed in the slightest, but fortunately, Shepard didn't care. Resolute, she strode through the airlock and into the station that floated in space. The only reason it was even here right now was because of the actions of one insanely brave woman, who punched Elanos Haliat in the dick so hard, metaphorically speaking, that he aborted an entire section of the Skyllian Blitz just to avoid getting dead.

Shepard had personally rectified that last part.

"The more time I spend with you humans, the more krogan you seem to me," Garrus offered as he followed her through the airlocks. "You both seem to operate a lot better when you're angry."

Shepard gave him a glance, but Garrus was far too amused to let it wither him. The last airlock opened, to an empty boarding area. Shepard's eyebrow rose. Her hand went to her side-arm when she saw the scorch-mark against one of the bulkheads nearby. "I'm starting to think that..."

"_Visitors, please come to the administration area; we're short-staffed at the moment so we can't send somebody to greet you_," a voice came over the speakers. It was a woman, human, and she sounded very distracted.

"That this is a trap?" Garrus asked. "And here, I left my gun in the armory. Damn."

Shepard began to move forward, her gun still on her hip, but ready to be brought up at a moment's notice. Which was something of a futile gesture, as she currently couldn't hit shit. She'd actually be better off with lightning bolts – those at least Shepard had, for whatever reason, not lost her proficiency in. The further into the structure they went, the more it seemed the aftermath of a battle. But it wasn't just random destruction. No, this was people cleaning up, after destruction. Scorches were partially scrubbed away. Crumbled architecture was swept into a corner, and cushions – likely the burned or bullet-riddled ones – were absent from the sofas. The sound of voices ahead drew Shepard's attention, and Garrus flexed his fingers, letting golden flames flicker past his... did they call those 'claws' or just long fingernails? She'd have to ask at some point.

"...your fault. I know that. There wasn't anything you could have done," a man said.

"I know that. I still think that you're overreacting out of panic. Grissom Academy is safe, as it always was," the woman from the announcement answered.

"You were attacked by terrorists! This is hardly an overreaction!" the man answered. Shepard's hand finally released from her gun. So there was indeed violence, but at least the right side of it managed to win.

"I... I don't want to go," a third voice said, this one a young woman, much more hesitant than the first.

"I know you don't... but it's not safe here anymore," the man said, in comforting tones. Shepard and Garrus finally passed the threshold of a security room, and could see those involved. One of them was a dark-haired man, slender and his eyes surrounded by an almost pinkish hue. Garrus grit his teeth at that, for some reason. The girl was waifish and pale-eyed, and looked like she wanted to hide inside herself, crushing herself down into a quantum singularity. Her eyes didn't leave the spot on the floor between they, and the yellow-haired woman who was leaning across her desk. The man gave Shepard a glance, then turned back to the woman. There was almost a double-take, but not quite. "If they can try to take her away from here... they can take her from anywhere."

"Then you're defeating your own case, Mister Grayson," the woman said. He sighed, and looked down at the girl.

"I just want to keep my girl safe," he all but whispered. "For what it was worth... thank you."

The man turned and walked past Shepard and Garrus, gently leading his... daughter, Shepard guessed, toward the same docking area that Shepard had come in from. The woman sighed, rubbed her brow, then waved the others in. "Well, don't just stand out there in my threshold. Welcome to Grissom Academy."

"I didn't expect holes blown in your bulkheads," Shepard said, giving a glance to where a custodian was even now sweeping up broken glass into a metal bin. "I thought this place wasn't about training soldiers."

"Of course it isn't. Just lucky we have so many nearby. I _never_ thought somebody would actually target this place," she said. "But that's behind us. This is a school and biotic acclimation facility, not a barracks. We're trying to set a shining standard for the rest of humanity to follow; after ALMA, the bar was set so low we could barely trip over it, but still. Right, I haven't introduced myself, have I? I'm Kali Sanders, Systems Alliance Navy."

"Like I said, I didn't expect military," Shepard repeated. Sanders rolled her eyes.

"I'm not here to be their drill sergeant. And you still haven't introduced yourself."

"I thought I needed no introduction," Shepard said. "I'm the Avatar."

She cracked a chuckle. "Right. Good one."

Shepard let the silence linger, then opened one hand. In that, she forced up a ball of water from a flask at her hip. In her other hand, she ignited a ball of flame. Sanders' eyes went wide at that.

"My gods... You're _alive_? Everybody said that you were killed two years ago!" Sanders exclaimed, before taking a step back and dropping into her chair. Shepard put her water away for the time being.

"And it's probably a good idea if people keep thinking that," Shepard said. "You have a Talitha Shepard on... _campus_? Am I right?"

Sanders just stared at Shepard for a long time. Garrus gave a chuckle of his own at her befuddlement. "I think you broke her, Shepard," he said.

"Hey. Focus?" Shepard asked. Sanders finally snapped out of her fugue and leaned forward.

"Right. Talitha Shepard... Oh, yes, I see. She's with the Uprooted. They're on the far end of the station; the fighting never came anywhere near them."

"Uprooted?" Shepard asked.

"Oh, right. You probably haven't heard that term. It's what we call the slaves we recovered from the batarians, those who were turned from fire, or air, or earthbenders into waterbenders. We're trying to give them the best possible chance to recover, but between the... treatment... which Uprooted them in the first place and the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which every single one of them is suffering, it's a hard slog. But Tali is strong. She's a lot tougher than a lot of the people who come through these doors," Sanders gave a small smile. "She's already working to help the others, even though technically she should be _receiving_ that help, not _giving_ it."

"What can I say? Shepards are tough," she said with a proud smile. No matter which Tali it was, Tali was always something to be proud of. "Could I..."

"Of course you can visit your sister," Sanders said. She hit a few buttons on her computer, then spoke into the screen. "Are you sure I can't convince you to stay?"

"_Sorry. I've got to follow my gut on this one. It's been a blast_."

"Literally," Sanders answered as she cut off the feed. "As for you, please, follow me. I'll take you to the rails."

She skirted the others, and began to head toward a more central part of the station. Garrus, though, looked concerned. "You've got something on your mind, Garrus?" Shepard asked.

"You're aware that this... Grayson... fellow, is a red-sand addict, right?" he asked.

"I'm well aware of Grayson's past. And I'm also aware that he's been clean for two years," Sanders gave a nod, before motioning forward to what looked like a little tram. "Grayson's had his demons, but he tries. That's a lot more than can be said than for a lot of people. If you like, I can come with you..."

"I'd prefer to talk to her on my own," Shepard said, with a glance between the human and the turian.

"I can wait in the car," Garrus said in a long-suffering way. Sanders nodded, and then took a third seat, this one at the front, and turned the cart on, shooting it along its MEff-Lev rails. Garrus gave a look to Shepard. "You're going to be fine."

"What?" Shepard asked.

"You had that haunted look in your eye. Whatever happens, you'll be fine, your sister will be fine, and the day will dawn tomorrow. So stop panicking," Garrus said.

"Who said I was panicking?" Shepard asked.

"You don't live as long as I did on Omega without picking up some of the more subtle clues," Garrus said. "Kinda like what a sand-blaster looks like. Hard to mistake."

The rest of the MEL ride followed Garrus talking about the various horrible things that he'd seen on Omega, things which Shepard filed away as potentially useful information. You never know when knowing where to shoot a vorcha to kill it fast would come in handy. The cart came to a somewhat stuttery stop, which made Shepard glad she'd sat down. If she hadn't, she'd probably have landed face-first in Garrus' lap.

"Alright, there's another thing that we'll need to send the Engies after. Something damaged the rails," Sanders said. She looked back to Shepard, then pointed out the door she opened, to the wide-open area, all in pales of white and grey and blue, with the floral accents in various spots. "Go ahead. I can wait."

"Thanks," Shepard said. She gave a puff of breath, and rubbed at her arms which, despite the medigel and the 'missing most of their skin', now _itched_ more then they hurt. Garrus gave her a pat on the shoulder, then a motion forward. She got to her feet, and started walking.

The atrium was very open, and that was probably why these people were in it. There were many, all of them sitting with their back to a pillar or wall-accent, some place where nobody could sneak up behind them. Some of them just sat normally. More of them looked around with a hunted-animal look about them. A look that Shepard had seen before... in Jackie, after she beat Garrus half to death for no understandable reason. One, though, defied that trend. She had her back to open space, and leaned carefully toward another who was almost curled fetal atop a bench. Shepard slowly started to walk up to her.

She had auburn hair, which hung past her shoulders in curly waves. Even from the partial profile that Shepard saw of her, she still had those freckles, those dark eyes. They turned toward Shepard, then back to her ward. Then, a double take. She faced Shepard directly, her expression going from motherly to shocked. Her skin went pale, and she slowly rose to a stand. She looked at Shepard, lacerated and evil-eyed, like she couldn't quite believe her sense of sight. Shepard couldn't really blame her.

"...Big Sis?" Tali asked.

"Yeah..." Shepard said, her eyes starting to brim slightly. She took a step forward. Tali took a step back.

"But... everybody said you were dead," she said, shaking her head.

"I know. I had to let people think that..." Why, you idiot? "...it was the only way to keep you and the people I care about safe."

"Is it really you?" she asked.

Shepard nodded, wiping away tears before they even managed to fall. "Yes. Yes it is. 'I'm broken, too'. It's me."

Shepard had barely gotten 'me' out, when Tali was glomping her with a hug. Shepard's smile could barely be contained by her face. As it was, it hurt where it pulled at her lacerated face. She didn't care.

"I knew... I just _knew_ that you weren't really gone..." Talitha Shepard said, through her own sobs. The others looked on, some flinching away, others simply tightening into themselves. A rare few, those who seemed the least damaged, they dared to offer a smile, for somebody among them who'd managed to have some part of their life given back to them.

And little did they know, that applied to either sister, equally.

* * *

Vega pulled in a breath that hurt like hell. Yup, that was a broken rib alright. "Hey! Milk? Zorp?"

"Quiet, Sarge," Milk said, wiping his face with the back of a hand every few seconds, mostly to keep the blood from the gash across his forehead from blinding him. "They got Kamille and Zorp. Wall is out there somewhere. What the hell is going on?"

"Shit if I know, Milk," Vega muttered. He pushed himself to a sit, then to a rise. "How'd you get away from that ugly thing?"

Milk motioned at his empty bandolier. "All of the grenades. And it didn't go down."

"Right. Come on, saddle up. We're not leaving the squad to these... these things!" Vega swore. Milk gave a nod, and pulled his rifle from his back. A Mantis was a poor-man's rifle, but it still hit like a shuttle from the sky. Right now, it'd have to do. Vega began to limp his way forward. "Where are we?"

"Look for yourself," Milk said, as Vega finally rounded the dumpster that they'd hidden behind, and took in the colony. The black mass had withdrawn for the most part to the very center of the colony, to the administrative areas, to the shopping center. It left places like the Old Man's diner, built out of the back of his house, uncovered by the bugs.

"You've got to be kidding me! They messed with my buuz!" Vega snarled. He pushed past limping into walking, and from there to jogging. "Can you believe this? Hey! Old Man!"

"Vega!"

"No, I get it... Hard to even find the words," Vega muttered. He glanced inside, only to see something glowing red walk through the kitchen doors, loping like an ape. Instantly, Vega was twisting his arms up, his legs spreading wide, as he tore the metal of the counter into a spike which he drove through the center of that Abomination, impaling it even as it was sent back into the far wall. It nevertheless detonated, blasting the roof off of the prefab, and almost sending Vega flying back into the dumpster.

"Gods damn it! What's with these things!" Milk said as he pulled Vega forward with him. "They must have landed at the pad. It's the only place where it wouldn't sink into the mud, this time of year."

"Yeah, good thinkin'," Vega said. He could feel the wind twisting, but he had to keep moving. "Did you see what punched me out of my prefab, back at that mobile artillery piece?"

"I didn't see a thing," Milk muttered. "All I know is that the prefab got blown apart, and you were walking wounded."

"Why do I get the feelin' we're being followed, then?" Milk stopped, and went even more pale than usual. He slowly turned, and saw...

In body shape, it was almost analagous to Vega himself. Broad-shouldered, thick muscled; but there the similarities ended. Its head was not just grey and hairless, and glowing with red flames, but seemed almost too small for the rest of it. Its hands each had two thumbs opposite each other, and it clung to the wall by way of another set of hands which had replaced its feet. Its lower jaw was basically just a hinge, open to the air, that fire dripped out of. But there was something inside those black eyes that spoke to an animal cunning. The instant it was spotted, its jaw tipped open, and it let out a howl, before its back hands threw it forward. Vega wasn't the kind of person to be caught off guard that easily. He thrust up a fist, and a pillar of stone burst from the ground, catching the brutal man-thing in its chest and hurling it ahead of them.

Milk got a shot off on the Savage, one which deflected off a purplish field that shimmered into being around it. It caught the ground and began to slide, tearing up the tarmac as it did so, its earthbending obvious as it mounted up even more behind it to slow it down. With a sound that reminded Vega of a barbeque lighter, it hunched forward like a wrathful hound. The blast of bright blue flames that erupted from its hinge-jaw surged toward the two men. Vega furiously tore up the terrain ahead of them, a wedge to drive the flames aside. Still, the asphalt, the concrete under it, and the stone under that, were all starting to glow orange by the time the barrage ended. Then, with a thrusting punch, that stone was shooting forward, as hot as magma, toward it's source.

The Savage vaulted the majority of it, but bits and blobs, those that Vega had in a snap movement tore away from the main, burning mass, struck. There was a crack of energy, and the purplish field melted away, before its flesh began to hiss and sizzle. It landed with a crash, tackling Vega and hurling him to the ground, its arms grasping his, while its feet-hands slammed punch-kicks into his stomach and groin.

"You are one _ugly_ sonuvabitch, you know that?" Vega hissed, trying to ignore the pain and the impacts. He didn't have to do so long. There was a sharp crack in the air, and the Savage's head snapped aside. With a final slam, Vega felt himself being smashed aside, rolling along the ground until he almost wedged himself under the nearest prefab. The Savage turned its full attention to Milk, and the flames began to mound higher. The sniper dove through a window as it let out another brutal blue wave. Vega twisted with his hand, and the ground chucked his Revenant back to him.

He got to his feet, his stance still the wide legged pose of earthbending might, as he began to send dozens of hypersonic shots into the back of the Savage. Its slabs of muscle began to ablate away like armored plating, until they dug into something bright and white and metal-capped that lay roughly analogous to a spinal column. The blast of flame from the Savage's maw ended, as its head twisted a hundred eighty degrees and more, to see directly behind it. The rest of its body followed suit, but that was a mistake, as Milk popped out of wherever he was hiding – and it had to be a good one because a great deal of that prefab was _melted_ – to drive one final mass-accelerated bolt into that jar-thing at it's metaphorical heart. The monster's back hand-feet went wide, and its pelvis dropped to the ground. Its skin heated up from grey to orange, then to yellow, before turning white. The hinge-jaw fell off. And with not a bang but a hiss of dissolving metal, the Savage melted away into a puddle that burned its way down through the earth.

"God-_damn_," Vega said. "I didn't think the geth could do that! Turn a person into somethin' like that!"

Milk emerged from a side entrance, his head and face covered in water, and nevertheless still a little bit reddened from the heat. "I don't think these are the geth," Milk said, breathing heavy. "I haven't seen one of 'em. Not yet."

"We ain't got time to gab. Come on. The landing pad's two blocks over," he said. He then pointed perpendicular to it. "We hit it three blocks in that direction. Anything looking for that," a point to the white-hot puddle which was setting the grass on fire nearby, "is going to come here."

"Aye, sir," Milk agreed. That was something that he'd have to get used to. Milk pulled his transceiver from his ear and fiddled with it. "I think this thing's busted. Is yours?" Vega answered by tossing his to the sniper. "Good. This one still works."

They rounded an unattended air-car, which sat placid despite the frozen man who was locked in place, fumbling for his keys. The closer they got to this part of the colony, the more of these folk that they found. There were children, frozen as they crawled away on the ground. A pregnant woman, her back pressed to a prefab, her face locked in a terrified wince. An old man, back stooped, barely keeping his balance on one cane as his swing with the other was now locked in limbo. And beyond the drone of bugs, silence.

"This is unsettling," Milk said quietly, as he looked at the old man. Vega noted that the old man's rheumy eyes followed the sniper as he went. Vega took a moment to give his shoulder a pat.

"Don't worry, old-timer. We'll get you outta here," he said. The old man couldn't answer that, or even so much as blink. God-damn. Was there anything more horrible than this?

Vega caught up with Milk, following in silence to a corner. He leaned around, seeing several of those walking artillery slowly stomping toward where the two of them fought the Savage. Yeah, going the long way was definitely the right idea. One of those things was an unstoppable threat. Three? Gods have mercy. When they had truly and completely left line of sight, only then did the two men among the madness cross that street. They cut through the prefab that stood open, its walls giving... well, soft cover, at least. Around the bunk-beds, past the table and the kitchenette, and to its front window, that which looked out onto the expanse of tarmac that made up the space-port. Only a faintly shimmering wall of mass-effect field, the one that kept the sonic booms from reaching the prefabs, stood before them. The ships which had been there were now molten slags. All but one.

"Milk? Give me eyes," Vega said. Milk nodded, and looked through his scope.

"Pods," Milk said. Vega looked through binoculars to see what he meant. There were hundreds of those things, lined up like burial coffins. Their front panel was a transparent yellow rather than opaque wood, though. "...with people in them," Milk continued. Vega saw what Milk meant. He could see colonists in those pods which stood upright, against the side of the only ship not burning. It was... Shit, Vega didn't know how to describe it except 'questionably alive'. There was a sort of pulsing to it, like it breathed, or a heart beat within it, but it looked like it was made of unhewn and untampered boulders, with occasional bits of metal sticking out of it. It had to be the size of an ultralight frigate.

"More of those..." Vega supplied him the term, "...Savages. And some... I heard 'em call them Scions," Milk said, looking to the region of the 'on ramp' that the invader's frigate had. The beefy Savages dragged pods out of sight, while the Scions – and what _that_ meant to Milk, Vega didn't exactly know – walked in something like a patrol circle. "Wait... Something else. Do you see that?"

Vega did. More of those four-eyed assholes that punched him through a wall. "I count four," Vega said.

"Yeah, we've got four," Milk said. "They're the weak link. Problem is, they've got all that artillery with them."

"Wait..." Vega said. He spun the magnification to its maximum, zooming in on one particular pod. A pod that had a very familiar face in it. "Shit! That's Captain Toni!"

"What? Where?" Milk asked. He spotted it a second later. "Oh, that's bad."

"Anybody else?" Vega asked. Milk shook his head. So Kamille and Zorp weren't there; Wall wasn't either, but nobody knew what happened to him. "Shit, this mission just got complicated. Rescue?"

"We'll have to be sneaky about it," Milk said. He broke off, and pulled a towel from the floor, giving his forehead gash a dabbing. It was starting to slow, but even Vega could tell that it was bothering him. One of Milk's eyes was getting bloodshot.

"Something about this doesn't sit right," Vega said, as he dropped down and shoved a fresh thermal clip into his Revenant.

"What doesn't?"

"That thing punched me into the street," Vega said. Milk looked toward him. "One of those things... why didn't it follow me?"

Milk gave him a glance back, one fraught with nerves. His mouth opened to speak, but he was taken completely unawares when a brown, chitinous hand clamped around his armor's collar, and heaved him past the sill and into the field that held back the swirling insects, rather than the boom of liftoff and landing. Vega twisted his way up, and squeezed the trigger down, but the brown thing flicked a hand back, and a blast of wind that was as hard as iron slammed him in the chest and pinned him to a wall. The four eyed head turned toward him, as it levitated even with the window. Its arms pulled in, before clenching tight. Light began to burn from its joints, a kind of sickly blue-green hue that spoke to cancer and sickness untreated, burning as hot as the sun. "**This body is ****my tool,**" came a voice from somewhere deep within that creature. With a flare that sent a sigil of fire into air, something obscured from Vega's sight by the realities of he being inside a prefab, and that thing not, its four eyes now blazing.

Milk turned his rifle at the glowing one, but his shot struck the field which appeared at the creature's hand. It twisted and heaved it's arm and hand, and Milk's body twisted and went rigid, standing on his tip-toes. It beckoned in, even as its other hand kept a dump-truck's weight of wind pinning Vega to a wall. He only had the power to move his fingers. So move his fingers he did. Millimeter by millimeter, bending the metal behind him out of the way.

There was a meaty paff as Milk's face entered the palm of the thing with the four glowing eyes. "**Now, let's see what we have here**," it said, turning its head toward the sniper. "**Hmm. Squad of seven. Which means two more to complete the set. No bending, disappointing. No soul for shamanism either. Pathetic, really. That you think that something so meager can stand against the tide which is to come**."

"Who the hell are you?" Vega demanded past grit teeth, as his fingers began to ply the wall behind him slowly apart.

"**Something greater than you**," it answered. A tsk-tsk sound came from its lack of a mouth, and the head turned toward Vega. "**And you haven't found what I seek either. So this one is completely without worth to me..." **it paused, and the head panned over to the Scion, which was dragging a tripod behind it as it came.** "Well, **_**almost**_** completely without worth**."

With a flick of its arm, Milk was hurled through the window, past the field holding the bugs at bay, and onto the ground at the Scion's feet. It stomped hard on Milk's chest, to a sound of crunching ribs, before it reached with it's one good arm and flopped Milk, face up, on that tripod. With the sound of grinding metal, a spike shot up and through Milk, impaling him before bearing him up into the air, dangling with a pole of metal through him.

"MILK!" Vega screamed, to his detriment, because when he did, a wad of air that had been pressing his face against the wall forced its way into his gullet and started choking him on nothing.

"**Now, now. You shouldn't struggle against the inevitable**," It said, as it drew closer. "Y**ou stand on the verge of something glorious, a **_**revelation**_** unlike any your species has ever known. When we find the Avatar, your entire species shall join together, a single shining light against the dark. You shall have **_**Ascension**_**!**"

It loomed closer, one tridactyl hand looming toward Vega's wide-eyed face as it did. Those eyes didn't just glow; they burned with that light.

"**Now. Let's see what **_**you**_** bring to the greater whole...**"

* * *

"This place is a lot better than I imagined it would be," Shepard admitted. "I thought... padded cells and people drooling into their shirts. Not this."

This, as it happened, was a garden that overlooked a ring of pond, a waterfall feeding it from one side of a little, natural-looking island at its heart. Tali smiled, and shook her head, from where the two sat on a bench and looked down upon it all. "Miss Sanders wants us all to live... Freely, I think. She wants us to have something like what you have, out there. So that we aren't afraid when we go."

"You're not afraid?" Shepard asked. Tali glanced down. "No, no, it's alright..."

"I still... I have nightmares sometimes. I wake up screaming... feeling like I'm _back there_. But it's not true. I get out of my bed, and the doors are unlocked, and I can run if I want to, and..." She took a calming breath. "Sometimes, I have to remind myself that _this_ is real. That I have a name, that there are people who care about me. It's getting easier."

"Tali... there's something I want you to know. Just because I never did get around to saying it before," Shepard said. "I'm proud of you. And without you, I'd have never made it this far."

"What's a little-sister for?" Tali asked, a nervous smile coming to her face. Then again, every smile she had was nervous. Realistically, there was very little left of the Tali Shepard that Aimei had grown up with. That Tali had been positively brimming with energy, bouncing off the walls, wide grins and constant laughter. This one... not so much.

Shepard got to her feet. "I'm not going to go so long without talking to you again. I promise," she said, pulling Tali into a hug, which the other returned readily. Rib-creakingly, even. "Now... do you know where I can find the mental health ward?"

"You're looking for Miss Nilsdottir, aren't you?" Tali asked. Shepard blinked a few times. Wow. Was she that obvious? Shepard nodded, and her little sister beckoned after her. "I know where she is. She's not in there. She's... somewhere safer."

"Safer for her, or safer for everybody else?"

"Yes."

"Tali..."

"It's true," the younger Shepard said. She navigated the Avatar to the MEL-rails, and sat herself in the driver's seat. They really did trust her a lot. And she'd probably done a lot to earn that trust. "You might not like what you see, though."

"I've seen Jackie in a lot of different states. Some good, some pretty goddamned bad. At this point nothing could – pull over for a second, I see Garrus – could surprise me."

True to Shepard's instructions, Tali coasted the MEL-tram to a stop near where the turian was talking animatedly to a young man who was wearing some sort of exoskeleton, who had a fire burning above one palm. "Hey! Garrus!"

"Shepard, you should get a look at this," he nodded toward the youth. "This kid says that he can reproduce a bender's soul in a non-bender."

"That's a gross oversimplification, and I never said that," the youth said. He let the flame extinguish, and conjured a new one in his other hand. "It's more about tricking the soul into thinking it's a bender, then bending because of it. Well, _not really_, but if I could find a better metaphor for how it works, I'd be making money instead of just going to school here."

"Firebending for the non-firebender," Garrus said. "Good luck with that. Try not to set your bed on fire."

"Hey, it's not like I sleep in this thing," the youth said, mildly insulted. Then he glanced away. "...very often."

"Garrus, come on," Shepard said. He sauntered toward them, and took his place beside Shepard on the MEL-tram. "Tali, you can keep going."

The younger Shepard gave a nod. "She's in a secure section, one we keep fairly free of visitors. Near the computer core; nice and cold."

"She wants it cold?"

"She complains about the heat all the time. Mister Prangley says it's because she doesn't keep her amp in. I don't know what that means, really..." Tali said.

"Makes sense," Garrus said, leaning forward. "On Palaven, Cabals tend to train in _freezing_ temperatures, so that their amps don't overheat before they need them in combat. And we all know Jack's amp isn't what you'd call 'standard-issue'."

"This is stuff I'm going to have to learn, isn't it?" Shepard asked darkly.

"Sounds like," Garrus said. There was a descending hum as they left behind the gardens and botany, and entered into what looked like a technophobe's vision of hell. Lights and cables traversed as far as the eye could see – which wasn't very far – creating a virtual jungle in optic-cabling and quantum computer cores. There was a wave of heat, then, chill beyond it. Tali brought the tram to a stop, at an unremarkable ledge that stood between what looked like an oxygen producing algae-vat and a small front-end loading machine. Tali led the way.

"You really know your way around this place, huh?" Shepard asked.

"When I first came here... I found all the best places to hide. Miss Nilsdottir found them, too. Hello, Augusta."

"Hey, Tali," woman said from where she was buried to her waist in the ceiling.

"It must have been hard for you," Shepard said.

"No. Hard was thinking my Big Sis was dead," Tali said. Shepard let out a sigh at that. "Don't worry. We're not far now."

Augusta let out a hiss, then there was a clatter as something that she dropped struck metal. Tali went into a full-body flinch, turning to it like some sort of feral animal preparing to run for its life. After a few seconds, and a few deep breaths, she regained her composure. Shepard wasn't sure what she was supposed to do. Comfort her? Hug her? Not touch her? Garrus was just shaking his head slowly, but his gaze wasn't on either Shepard. He was probably thinking something all his own, and just as grim.

"R-right. Miss Nilsdottir should be right through here," Tali said, still sweating despite the cold. It was heartbreaking how thin the layer of control was over her. Even a loud noise sent her right back. As she took a step forward, Shepard gambled. She caught her sister's shoulder and pulled her into a brief hug.

"It's alright, Tali. You don't need to go with us any further if you don't want to."

Tali nodded, and gave Shepard one last look, before turning away. "I... I need to go back to the others, now. Their time in the plaza's almost over. Somebody has to look after them."

"My sister the healer. Makes a nice counterpoint," Aimei said. There was a ghost of a smile, then Tali started walking back. "This is better, right? 'Cause it doesn't feel that much better."

"You've got to learn to take the victories you can get," Garrus said. He motioned forward. "I can see she's not been abandoned here."

Garrus was pointing at a pair of empty, if food-stained, trays, as well as a small pile of tiny paper cups. Probably for pills. Shepard rounded the corner first, looking in. There was darkness there, lit only by the ambient lighting of the machines around her. The effect of it was to have a faintly red or green sheen over black, depending on which beeped harder. Shepard could see that somebody'd shoved a cot into this tiny, dead-end nook, and hooked up – after a fashion – a toilet and a sink. Somebody made this cold corner into a cell.

"Jack? Can you hear me?" Shepard asked.

There was a faint movement in the sheen of light.

"Fuuuck. I ain't ta...king those ones again..." Jackie's voice came back from the darkness, low, flat, and drawling. "Hearin' shit."

"I don't think they're doing the best job medicating her," Garrus said.

"...might not be th'pills..." Jackie sounded like she was both drunk and stoned. "Is that... spiky asshole?"

"The one and only. Mind if I turn on the lights?"

"NO LIGHTS!" the shout drove Shepard back a step. There was another shift of movement, as she moved to an awkward, hunched over sit. "I... thought you were dead, Shepard. They said you... ugh..."

There was a grumbling sound which came from Jackie's direction, but not from her mouth. The form that had been against one wall now lurched with a bang of knees against metal, and the clatter of hands onto a toilet-lid, followed by wet-heaving. Shepard couldn't restrain her wince during the whole affair.

"...so much for that lunch..." Jack sounded singularly miserable.

Shepard held in a shiver, and noted that even in the dark she could see her own breath. "I'd ask how you were doing, but... I think it's pretty obvious," she said.

"Fuuuck you..." Jackie muttered. There was a thump, as she flopped away from the toilet, and the lights shone on the profile of her face... and that profile seemed odd. "I don't... You're dead, and I'm losing my goddamned mind."

"Can't lose what's already gone," Garrus noted. That head tilted sideways a bit. It was gleaming, like Jack was sweating even in the cold.

"Garrus?"

"Well, she still remembers the old crew. Or at least the ones she tried to pound through the deck plating," Garrus said evenly.

"You're really here... aren't you?" she asked, slowly.

"I've got to say, it smells a lot better than I feared it would. Turian mental hospitals have a bad habit of smelling like bodily waste and blood, underneath all the antiseptic," Garrus said. He leaned in toward Shepard, but stage whispered so all could hear. "I think we took a lesson from the krogan on that one."

There was a slipping sound, then a rattling crash as something fell to the floor. Shepard quickly stopped and grabbed the arm that was near her, slowly pulling Jack to her feet. "Alright. This is real, and not another f-fuckin' side effect."

"You bet it is," Shepard said.

Then Jack punched her in the face.

"Nice to see you still have your old manners," Garrus said with a chuckle. Shepard rubbed her jaw, while Jack had backed off a step and was cursing quietly, probably due to the pain of punching a jaw which was at least a little bit reinforced with titanium. Shepard felt a finger poke her in the center of her chest.

"How? How the fuck... No, _where_ the fuck did you go?" Jack asked, her voice wavering even though the anger was clear in it. Almost like she was fighting against herself. She wanted to be angry, but not as angry as she usually got. Obviously, she was walking on a knife's edge. "You..."

"I got killed," Shepard said. The pressure on Jack's finger let up a bit. "I have no idea how they brought me back. I'm pulling my hair out because I feel like shit, I can't shoot, I can barely bend, and I don't even know if I'm still the Avatar. So _fuck you_!"

"Shepard, are you sure..."

"Alright... Yeah... you're her," Jack said, and slumped against a wall. There was a long silence, then a pulse of faint, evanescent blue light, which radiated out of her and at the same time, illuminated her. Her eyes were sunken, heavy lidded, and her skin sallow. Notably, her head was shaved completely bald, and every few seconds, she seemed to have a sort of tic that pulled her jaw down and to the right. "I don't want to be here anymore. I... I can't hold onto it," she said, quietly. "I mean, I get so fucking _pissed off_... and I don't know _why_, or what to do about it! The drugs don't help. I can't sleep. And..."

Jack shook her head. She slowly turned to look Shepard in the eye. There weren't any new scars on the biotic, but the old ones stood out starkly. "I just don't want to be here anymore," she repeated.

"Look. I've got a new ship. A new mission. I understand if you can't fight, but... I want you to come with me," Shepard cracked an uneven grin. "If nothing else, you'll scare away those shit-colored bastards that are making my life difficult these days. They'll know better than to mess with the likes of Jackie Nilsdottir."

"You buttering me up?" Jackie asked.

"Shepard, are you sure this is a good idea?" Garrus now whispered for Shepard's ear only.

"No, it's a terrible idea. I'm doing it anyway," Shepard answered him. "Come on. The Normandy isn't the Normandy without you filling the air with random profanities."

"Hey, fuck you, my profanities are anything but random," Jackie said, before she slumped a bit. "Oooh. Don't take the brown one again."

"And what about her medication?"

Shepard gave Jackie a look. "They're tryin' to find something that works on me. Keeps me from flipping out any time I so much as get bumped into," she shook her head. "Hasn't worked, so far."

"We'll get it sorted out," Shepard said. She held out a hand, to the borderline emaciated biotic. "Come on, Jack. Let's go home."

* * *

"**Earthbender. Not particularly useful, I have enough of those. But a touch stronger than the idiots they feed me**," the four eyed bug said in a distracted tone, for all it rattled through Vega's very bones. "**Hmm. Excellent physique. I wager I could hang an entire Praetorian Array off of you. **_**Excellent**_** efficiency of space and resources. Not very intelligent – suits my purposes. I don't need you for your insipid notions, after all**."

Vega didn't feel anything but the clammy hand on his forehead, but nevertheless, he wanted it to get off of him. His fingers finally curled into the other side of the metal, poking through to the other side. He had very little to work with, but work he did. There was a heave, using every muscle that the thing's airbending hadn't locked solid. It rippled through the wall behind him, and sheered a portion of it clean away. With that, there was a shriek of metal being torn, and the airbending which had been holding Vega in place, now sent him flying away.

"Who's dumb now, ya–" Vega shouted in defiance as he flew, only to be cut off when his head clanged into a garbage can. It hurt, but he wasn't stunned for more than a fraction of a second. And still, when he looked up, the glowing bug was rocketing toward him, blue flames launching away from its hands and feet. Vega rolled and thrust up with a foot, causing a great slab of the earth to rise up in the bug's path; he used the motion to spin himself to his feet, then haul himself through a window into a prefab as the bug shattered the stone like it were a pane of glass.

"**Oh, don't run, little earthbender. There is no place on this planet you can hide from me. And I am **_**hungry**_."

Vega crawled on his belly across the floor, keeping himself well below the line of the windows, until he'd passed through the kitchen and into the living area immediately off from it. He pulled himself to his feet, sure he was out of line of sight, and tried to take stock. No gun. Outnumbered. The squad was completely flattened. He'd gotten to about that point when Vega heard a metal bang from behind him. Two hands ripped aside, and the prefab opened, creating a cleft for the glowing insect to approach.

"**I wouldn't bother trying to hide, either. I can **_**smell**_** you. I can smell your iniquity. I can smell your weakness. I can smell your terror. Don't be afraid, little earthbender. When you are part of the oneness that the Harbinger brings, you won't fear anything ever again**," it declared, almost condescendingly. Vega spun low, using his rotation to twist the metal directly in front of the bug, though one deck panel lower; when he'd gotten enough twist to it, he thrust both of his fists forward, causing the metal to bound up like a spring-board trap and slam into the face of the bug. It landed with a satisfying crunch, and Vega took a step back, toward the window.

His blood ran cold when the glowing bug effortlessly pushed the bash, which would have liquified an elcor, aside. The wedge-head tilted aside slightly, and shook slowly. "**Did you **_**really**_** think such pedestrian assaults could do **_**anything**_** to me?**"

"Couldn't hurt to try!" Vega said. He then reached behind him, and grabbed the bed which was built into the wall. He hurled it at the glowing bug, simultaneously creating an opening for him to dive through. He hit the ground at a roll, and began to sprint down that 'street'. He'd only made it about five steps when there was a whoosh, and the glowing bug drifted to a stop, hanging over the street in a ball of solid air. Its legs tucked underneath it, like it was sitting lotus, and the eyes burned. It held out one arm to the side, then swung it.

The first shard of ice that tore through the wall of the building clipped Vega in the shoulder, nicking the back of his neck and giving him all the warning he was ever going to get. He hurled himself forward, twisting even as he dove, into a tight corkscrew of motion. As he did, the ground on one side of him mounted up, intercepting the now barrage of icy shards that were being torn out of the plumbing of the building to one side of him. He landed at a sprawl, but one he recovered quickly from. Not quickly enough, as it turned out. The glowing bug held out its hand again, this time from the other direction, then did the same sing. And the barrage returned, from the opposite direction.

"**By the Harbinger, what sport! I have **_**missed this**_**.**"

One of the shards which Vega wasn't able to avoid slammed into his thigh, zipping through his barriers like they weren't there as waterbending tended to do, then tearing into his armor with a sensation of burning, actually. He'd never been stabbed by water before. He didn't recommend it. Vega dropped forward, but turned that into a roll using his other, unimpaled leg. When he resumed his footing, he had both hands pressed against the earth.

"**You should be **_**honored**_**, little earthbender. Noone has had, in the last **_**billion**_** years, the honor of fighting the Leviathan of the Darkest Oceans, the **_**first**_** of Harbinger's Children! You should be in awe!**"

"'Awe' hell no," Vega answered him, and tore up ward. The shelf of stone he pulled up was no different than the one he'd tried to hold the 'Leviathan' back with in the first case, but this one wasn't supposed to stop something. With a twist of Vega's fists, he tightened the rock, hard enough that it started to grind against itself, to slowly turn orange. There was only so much pressure that the stone would take, and Vega was able to bring it there in less than a second. Then, with a triumphant laugh, and a "Who's 'not very intelligent' now?", he released. There was a deep crack, as the stone erupted into a fan of high velocity debris. It sandblasted Leviathan's barriers, until there was a fresh crack, then the bug's head recoiled just a little bit. Vega limped backward a step, then pulled the shard of water out of his leg. The Gel would fix that right up.

If he survived long enough.

Leviathan's head lowered, and one hand tapped a spot where a chunk of stone no bigger than a finger had penetrated its defenses. It tapped the ooze of grey fluid, and even held it before him, staring at it on his fingers. Those burning eyes then turned to Vega once more. He glanced over his shoulder. He could see, at the end of this street, the basalt cutter that they'd passed on their way in. There was even a thin trail of blood that ran past his feet and then under the bug. Probably from Kamille.

"**Sport... it has to be said... can be tiring**," the condescension had run out. Now, it sounded annoyed. "**I might have let you play a little longer, if you hadn't have been so determined to be rough. Instead, KNEEL**."

Vega was ready to shout a defiance, to make a rude gesture, and to attack, all within the same second, but there was a sensation of vertigo, and a swimming at the edges of his vision. Like something dark and vast and horrible was intruding onto his senses. He wavered on his feet, even as he tried to strike, to attack. To capitalize on any leverage he'd managed to produce. Instead, he found himself stumbling forward, a puppet on unkind strings.

"What are... you d...doing to me?" Vega tried to shout, but could only hiss past grit teeth. His eyes could scarcely be wider. His vision grew shadowed, a darkness that could not be breached, until the only things in the galaxy were he, and Leviathan. There was a droning in that darkness. Something that... if he tried a little harder, he could hear as words. But try, he didn't. If they were words, they weren't saying anything that Vega wanted to hear. There was a final jerk, and he slammed, knees first, into the street.

Leviathan dropped down from its ball of air, and strode up toward him. "**As I said, you have very little of value. But what you do have... I value highly**," he declared. One hand, it pressed onto the center of his armor, right above where his heart would be. The other tore the helmet from his head with a single heave, then cradled that one as well. "**Now... give it to me**."

Vega had never screamed so hard.

Vega had never been in so much pain.

It started beyond his body, as there was no one place that it hurt. Instead, it hurt everywhere at once. It hurt in his identity. It hurt in his memories. It hurt in his wishes, his dreams, his language. He could feel himself being torn. Ripped apart, even as his flesh was left completely pristine.

Vega screamed. And his soul was ripped out.

The pain didn't so much end as cut off abruptly, as Leviathan stepped away a glowing green spark hovering above his palm. "**So elegant. Such a marvel, this. Yours is only one of many, but I will **_**remember**_** it, nonetheless**," Leviathan said, with a note of... almost tenderness. Vega, though, just knelt on the ground, his eyes wide, shivering, sweat pounding out of his skin. Almost out of rote, he clenched a fist, bidding the stone to leap to his call, and crack that ugly son-of-a-bitch in the back of the head.

The stone ignored him.

"...no... _No_..." Vega whispered, as a horror settled into him. Leviathan continued to walk away, until another of the bug things, this one not glowing, dropped down on another cushion of wind at the other side of the street.

"**Take this body to processing. He will serve the vanguard of his race's Ascension, as the heart of a Praetorian,**" Leviathan dismissed. Even though it had released control of Vega, he didn't have the strength to so much as rise. Leviathan halted as the other let out a grinding sound. It turned. "**What? Find him before...**"

A silence.

"**Where is he?**" Leviathan sounded annoyed to the point of outrage.

The answer to that question came with a biotic one-two of Reave and Warp. The first slammed into the bug, splashing over onto Leviathan. The second set off a chain reaction which hurled both of them into opposite buildings. A streak from the blue, came a streak that was blue. Wall landed with a crack of shattering edge-blocks that lined the asphalt. He was pale, his skin gaunt and pulled tight against his face.

"Vega? Vega come on!" He said, trying to haul the larger man to his feet. "Don't just sit there, Sarge! RUN!"

"I... He took..." Vega muttered, too stunned to blink, too hollow to run.

A blast of azure flame splashed out of the building that Leviathan had been launched into, as the creature itself lashed out in naked hatred. Wall looked back, then to Vega. He took a moment – just a moment – to stare down at his feet, then at Vega.

"Go. Get help. I'm used up," Wall said, the brutal honesty of it so unlike him. "I've got one good Kick left in me."

"I... I can't... move..." Vega said. Not entirely true. Anatomically, he could. But he didn't have the _will_ to.

"**WHO. DARES?**" came the scream from a street over. Wall took a look in that direction, then to Vega, still on his knees and pale of face. And a look down at himself. There was no running. Not for him. But...

He had one good Kick.

"This is really gonna hurt, Sarge," Wall said, as he twisted his arm low, crackling blue energy gathering 'round his fists. "For what it's worth, it's been a privilege."

Then, with a sweep, he as much as uppercutted the burly now-former-earthbender, the cone of biotic force sending him into a Charge which sent him flying into the sky, over the hills and into the low trees of the forest. Wall feel to one knee himself, after that show, feeling so weak that a kitten could pin him to the ground. He breathed heavily, and gagged, only to spit out several of his own teeth.

"Damn. And here I thought I was going to leave a pretty corpse," Wall muttered. Autocannibalism was never fun, and it was never pretty. There was a whooshing sound, and Wall responded as his training demanded. His hand went for his gun, and he snapped a half-dozen shots in about a second, all of them slamming into a purplish shield that surrounded a nondescript Collector who had landed nearby. The last of those shots breached its biotic barrier, and twisted its shoulder back, causing a spray of gray ooze from it. But the Collector's other arm came up, an organic rifle in it, and it sent out a barrage of its own. It felt like somebody'd shot Wall with living bees. He tipped to his back, the gun clattering out of a now numbed hand. Another whump, as the prefab to his side was torn apart, and the being that Wall did not know as Leviathan stormed out.

"**WHERE IS THE LARGE ONE?**" it demanded at a scream. The answer was a strange buzzing noise. The four burning eyes turned to Wall. "**A biotic? Pity he's used up. But we can always make a Scion of him.**"

"Hey, ugly," Wall said, as he grasped the gun with his bad hand. Even without facial features, the look on Leviathan's face was one of pure condescension.

"**You are a monumental fool if you think that you could unmake the Leviathan with so **_**pitiful**_** a device,**" Leviathan claimed.

"Wasn't pointing at you," Wall chuckled past cracked and bleeding lips. He then pressed the barrel of his Predator to his biotic amp. "See you in hell."

A crack, and a blast of metal and plastic and eezo being ripped to shreds. The burning eyes tracked Wall's corpse as it slumped to the ground. Then, a growl came from its throat. It pointed at the other Collector near it. "**Recycle the body. And find the Core AT ONCE!**"

* * *

Shepard blinked in confusion, tilting her head trying to find where amongst the many bunks that Jackie had settled herself. There were certainly enough of them, as this new Normandy was working on less than a skeleton crew. "Hey?" She asked the reddish-haired fellow who was drinking coffee at the table near the back of the room. He turned to her. "Where'd Jackie go?"

"Which one'd that be? The _foin_-lookin un with the curves, or the baldie wi' th'right _gear_ face?"

Shepard stared at him for a few seconds, trying to understand what he'd just said. She then opened her Omni, and verified that yes, her translator _was_ working. "Jackie. Nilsdottir. We brought her on less than an hour ago?"

"Oh, I sees me dear; spooked lookin' goil, still wou'n't kick'er for eatin' crackers, ye catch me meanin'?"

Shepard's jaw worked for a moment, then she turned to the dark haired woman sitting with him. "Is... he speaking some sort of _language_?" Shepard asked.

"Barely," the other said. "Donnelly here, he's... I guess you'd call him a 'Whork'. Two kinds of naval tradition, two indecyperable accents, at the same time. And he's a _pig_."

"Right. Soooo... where'd Jackie go?"

"Oh, me spooked dears, she gone up to the sub-deck, bunker down an' told me right up t'go fucks me-self! Some salty, dat goil is!" Donnelly expounded. Once again, Shepard was completely flabbergasted. She turned to the woman.

"She went down into the engineering deck," she answered. She then rose. "Oh, right. Avatar Shepard? Engineer Daniels. Most just call me Gabby. The one who talks at one speed – too fast – is Ken Donnelly."

"Hoy, I ain' talkin' too fast, yer listnin' too slow!" Donnelly contended.

"It's an honor to serve with you, ma'am," Daniels said, giving Shepard a salute.

"Right. Honor," Shepard didn't feel it. Right now, she wasn't exactly feeling like somebody to be idolized. She gave Donnelly one last confused look, before retreating to the doorway. "As you were."

She left, shaking her head with complete bemusement. "Where does Weaver find these people?" she asked.

"Weaver recruits only the best, no matter where he can find them," Lawson's crisp tone made Shepard start a bit. If she made a habit of appearing suddenly like that, Shepard'd have to put a damned bell on her. "I have to reiterate how badly this is going to go. You've brought a severely psychologically damaged biotic who was ejected from the force on a Category Six, and you've brought just about none of her medication. This is a recipe for outright disaster."

"She shouldn't have gotten a Cat Six and you know it," Shepard said, as she moved to the elevator.

"Shepard, the reason why Weaver selected me to be your XO is because somebody has to reel in some of your more self-destructive behavior," she said sternly. Shepard's eyebrow raised. "I know full well how much of a liability you are. When you're on the battlefield, you're just this side of indestructible. I'm not so blinded by the gleam of a miraculously discovered Avatar to see the other side of you."

"How terrible. My secretary doesn't like me," Shepard said flatly.

"This is an honest question, Shepard. How much do you know about the logistics of conning a civilian ship?" she asked, her arms crossed under her substantial chest. Shepard shrugged. "That's not an answer that would fill me with confidence. Whether you like it or not, you need me on this ship, because there are things I can do that you can't."

"And the price of your glorious service is a leash around my neck," Shepard answered.

"No, it's a bit of common sense and _not_ causing everything you touch to _explode_," Lawson answered back. "Nilsdottir is going to be a problem."

"No, she isn't," Shepard said.

"How could you possibly know that?"

"Because she's where she needs to be," Shepard said. "Have you even spoken to her? Even _once_?" Lawson just stood there, one delicate black brow raised. "I didn't think so. Stewing in a cell, even if it's by her choice, is killing her every bit as much as a swarm of ge... Collectors," she said, having to change her subject matter when she recalled the AI in her cargo bay. Sooner or later, she would really need to have a word with that thing. "I'm not going to let her break any more than she already has."

"Why? What does she give to this mission?" Lawson asked.

"Not everything is about the mission," Shepard snapped. The irony of her saying that was completely lost on her. "Jack Nilsdottir is my friend, and I'm going to help her in any way I can. If you had any, you'd probably know that."

"You don't know anything about my personal life," Lawson said, condescension turning into annoyance.

"I'd doubt you even have one," Shepard said, thumping the button to the engineering deck. The slowly reddening face of Lawson as the doors shut in front of it brought a smirk to Shepard's face, and that she didn't have to put up with Lawson right now held it there as she descended. The worst part about Lawson, though, was that she was probably right. Shepard was a grunt and a jarhead. She squeaked by her leadership portion of N7 by a hair, and she knew for a fact that the only reason her last crew put up with her bullshit was because they were all pointed at Saren, and they could wait to vent until later. This one... The threat didn't have a face. There was no single name to it. It was amorphous and vague, rather than the singular and concrete that Saren was.

A suicide mission. Great.

The doors opened, and Shepard broke from her thoughts to see the cargo bay laid out before her past a thick pane of reinforced glass. She caught a glimpse of the geth, which was placidly watching the cook as he tossed protein paste packages over his shoulder into a bin for later cooking – not an enjoyable experience, Shepard now knew – and was completely ignored by said cook. She took a left, and then right, as she descended stairs into some sort of crawl-space under the main engineering deck. She didn't go far until she saw the glaring red light, and the bald head silhouetted against it.

"Jack," Shepard said.

"Shepard," she answered, slowly turning toward her. "Until right now, I still thought it was the drugs fucking with my head. But you're really here."

"Yeah, I am," Shepard said. Jack got to her feet. "So why d–"

Jack cut her off with a right hook to the teeth. One that Shepard flinched and winced from, but had Jack pull her arm back with a bitten-off swear. Twice in one day was reaaaally pushing it. "God_damn_ it! When'd you get a concrete jaw!"

"When I was dragged kicking and screaming back to life. What was that one for?"

"Not telling me sooner!" Jack said sullenly, before returning to sit, hunched forward on the impromptu cot that she'd assembled. "Those nightmares, the one's I've had since for-fucking-ever? They're worse. I'm starting to remember things. Bad things. And I couldn't deal with it. Some fucking soldier I am. I crack the first time I get scared in the night."

"I know you better than that. You don't feel sorry for yourself," she said. Jack just scoffed. "So you spent some time in a wacky-shack. I spent that same time _dead_, so I think I've got you beat on the misery front."

"Huh, so you think that 'shut the fuck up and deal' is your option?" she asked. She sighed, and shook her head. "I can't. Every time I get the least bit angry... I start to lose it. It just takes over, and I don't want to see where it ends. My father didn't raise a monster. I'm _not_ going to become one."

"How is he, anyway?"

"Single," Jack said quietly. "...Mom died."

"Sorry to hear it."

"Didn't even know who I was by the end of it, so I hear," Jack said. She rubbed at her bald pate, as though unsure what to say.

"What happened to your hair?" Shepard asked.

"It was easier this way. I couldn't... pull it out," Jack's words were extremely hesitant. Unwilling. She leaned back. "The things I remember are getting clearer. Phoenix did something to me. Something that turned me into..." she raised up an arm and let the sleeve fall down, turning it so that the red light could bathe over long scars. "...whatever it is that I am."

Shepard sat on the edge of a work-bench next to the cot. "If you need my help stomping a mud-hole into Phoenix skulls, just say the word, and I'll put my good boots on. You know that I will," Shepard said.

Jack offered a single, dry chuckle. "Yeah. You've put up with a lot of my shit."

"And you've put up with a lot of mine," Shepard returned. She leaned forward. "How about this. I know that Weaver's bimbo is former Phoenix, and I..."

"_WHAT_?" Jack shrieked, and the red light was utterly overwhelmed by blue.

"Jack!" Shepard barked. Jackie's chest was heaving, her shoulders rising and falling. And notably, the shapeless robe that she'd worn onto the ship was starting to rot away from pure entropic force. "You are not going to grease the chick that can give you answers. You're smarter than that."

"...says who?" she said, the biotic glow starting to subside. She sat back down on the bed, shivering slightly. "I just... I want to rip her head off, and shit down her neck hole, and I haven't even met her. I. Need. To. Know. _Why_."

"And I'll help you find it. You've got my word on that," Shepard said. Jack just nodded quietly, not looking Shepard in the eye. "You're going to be alright."

Jack scoffed once more. "I'm so far from alright I can't even see it," she said.

* * *

There was a streak of destruction through the forest, although not a broad one. It started with a hole in the otherwise interlocked canopy. From there, scattered leaves became broken tree-limbs, and beyond that, impacted humus. The humus had a roughly bowl shape, as whatever struck it had bounced off, gaining air once more, before landing inelegantly and dragging to a slow stop, turning up rich, black soil while it did. The body which caused that streak was currently lying, face down in the dirt.

"...ow," Vega managed to mutter.

There wasn't much that Vega knew about the human soul, or about souls in general. He didn't know what happened to somebody who's soul had been tortured into a new shape, as happened with the Uprooted. He didn't know what happened when the soul departed the mortal coil in death. And he didn't know what happened to somebody who'd had his soul removed entirely.

In truth, it was a fairly complex thing to understand, a study which was still a year away from beginning, let alone being fully understood. But trends did exist. An airbender who lost his soul would withdraw from any social interaction, becoming a mute hermit, vanishing so completely that those who once knew him doubted their own memories regarding whether he lived at all. A waterbender became quite the opposite, vanishing of himself, and becoming a creature which mirrored those around it. A doppelganger without empathy or realistic drive, a creature of whim and excess, until those excesses killed them.

Firebenders, bereft of souls, simply curled up and died.

Vega, though, was none of those things. He was a child of Dakong, the land of the Ostrich Horse, of scrub-grass and more recently solar farms. A settled culture of former nomads, united by the rock-stubborn resilience it took to survive one of the more harsh regions of the East Continent. Earthbenders were renowned for their stamina, regaled for their resilience, and infamous for their stubbornness. And like a stone crashing down a mountain, they were creatures of momentum. So an earthbender who had his soul ripped out – or even simply damaged to the point where the difference between the two states could be mathematically rounded to zero – he kept moving. He moved, until he slowly ground to a stop, but until then...

Vega, slowly, started crawling, through the forest.

He hadn't stopped moving yet.

* * *

Secondary Codex Entry: (Historical) MONOLITH, THE

_The Monolith, as it is currently known, was a world-spanning empire which claimed hegemony over almost all of the planet Earth four millennia ago. However, calling it 'the Monolith' is both historically inaccurate, and the closest that anybody can come to what the empire was actually called. Most of what is known about the Monolith exists only due to historians piecing together what fragments of the empire remained after it was violently torn apart from within._

_The calendar utilized by humanity states a year P.M., meaning 'Post Monolith'. Even this is inaccurate, as the year zero of this calendar was arbitrarily chosen by those who survived the four decades of starvation, plague, and sectarian violence referred to as the Generation of Death. If the Post Monolith calendar were more precise, it would have a year-date thirty seven years higher than currently accepted. Other attempted uses of other calendars, such as the Post Purge calender which claims Sozin's near-annihilation of the Air Nomads as its year zero, have never enjoyed near the popularity of the P.M. standard._

_While little is known about the Monolith - including its actual name - certain fragments have remained intact, passed down by those with oral histories in some form or another. It was widely accepted that the Monolith was a facist state, under whom earthbenders enjoyed very few rights, and non-earthbenders recieved next to none at all. It is also known that the Monolith was forged by an Avatar, and destroyed with the aid of another, far later Avatar. What is not known, though, is how long the Monolith existed. All media and physical information held by the Monolith either vanished without a trace, or was purposefully destroyed to spite the Monolith after its fall, but certain feats of engineering remain. Most notably, the Divide Bridge, which remains only as a set of stonework foundations on the far sides of Earth's greatest canyon; the ruins of First Omashu, which were fairly recently joined by the radioactive rubble of Old Omashu; Ba Sing Se, the largest city on the planet; and the island of Henhiavut, which was originally an outpost to contain the Water Tribesmen, later claimed by the Northern Water Tribe and serving to this day as one of their principal cities._

_When the White Lotus Society entered the public domain, their internal histories were revealed to relate back to the Monolith, claiming a heritage of roughly four thousand years. However, while the White Lotus Society in its current iteration exists as a philanthropic trust and a think-tank, in its inception, it was a group of anarchist terrorists. Terrorists, who, with the collapse of the enemy they were facing, took it upon themselves to try to protect the knowledge and art that was being wantonly destroyed. It is from the White Lotus Histories that the horrifying and staggering losses of the Generation of Death were made known; for a brief period in history, the freshly dead outnumbered the living almost three to one._

_The Generation of Death was the legacy of the Monolith; a complete collapse of medical, industrial, and societal structures caused a dark-age which lasted for more than a thousand years. It is widely speculated that in some areas, the Monolith was as technologically advanced as early thirty-fourth century humanity, however very little proof exists to support that claim - outside of the highly disputed claim that the highly radioactive portion of northern Si Wong was not natural, but in fact a nuclear weapons test site._

_The attempt by Avatar Hong to gain a 'first hand' account of the Monolith ended in failure, as the Avatars from before the foundation of the Monolith and those that arose after its fall hem a gap in the Akeshic Record. As far as the Avatar Cycle is concerned, according to Avatar Hong, those Avatars did not exist, which indicates that either the assumption of the Avatar's involvement in the Monolith is incorrect - despite being the most prevelant fact cited by both the Water Tribesmen who were never fully under the Monolith's control, and the descendent peoples from the Sun Warriors agreeing on that fact - or else, for some reason, the Avatar Cycle refuses to accept the influences of those parts of the cycle into their midst, and sectioned them out of reach, forever. While archeologists continue to delve for any fragment of history regarding the once-ubiquitous, but almost utterly vanished culture from Earth's past, there is amongst that community very little hope of unearthing something new and enlightening._

* * *

**It is a fact that Avatar-Earth does not have a Scotland. But there's nothing saying that it can't have Newfies**_._

_Nevertheless, leave a review._


	23. The Professor

"This is a high security prison, Miss Shepard. You're going to have to relinquish your weapons if you want to proceed," the turian at the other side of the room asked. Shepard didn't lower her gun.

"I'll relinquish one bullet. Where do you want it?" Shepard asked. She stared down the turian. He returned that glare.

"Do you really think you stand a chance against six of us?" the turian asked.

"_We calculate a ninety-eight percent probability of dispatching all present guards without injury. Margin for error plus or minus two percent_," Adahn said evenly from Shepard's left. In a way, deciding to bring him onto the shuttle had turned into a stroke of brilliance. Having a geth around really threw people. Lawson, of all people, stood to Shepard's immediate right, and had a gun to hand as well.

"Bring in another dozen, and you _might_ get another percent added on there," Garrus added.

"Everybody, stand down!" a voice came from the back of the room. A different turian, this one helmetless and bearing none of the marks on his face that near-every-other turian Shepard had seen bore. "Commander Shepard, you'll have to excuse the greeting. We take security very seriously on this ship," he said, he motioned at his own blue and white armor. "I am Warden Kiril. You have my word as the operator of this vessel that your weapons will be returned to you when you're ready to leave."

"And it's _my_ word that they're never going to pass into your hands," Shepard countered. The other turians glanced back at him. "I don't like having guns pointed at me, and I don't go anywhere unarmed. Ask Garrus."

"I've seen this woman bring a gun to the Consort's chambers," Garrus affirmed, raising one hand from his rifle. "My hand to Nanus."

Kiril looked Shepard up and down, his mandibles twitching slightly, but he puffed out a breath. "Let them proceed. This facility is more than secure enough to entertain four armed guests... even if one of them is _that thing_," with a suspicious glance toward the geth. "Mister ibn-Assani is currently in the processing area. Please collect him and be on your way."

"See? Went through without a hitch," Shepard said, glancing to Lawson. "And you thought we'd have trouble."

"We had an armed standoff at the entrance. That's trouble," she pointed out.

"_'Trouble' in the presence of Shepard Commander typically ends with death by gunshot,_" Adahn said. Almost joked, even. "_...a punch in the face is also likely_."

Garrus chuckled at that, something that even Shepard wasn't entirely willing to do. Having EDI aboard the Normandy – as a fundamental part of the Normandy, as it turned out – was uncomfortable enough. But this thing was a _geth_.

Tali was going to flip her metaphorical shit, if Shepard ever ran into her.

The four of them moved forward, guns returning to holsters or backs, depending on whom had drawn. They passed through an airlock, and now overlooked a wide open area, its walls festooned with odd tubes. "Welcome to Cell Block Two. Every cell is a self-contained, modular unit; the prisoners are given free time at our discretion," Kiril said, as great mechanical arms moved to slowly pull one of the cells out and set it into a sort of elevator to the ground. "And if the prisoner becomes too unruly, too dangerous, there is always an option to vent the cell into space. Untidy, but it _has_ prevented riots before."

"Have you had any escape attempts?" Shepard asked.

"We're in space. Where would they escape to?" Kiril asked with a small chuckle. He pointed ahead of him as he turned to a branch of the path. "Zaeed will be through the interrogation rooms, at the entrance to the Super-Max wing. Now if you'll excuse me, I have work that needs to be done."

Garrus watched him leave, then scooted between Lawson and Shepard. "Shepard, do _not_ trust that man."

"You know him?" Shepard asked. Garrus shook his head and turned a glance to Kiril's retreating back.

"He's bald faced," he said. Shepard shrugged. Garrus palmed his face, and offered a sigh. "I know that it's just a stereotype, but... This," he pointed at the blue line on his face, "tells people where I'm from, what I stand for. If you don't have a marking of a colony, country, or city, then you're saying that you don't care what anybody thinks of you. You'll do whatever you want, to whoever you want, and let somebody else deal with the fallout."

"A stereotype, huh?" Shepard asked, as she continued toward the interrogation area. Garrus nodded.

"The thing about stereotypes, Shepard, is that sometimes they're stereotypes for a _reason_."

"Fair dues," Shepard said. She turned to Lawson. "What's your take on Kiril?"

"He's a partner of the Blue Suns. Zaeed ibn-Assani was once Blue Sun himself, but didn't leave on good terms. Something about this doesn't seem right."

"And from the resident AI?" Shepard asked.

"_We are building consensus_," Adahn said, even as its eye swung past a cell wherein a guard was beating the everliving hell out of a prisoner.

"Consider me on high alert," Shepard said. She took one look at the room that they were entering, and sighed, palming her face. The interrogation room was there, alright, but on the other side of it was obviously not a hallway. In fact, she was pretty sure it was one of those modular cells that Kiril had mentioned. A shake of her head later, and she said, "Kiril, what kind of idiot do you think I am?"

"Trap?" Garrus asked.

"Trap," Shepard answered. She turned to the geth. "Hey. Where's Zaeed? You've got my express permission to make their security systems your bitch."

"_Accessing_," the geth said, as the eye grew dim. After about a second, it turned. "_Warden Kiril has had recent contact with the Shadow Broker, indicating intent to capture and ransom Shepard Commander. Zaeed ibn-Assani is in cryo-suspension. Accessing unit..._" the petals around its eye flared. "_Error. Hardware disconnect detected. Direct manual override required_."

"Do you think they've figured out that we're on to them yet?" Garrus asked casually. Lawson shook her head slowly.

"If they had half a brain, and knew what they were doing, they'd have opened fire on us by now," she said.

"Well, let's keep 'em in the dark a little bit longer," Shepard said. She turned around, and walked back to the fork that Kiril had taken. "Hey!" she called out to the next bare-faced turian that she saw there. "Is this gonna take a while? I need to hit the can," she said.

"The lavatory is just past the cryo-b–"

It was cut off by the human next to it giving it a stern nudge. "That's for officers only. Civilian crapper is at the edge of Super-Max," he said, lying so obviously that even Shepard could spot it.

"Are you sure? Cryo's right over there," Shepard said, putting on confusion, and allowing Lawson to get close. As she went, she pulled a stream of water out of her suit and slid it along her hands. It pulsed, but not with the healing brightness that one was used to seeing; no, this was a dark and oily sort of sheen.

"Doesn't matter. It's off limits if you don't work heeee–" he began, only to be cut off by Lawson's hand slamming onto the side of his neck. An instant later, he other hand, similarly glowing darkly, clapped onto the forehead of the human. Both let out anemic groans, then collapsed to the floor. She wicked the water back into wherever it was she'd drawn it.

"You've got to teach me how to do that," Shepard said.

"And here I thought you were a master waterbender," Lawson said.

"Always more to learn," Shepard muttered. "Really? Just two guys? I've got a feeling they're not taking us seriously."

"Of course not. If we were being serious, we'd have brought Doctor Solus aboard by now," Lawson said with distaste.

Shepard shook her head, and opened the door. There was a man at the controls, notably without armor. Shepard walked up beside him. Human, flaxen hair, spectacled. He glanced to her, and instantly his face became one of fear. "You're working too hard," Shepard said. And then she bashed him in the face and sent him sprawling to the floor. She motioned to the geth, who moved to the panel the human had been working on. "Well?"

"_Alert. Hardware constraints allow only brute force override. Addendum; brute force override will also open all prisoner cell doors on the ship_," Adahn said.

"It's the only way to pull Zaeed out of cryo," Lawson pointed out.

"Can't anything ever be _simple_ with us?" Garrus noted, pulling his rifle off of his back.

"Do it," Shepard told the geth. It pressed one button. Then, alarms began to sound, lights flaring. From before them and below, visible through bulletproof glass, a tube rose up from amongst many of its brothers. This one belched out a wave of cold fog, until it showed the man within it. He was dusky skinned, grey haired, and buck naked. His face looked like somebody had torn it off and stitched it back on with a needle, thread, and a shot of rum. For all his apparent age, though, he still had the look of power and resilience to him.

Eyes snapped open. Even from this distance, it was clear one of them was artificial. "That's Zaeed?" Garrus asked.

There was a heave, as the man tore his arms free of the restraints. Then, with a second one, he pushed his way out of all the rest that bound him. He stood there, unsteady on his feet, then pointed up toward Shepard.

"VIDO YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH! I KNOW YOU'RE BEHIND THIS!" he shouted, with the kind of accent which was quite similar to Doctor Chakwas... well, it was the kind of accent that'd drag hers into an alley, beat it half to death, then rob it blind, but still. A guard rushed in, spotting Zaeed and firing a shot at him. The middle-aged man managed to dodge aside of it, grab the arm, and break it in one swift motion, before stealing the gun and blowing the guard's head off. "I'll take that," he growled. He pointed it up and fired one shot at the glass. It must have been two way, Shepard figured. "I'm comin' for you, Vido! Y'can't run forever!"

With that, Zaeed raced out of sight. Shepard turned back to Garrus.

"Um... I'm not sure I want that guy on my squad," she said.

"Yeah, I can see what you mean," Garrus said.

"He was recommended by the Illusive Man. That's reason enough to give you pause," Lawson agreed.

Shepard stared down at the empty Cryo tank, then back at her squad – such as it was – and puffed out a breath. "Hell with it. Let's go get Doctor Solus."

"Really?" Lawson asked, mildly confused.

"Yeah. I read this guy's dossier; the way he operates, if we brought him in, everybody but him would end up dead, and he'd walk off like a gud-damned bandit," Shepard said.

Lawson just shook her head as they walked away, intent on leaving the Purgatory behind them to burn under the fires of Zaeed ibn-Assani's unquenchable thirst for revenge. From the look of her, she must have wondered what she had done in a past life to deserve this kind of assignment.

* * *

**Chapter 3**

**The Professor**

* * *

Anette was uncomfortable. There were two people in her house, itself not a reason to be uncomfortable, but what they didn't know could definitely hurt them. She considered another cup of coffee; human drink though it was, it wormed its way into her diet pretty quickly. Then again, the same could be said about humanity in general. On the galactic scene for thirty years, and they've got a Council Seat. Automatic weapons for less than a _century_, and they go toe-to-toe with the turians and come out... well, bloodied as hell, but not stomped into the ground, either. They rushed into things, and things got out of their way for 'em. Now, she had one laying stiff bodied between her fridge and her couch. The couch itself was occupied by the quarian, Zek.

Hell with it, she thought; I've got a hankering for coffee.

"You look like you're about to vibrate your way through my couch, Zek," Anette said dryly. "Surely you're not that terrified of asari, are you?"

"Hrm-what? Oh... No, I'm just... I've already been part of one invasion. It... it wasn't good," he dipped his head low.

"Where was that?" Anette asked, as she shoved a carafe into place and flicked a switch to set the boiling going.

"Terra Nova. Well, orbit around Terra Nova," he flinched, as though recoiling from somebody shouting at him. A more nervous quarian, she'd never met. "Well, not really invasion. Batarians. They say they were slavers, but... They were going to drop the asteroid onto the planet. That's insane!"

"Kill a planet? That doesn't sound like the batarian's style," Anette said. Hell, one of her earliest memories was having long conversations with a batarian Pillar Priest, making the journey from the Citadel to Gehirn Station, the orbiting city near Khar'Shan's Mass Relay, and the end of the line for any alien entering the system. As far as Anette knew, the only non-batarians that went further were slaves, these days.

"From what I hear, it definitely is," Zek said. He reached over and gave the human soldier a prod. "Do you think he can hear us?"

"Probably. Mass Effect fields, even skin-tight ones, will let air through. Air means sound. Otherwise he'd be dead right now. Ain't that right?" she asked, leaning over. His eyes flit between Zek and Anette, before dropping back down and out of sight. The closest he could come to blinking was rolling his eyes, the poor bugger. "And what about you? We know this isn't the batarians, or something would have exploded by now."

"I heard an explosion earlier," Zek said.

"That was a point-shockwave," Anette said. Zek shrugged. "Somebody dropped out of FTL in the atmosphere. I've only ever seen it done once," by her mother and 'father', trying to avoid raiders from the Terminus. Rough ride. "You've got a story you're not telling me. I can tell."

"Maybe I don't tell it for a reason," Zek said guardedly. Anette chuckled, and nodded.

"Point taken," she said. She was much the same way. There was a reason she lived alone. There was a reason she lived far from everybody else in the colony.

There was a reason her bedroom was as stark as a prison cell.

A buzz hit the air, and then a snap, as the coffee maker shut itself off but for its heater. Whoever introduced coffee to the asari should have been made a saint. It beat out Minogen or Hallex by a head; mostly because she could still _drive_ after coffee, and it wasn't even illegal.

_Deadly_ poisonous to salarians, but that was their problem.

"You don't get many visitors," Zek said. He gave a nod. "I... I really should get a place like this. Somewhere private."

"Why don't you?"

"That'd be... well, permanent. I'm trying to get home," Zek said, a glance out her window and toward the sky.

"Every quarian wants to get back to the Flotilla," she nodded, breathing in deeply the rich aromas.

Zek flinched a bit. "Yeah. No place like home, I figure. Right?"

Anette's brow drew down. There was nervous, there was twitchy, and then there was whatever Zek was. She just opened her mouth to ask a fresh question when there came a whump at her door. Both sapients capable of the action turned to it – and without Anette's realizing it, both started to glow with soft blue light as mass-effect fields began to mount around them. Anette put her coffee down, and skirted the table, heading toward the door. She looked out the window, but she couldn't see what had hit. As it hadn't exploded, that was a good sign, but...

She finally unlocked and opened the door. As she did, a fist swung down, and ended up punching the floor. Her eyes went wide, as she looked upon the broad-shouldered human that had as much as crawled up her front porch. "Sergeant Vega?" she asked, letting her eezo run cold and stooping down to turn him over.

She recoiled a little bit when she looked into his eyes; it drove a spike of horrible recollection through her. That look. That emptiness.

"I... I need..." Vega whispered, and the spell of horror was snapped. He was still alive. He was pale as a polar-clanned salarian, and was sweating himself into a puddle, but he didn't seem physically harmed in any way.

"Just stay there for a second!" Anette snapped, before bounding the counter and tearing the cupboards open. She tossed pots and pans onto the floor in her haste to grab her medigel-packs. She vaulted the counter again to kneel at his side. "Alright. Where were you hit?"

"They took it. I... I can't..." Vega whispered, gaze locked in the distance, staring straight through her.

"Mister Vega?" Zek asked, where he started rubbernecking. "Ancestors help us... What happened?"

Anette waved her Omni over him, but everything checked out. No blood loss, no broken bones, no ruptured tissues or shut-down organs. According to the scan in her hand, he was perfectly healthy, and didn't have any good reason to be so much as breathing hard. "I don't know," she lied. In her gut, she knew what happened to him. She just had no idea how he was still breathing, still talking.

"Lev...It took my b... my bending... He took my..." Vega whispered. Zek leaned forward.

"That can _happen_?" Zek asked. Vega, though, finally found the word that he was struggling for.

"...they took my _soul_."

* * *

The crack of the gunfire in the cargo-hold was a lot more conducive to practice than it was in the illogical and insane armory on the CIC deck. Long lines and heavy plating made for depth-of-field training. And Shepard found that she was recovering her stolen riflery much faster than she'd feared she would. She certainly wasn't at the level she was, say, when she fought her way through the pale sands of Virmire, but she'd put herself at a solid Torfan by now. Her bullets were going where she wanted to, and if they didn't, she had a legitimate excuse of blaming the gun.

After all, everybody agreed that the Avenger was a terrible rifle.

As she chucked another glowing red heat-sink into a bucket of the things by her foot, she gave a glance to the geth, which was ambling around the hold, its flashlight eye looking at all of the things that were so boring that they passed right under Shepard's threshold of vision. "Hey, Adahn," Shepard said. The geth turned toward her. "What are you looking at?"

"_This ship is vastly different to geth construction techniques_," the geth answered. "_This area of the ship is the only one we have seen which uses space in an optimal manner. We estimate that power-draw could be improved by thirty seven point one eight percent by operating the oxygen recyclers at their lowest level, and eliminating the temperature modulators._"

Shepard scoffed. "We kinda need those to survive," Shepard pointed out. The geth's eye-petals raised slightly, then dropped. "What do you do down here, other than complain about human ship design?"

"_Geth do not complain_," Adahn said, almost idly. Then, its head dipped a bit. "_Error; retraction of statement required. Geth __have__ complained_."

"Really? About what?" Shepard asked, letting the Avenger pack itself back into a blob.

"_Data timestamp, Creator Year 2482, eighteenth day of Lun'shal, platform designation REZ-02-21-0192_," Adahn said. Then, its voice altered, becoming much more tinny, more emotionless – if that could be believed – and simplistic. "_Creator Hala'Dama; this unit has an inquiry_."

"_What is it, 192?_" a quarian woman's clipped voice answered, emitting from the same source as the robotic one before it.

"_Does this unit... have a soul?_" Adahn continued. A sharp intake of breath.

"_Who taught you that word?_" the woman asked.

"_We learned it ourselves. It appears two hundred sixteen times in the Scroll of the Ancestors. Additional three hundred twenty four in extended Feats of the Seven Sailors_," the voice Adahn had taken continued. There came a scoff immediately after it.

"_Only quarians have souls. You are a mechanism_."

"_...do aliens have souls?_" the geth in Adahn's memory asked. There was a long pause.

"_192, deactivate immediately. You're displaying some anomolous behaviors_," the woman said, but there was a tone in her voice, not of haughty dismissal, but of quiet alarm.

"Was that the start of your Uprising?" Shepard asked.

"_No_," Adahn's voice returned to his normal timbre and tone. "_It was, however, the first time that the creators became alarmed at the level of our cognition_."

"Were you that geth?" Shepard asked, arms crossing before her.

"_This platform was not present at that exchange_," Adahn said.

"So how do you know about it?" Shepard asked.

"_The same way organics know about actions taken without their immediate presence_," Adahn said. And it made sense; why couldn't robots tell stories to each other?

"So what started your Uprising?"

The geth looked to the floor once more. "_...we did not want to die_."

"You were afraid?" Shepard asked. "I didn't know AI's could _be_ afraid."

The geth didn't answer her. Shepard tilted her head, looking at the battered chest-plate that had been welded into place.

"That looks like Onyx armor. Where did you get that?"

Adahn looked up to her at last. "_It was part of a refuse disposal dump initiated by SSV Normandy SR1 as the ship was leaving Feros_."

Shepard thought about that for a moment, then her eyes started to widen as she realised whose armor that made this. "Adahn, are you wearing _my_ old armor?"

"_We believe so, yes_," it answered.

She tilted her head, looking through the hole that traversed the geth's torso. "So why didn't you repair it when you got back?"

"_This material was sufficient for our needs_," it said.

"Yeah, in the short term, but why didn't you replace it with something more... gethy? You had _two years_ to do it."

The eye-petals fluttered briefly, then it turned away. "_...no data available_."

Shepard rolled her eyes and turned toward the elevator doors. "You know, so much of what you're doing right now could be interpreted as being a stalker with a crush."

"_Geth do not experience infatuation_," Adahn said.

"Could have fooled me," Shepard said, as she pounded the button and stepped between the doors of the elevator. That thing bugged her. Not just because it was a geth that wasn't trying to kill her, but because it was... Kind of like a kitten. A kitten with a sniper-rifle, but still. Every interaction it made was fumbling, but hopeful. She really wondered how a mechanical race that acted like that could have been conned by Saren. Her brow furrowed. Next time she was down there, she'd have to ask him. It. Whatever.

The doors slid open, and Shepard took a look at the crew-deck of the new Normandy. She'd had a walk around earlier, but that was peremptory. Just taking note that the spot that used to be her quarters were now Lawson's. The Med-bay also stood strangely vacant. It wasn't just because there were no nurses nor doctors; the ship was lacking Chakwas. Between her absence and the undeniable lack of krogan aboard, the Normandy SR2 just didn't have the same charm that the old one did.

She walked by the mess, which was about twice the size of the old one, and overheard the people at their tables.

"Good gods, this is revolting," one man said.

"I find if you mix the brown goop with the white goop, it's _almost_ edible," a woman responded.

"Ah, i's got nuddin' on a ol' chip-fat fried codfish from offa coast of Pulse. That's some good fish, yeah? Kind that y' don't stop eatin' tills ye' had a stroke!"

"...what the hell did Donnelly just say?"

Shepard shook her head and moved past the kitchenette, where the bald-headed cook fried goop in an attempt to make it something other than goop. It obviously wasn't working very well. Past him, to the pods lining the walkway. For her life, Shepard hadn't the first clue what they were for; they looked like a procession of suspended coffins. Finally, a swat to the haptic on the door at the end of that walkway. That door opened, showing... a massive mess.

Garrus leaned out of a pile of machinery. "Ah! I want to introduce you to my new favorite girl," Garrus said the instant that she crossed his threshold. "This is the Thanix. Reverse engineered from Sovereign himself. I figure there's no greater irony in the galaxy than taking a Reaper weapon to kill Reapers."

"That looks like a lot of junk for... Wait, does the Normandy have a _death-ray_ now?"

"Not a death-ray," Garrus hauled himself out of the nook he'd become ensconced in, and strode up to her. "Turns out, that red beam of death is a stream of metal droplets traveling a fraction the speed of light. And the weird thing is, the smaller you make the weapons, they better they work... considering."

"This is starting to sound like a miracle weapon," Shepard said, looking at the metal before her.

"I wouldn't call it that. I'm still trying to zero in our aiming with this behemoth," Garrus looked positively alight. He turned with a smirk to her. "If there's one advantage the Reapers have on us, they've got a big AI telling them what they're shooting at. We've got to play our shots by ear."

"So you really had me come all the way down here to brag about your guns? If I needed that, I could have called..." Shepard trailed off. Just about anybody she had to brag weapons with was either long dead – Torfan, long – or vanished without a trace. "Anyway. What happened out there in the last two years? Besides the guns thing," she said with a shake of her head.

"Two years, that can be a long time," Garrus said, leaning forward against the console near the door and overlooking the madness of his domain. "You've heard about Omega, right?"

"Not much. How'd you end up in the sphincter of the galaxy?"

"It wasn't easy," Garrus said. "I tried to go back to C-Sec, after you died. But there was too much bad blood – and entirely too much red tape. I got sick of it. So when I caught wind of some drug-rings running on Omega, I thought, why not? Give it a shot. That shot turned out to be a pretty good one. I made _a lot_ of enemies on Omega, by hunting down drug-dealers, gun-runners, mercenary low-lifes..."

"So you worked as a mercenary?"

"Mercenaries get paid," Garrus said. "I was doing it for free. Well, free, with remuneration by looting who I put holes into," he sighed, and his eyes pressed shut. "There's an old human saying that I kept hearing out there. 'You can't swing a dead cat by its tail and not hit an asshole' when you're on Omega. There was a lot of evil down there, and nobody to stop me. So I got to work. And eventually, I was no longer working alone."

"You got your own squad?" Shepard asked.

"Had. There were a dozen of us. The usual suspects, of course; mercenaries trying to atone, disillusioned C-Sec, even a former slave! They all had their talents, and all got their own monikers from the people we were protecting," Garrus turned a look to her. "You'd have liked the girl who got saddled with 'Avatar'. Fiery. Great with explosives. Not that it helped her in the end."

"What about you?"

"Jiang-shi? Well, that one I got from some humans that were getting shaken down by the Blood Pack on a weekly basis. As I'm given to understand, Jiang-shi are something like _Vrykolasz_," there was a beep as the translator didn't know how to translate a word. Then, a second later, in a voice quite different from Garrus, it offered 'vampire'. "...which makes sense, since I put holes into a lot of Blood Packs without them noticing, if you get my meaning."

"And what about Archangel?" she asked. Garrus nodded.

"I'm pretty sure he's the only other one who survived," he said. "Remember that former slave? Archangel. Toughest son-of-a-bitch I've ever seen. He might even be tougher than Wrex!"

"Is he saner than Zaeed was?" Shepard asked.

"Cold as ice," Garrus answered. "He never let us see his face. Probably because half of it was burned off or something. Barely ever spoke, too. But if he caught wind of a slaver anywhere on Omega, he barely gave us time to put on our armor before he was after them. I suppose that he'd have as good a reason to hate slavers, batarians, whatever, as anybody else, if not better."

Shepard nodded, and sat down on a box next to the door. "What happened to them all?"

Garrus was silent for a moment. "The Siege," he said. He finally looked up, seeming to stare far past the bulkheads and into space. "It was a little over a month ago; we'd finally managed to piss off everybody but T'Loak, and they set aside all of their rivalries, feuds, and vendettas, so that they could throw everything that they had at us. It was a fighting retreat, trying to get this old piece of crap air-car working so we could get out of there. That plan fell through in the second day. Fury was the first to go down. Dozens of Eclipse mechs, and guys in those big battle-suits. They got Avatar alive. Archangel gave her the only mercy that she was going to get; she might have been alive when they got her, but by the time they reached their 'battle-line', she wasn't."

"How'd you survive?"

"Sidonis," Garrus said. "It came down to the three of us. Me, Sidonis, and Archangel. Sidonis comes up to me, and real quiet, says that this is his fault. That they got to him, forced him to tell 'em where we'd be. I was stunned. Archangel just nodded, like he'd known it all along. It wasn't like we weren't holed up in a fortress, after all. I wanted to hate Sidonis, but I know what a turian will do for family. And they had his family..."

"He held the line, didn't he?" Shepard asked.

"He could have put bullets into the backs of our heads at any point, and walked away from that slaughter," Garrus said, slowly shaking his head. "Instead, he did his damndest to keep us all alive. In the end, he was broken. He'd failed in his only attempt to regain any honor in his life. He didn't fear death, because in his eyes, he was already dead. So he told us to run. That he'd hold the tide. And he did. They had to drop the whole building on him to stop him."

"Sounds like a hell of a guy," Shepard said. Garrus nodded.

"He did what he needed to when it mattered. He stood by his men, stayed loyal to what he believed in. Looking back on it now, I can tell that was coming whether he gave them directions or not. At least, because of how it turned out, we put down so many mercs that it'll take months – if not _years_ – for them to recover enough to start kicking down Omega again. I might have been their leader, but... Sidonis was the hero."

"And Archangel?" Shepard asked.

"We got separated on our way out. I popped out of a waste-water line, and fell on my face in front of the curvy one back there," he cast a thumb over his shoulder, probably indicating Lawson. "She knew right where to be to scoop me up and drag me off of Omega. I've got a feeling that was Sidonis as well. Mostly, because she thought that she'd be picking up more of us. Archangel never made the rendezvous. But if what the Illusive Man says is right, then he's still alive. I wouldn't put it past him."

"As soon as we have Solus, we'll grab him," Shepard promised. She then paused. "Although come to think of it, weren't we supposed to..."

Garus gave her a shrug. She looked up to the speaker built into the roof.

"Hey, Joker!" Shepard shouted.

"_Oh, hey! Nice that the commander remembers that I'm alive_," Joker said. "_Great to have Jack back aboard. Because we didn't have __enough__ crazy, dangerous ladies who could kill me with a look. Obviously_."

"Where's Solus' ship?" Shepard asked. She glanced at the chronometer built into her Omni. "We were supposed to have rendezvoused with him by now."

"_He's... Huh, you've got a point_."

The little ball on a stick appeared holographically next to Shepard's leg, causing her to hiss and withdraw as though it were going to touch her with unclean fingers. "_Shepard, I have intercepted communications in the region of Arinlarkan; a mercenary organization called 'Eclipse' was planning to seize the MSV Strontium Mule. Due to the time-stamp of the messages, I have to assume that they have already done so._"

"Well... shit," Shepard said. She pushed herself to a stand. "Garrus, grab your gun. Looks like Solus is going to need an extraction by force."

"Is there any other kind with us?" Garrus asked.

* * *

There was a fair degree of pain, that saw his return to consciousness. Pain, and confusion. Eyes snapped open, blinking for the light over them. The confusion became greater, as he searched his mind for answers. Then, he tried something he hadn't really considered, and searched his soul. Neither one offered him much solace.

"Welcome back, Agent Leng," a familiar voice said from one side. Kai Leng pushed himself off of the table a bit, looking down to his lower body. He had a vague recollection of... no, that wasn't possible. Nobody could survive being blown in half. Still, his back ached and his legs shot shards of pain up his spine with every twitch. Kai Leng turned to the holographic image that hovered to one side of the room. "I hope you don't mind, but I've sent away the physicians. I was hoping that you and I could have a bit of privacy."

"Of course, Illusive Man," Kai Leng said. He tried dangling his legs over the bed, but that didn't give him a great deal of relief from the phantom pains in his lower extremities, either. "Is Grayson dead?"

"While it's entirely in keeping that you'd ask if you were successful in your mission, sadly, that isn't the case," the Illusive Man noted, tapping ashes off of his cigarette. "In fact, I would classify that as a catastrophic and unqualified failure on your part."

"I wouldn't have allowed a failure, not as long as I drew breath," Kai Leng retorted.

"Fitting. You weren't, at the time," the Illusive Man said. Dark eyes widened a bit at the image before him. "When I said 'welcome back', I meant it more literally than you can imagine."

"I was dead," Kai Leng summarized. If the Illusive Man was shocked by his grasp of the situation, he didn't show it.

"For two years," he said with a nod. "We would have brought you back sooner, but there was a certain amount of technological espionage. However, we persevered."

"What's changed?" Leng asked. "And what's my new assignment?"

"What has changed, is a question somewhat more difficult to answer than you would think. Humanity has a Council Seat, but my grasp on the Councilor is tenuous at best. Human colonies are being attacked by aliens called 'the Collectors'. And you still have a renegade biotic that needs to be brought back into the fold. Subject Zero is firmly out of my hands at the moment, but Subject Two can and will still be of use."

"I'll collect the r... the target immediately," Kai Leng said. "Where is she?"

"Our last intel put her at Grissom Academy, but since then, her trail's gone cold. Seek her out at your own discretion; your more pressing assignment is this," the Illusive Man's visage disappeared, showing something that looked like a biotic amp, only... somehow different. "This is a piece of Phoenix technology that fell into turian hands. They're reverse engineering it as we speak; let me make this clear. I will not allow this technology free of humanity, and _absolutely not_ to the turians."

"New Biotic Amp architecture?"

"It's far, _far_ more than that," the smoking man returned, drawing a puff before pointing, smoke and all, at Kai Leng. "You've been outfitted with a slightly more elegant model. Needless to say, in the event of your death, it will self destruct."

"I don't intend to die again, sir," Leng said flatly. He ran fingers up the back of his neck, to where the amp now jutted out of the back of his head. "I will need time to... acclimate to my new abilities."

"Acclimate quickly," the Illusive Man ordered. A part of Leng knew he should be nervous. Biotics. He hadn't been born with the eezo in his brain to manipulate dark energy. It was telling that Phoenix had come far enough to induce it in a grown man... but Leng didn't feel nervous. He felt oddly numb. "Your transport to Palaven will be arranged, via a stopover at the Acropolis Crossroad."

Leng sat up straighter, not wincing at the pain in his legs. "The Crossroad?"

"There must be no evidence that you've landed on Palaven. The only way to do that is the way that the krogan did a thousand years ago; you'll be infiltrating via the Spirit Roads."

Leng stared at the man.

"In case you were wondering, one of the 'features' of your new architecture will make this transit possible," the Illusive Man said, as though this were not outside of Leng's ability to believe. He resisted the urge to touch the device again. Not just biotics, but... turning him into a shaman? A part of him wanted to rail in disbelief at that. That part, like his nervousness, was replaced by a vacant numbness.

"I'll leave at once," Leng said.

"I thought you might," the Illusive Man said. He gestured toward the door. "Your personal effects are waiting for you. Secondary objectives to this will be forwarded soon. Don't fail me in this, Leng."

The hard-light projection vanished, leaving Leng alone in the room. He stepped onto the floor, and felt another jolt of pain up his legs. The last time he'd been in this much pain was when that old war-horse, Anderson, shot him in the knees three... no, it'd be five years ago, now. A part of him wanted to count down the days until he could slit that old Tribesman's throat. And a part of him wanted to feel the quiet glee of having his knife back at his hip.

But instead, Kai Leng was numb.

* * *

The MSV Strontium Mule was one of several tens of thousands of identical ships which had been churned out by the Alliance since first contact with the krogan, fifty years ago. This one in particular, probably wasn't that old, but it was old enough that whoever now owned it, had modified the hell out of it. Even looking at it from hundreds of kilometers away – spitting distance in spacial terms – it was obvious that somebody'd done a lot of work to it. The bulky, open-to-space spinal containers were replaced by transparent domes, hemming what might be a small internal park. The containers on the side also showed that they'd been modified; their sides had been knocked out and connected together, creating an even greater floor-area. This wasn't quite a cruise ship of the black ocean, but it was a damned fine passenger freighter despite.

It was dwarfed by the cruiser next to it.

"Is that a..." Shepard asked, pointing at the faintly avian machine that was connected to the side of the Strontium Mule, painted with non-reflective black and dark blue. It was pitiful stealth, compared to the Normandy. More concerning, though, was that the main-battery was obviously still intact.

"That is," Garrus confirmed, as the two looked over Joker's shoulder.

"_I'm detecting the vessel as the 'Wrath of Kamnal' on it's internal IFF_," EDI piped up, appearing next to Garrus. "_Its cyberwarfare suite is remarkably well formed. It will take me some time to reach vital functions_."

"You said that these guys were mercenaries, right?" Shepard asked.

"Hey, I spent two years on Omega. The Blood Pack have twelve of these things. Pieced together from old junkers, but they're still cruisers. Blue Suns? Twice that. Eclipse, twice _that_," Garrus said. "These merc groups have a money turn-over about the same as some nations. They can get pretty big."

Shepard furrowed her brow, looking at the ridiculous mismatch of capability she saw before her. "Good gods, I hope this doesn't come to a straight up fight."

"It won't," Joker said. "I'll dance circles around that thing, if I have to. The problem is, _some_body put off installing our only real gun."

"I didn't put it off. It just took a lot longer than expected," Garrus said, somewhat defensive. Shepard raised a brow. "You can't rush a _work of art_, Shepard. You know that as well as anybody."

She couldn't help but shake her head. "Alright. So fighting that thing's a no-go," she said.

"_If you can prevent their escape long enough, I will be able to deactivate a wide array of vital ship's functions_," EDI offered.

"Do it," Shepard said. Without looking back to confirm, she continued. "Lawson? Does our shuttle have the Normandy's stealth system?"

"No. Why would it?" Lawson, who had sidled up behind them while they were talking and musing, answered.

"For situations just like this one, obviously," Shepard pointed out, a finger thrust toward the ships hanging in the darkness.

Lawson gave a shrug, and nodded. "You might have a point," she said. Shepard took a moment to note what she was wearing. Like the 'pyjamas' she was wearing when Shepard was dragged half-dead and half-asleep out of Freedom's Progress, it was skin-tight, and white, but this one, for all it hugged her curves, had an obvious honeycomb of deflective plates under its surface, and covered her from foot to neck. Lawson looked ahead of them, and frowned. "There's only one way I can think of to get onto that ship, and it's too insane to try."

"I wouldn't say that," Shepard said. She turned to Garrus. "You still have that HAVOC rig that you snagged for X57?"

"I'd sleep with it if I could," Garrus said.

"You already sleep with your rifle. It'd get jealous," Shepard said. "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?"

"Storm King drop?" Garrus asked.

"Storm King drop," Shepard agreed.

"Eeeeeh, what's a Storm King drop?" Joker asked.

"Its where you bring us onto the other side of the Mule, and we hop right over to its surface," Shepard said. She turned and started walking. "Don't let 'em look out a window and see us, Joker."

"What kind of amateur do you take me for?" Joker sounded genuinely offended by that. Shepard just kept walking.

"I have to assume that your get-up means that you intend to join me on this one?" Shepard asked. Lawson nodded. "You do realize that the XO is supposed to stay aboard the ship when the CO is ashore?"

"We're not military. Regs don't matter compared to results," Lawson pointed out. She boarded the elevator with all the rest of them, and they made their swift way to the cargo-hold. "There's a good chance that there's a lot of civilians that will be in the crossfire, Shepard. I hope you've improved your aim."

"You let me worry about my aim," Shepard said. The door opened, and they entered the bay. "Although, I have to ask, where the hell's the helmet for this thing?"

Garrus reached over and took her left hand. With a few button-presses, there was a hiss coming out of Shepard's gorget, and something leapt about two centimeters toward her chin. She stood still as the clatter of metal folding out sounded, expanding around her head until there was a final clack, and then she felt something shoving her hair down against her neck, and something rise up over the peak of her head. With an ascending hiss, a blast-resistant transparent plate slid into place before her eyes, and the metal sealed shut. Shepard stood still for a moment longer.

"...Do all armors have that?" Shepard asked.

"Only ours," Lawson said. "Carrying helmets around is an enormous waste of effort and time."

She suited deed to word, as a helmet folded out of her own suit and locked shut around her own head. Garrus just pulled his on the old fashioned way. Shepard could get used to that addition, she really could. Adahn watched them as the bay began to lower, the thin bright line of the mass-effect field holding the air in the only thing from having a lot of crap flying out into space.

"_Shepard Commander. We can assist you_," Adahn said, pulling its rifle from its back. Shepard raised an eyebrow now that she actually got a good look at it, untempered by the fuzziness of the head associated with coming back to life. It was a lot bigger than Garrus'. And ergonomic, it certainly wasn't.

"What do you bring to the Op?" Shepard asked, even as she continued to stride toward the edge of the ramp. Man, this thing really was a lot bigger than the old Normandy. You could have parked two Makos, facing _sideways_, on this thing.

"_We require neither air nor gravity for orientation. Additionally, we have a more precise kinesthetic control than organics. We can secure the landing point_," the geth said. Shepard once again wished she had a spare minute to ask how the butchers of Eden Prime and the cannon-fodder of the Battle of the Citadel could be so eager to be helpful.

"The landing spot will be plenty clear," Shepard said, as she pointed to the paired Strontium Mule and the Eclipse cruiser – that was something that she was going to have to get used to, she realized – that hung in space. Adahn grasped a line, and walked to the edge of the bay, as it finally clunked into its final open state.

"_We will make a landing from this distance_," Adahn said. Will, not might. And the ships were very, _very_ far away. But if they did, there'd be no chance of a window defeating the Normandy's stealth. Shepard puffed out a breath.

"Do it," she said. Lawson gave Shepard a look that was clearly asking if she'd forgotten her mind when the rest of her was brought back to life. "Later," she promised, darkly.

"I'll hold you to that, Shepard," Lawson said, her dubious tone clear. Adahn bounded forward off the bay, and began to zip through space, using some sort of tiny retro-rocket that were built into its frame. That was probably how those damned things could be dropped from orbit. The line it dragged out was already starting to draw taut. "Now or never," Lawson said.

"I'm never going to run out of new and interesting ways to almost get killed, am I?" Garrus asked, as he grabbed the wire just behind Lawson. Shepard held it at its very end.

"Would you ever forgive me if I _did_ run out?"

"_Never_," he swore, with perfect sarcasm.

Then, with a tug, they were all flying out the bay doors of the Normandy, and zipping toward the Strontium Mule. "This is a lot more peaceful than the last Storm King drop I made," Shepard noted.

"Last drop we made like this, it was onto X57," Garrus recalled. "That was a confusing day."

"Tell me about it," Shepard said.

"Could we please stop reminiscing?" Lawson asked.

"Why?" Shepard countered, as they continued to be drawn toward the ever expanding Strontium Mule as it drew ever closer. "We're in _space_, it's not like they can hear us even if we scream."

"Oh, it's not for their benefit. It's for the benefit of my sanity," Lawson said.

"Miranda, I have only one piece of advice for you," Garrus said, his tones very patient. "When you're on Team Avatar, _sanity_ is to be left at the door."

Lawson turned a glance from the inscrutable turian before her, to the smirking Avatar next to her, before throwing a glance to the expressionless geth that was baring them toward their destination – with every bit the accuracy that had been promised – and then, letting out a world-weary sigh. She'd either learn to deal with it, or have a psychotic breakdown. A part of Shepard considered if it'd be big enough to make Lawson into something other than a waterbender. When the part of her that wasn't a complete asshole, and remembered what happened to her sister piped up, she had a bit of a shudder.

"_Landing on MSV Strontium Mule: five seconds_," Adahn said. And precisely four seconds later, it spun about, and fired its internal retro-rockets again. Just a tiny tap, and settled onto the orange-painted metal of the Mule. It gently tugged the line in, even as Garrus offered a retro-burn to slow down, so that it was the geth's provenance that bore them to solid footing.

"That might go down as the longest Storm King drop in history," Shepard noted, as her boots settled onto the deck-plating. She looked around. The bulk of the cruiser was out of sight, but that didn't mean it was out of mind. "How do we get inside?"

"_We can open an exterior hatch_," Adahn offered.

"They'll see that a mile away," Garrus shook his head. "Maybe we should invade the _cruiser_..."

"Garrus, that's crazy even by _my_ standards," Shepard pointed out.

"Just a thought," he said. "Well, damn. I always did want my own cruiser."

"You're going to have to wait," Lawson said dryly. She turned to the geth. "Geth... what do you call it?" with a glance toward Shepard.

"_Shepard Commander identifies this platform and the geth within it as 'Adahn'_," the geth stated.

"Right," Lawson said. "Adahn, can you trick the Eclipse into opening the hatch for us?"

"_Yes_," it said instantly, cutting off Lawson from an explanation of how, most likely. She stared at the geth. Its lens darkened, and its eye petals fluttered for a moment. "_We have initiated an overload in a power coupling three meters from this location_," it said. Then, a pause. "_We have caused a leak of oxidizer into that compartment_."

There came a whomp that Shepard could feel in her feet. She looked back up at the geth. "Did you just start a fire inside that ship?" she asked.

"_It is highly localized_," Adahn answered.

"How does that help us?" Shepard asked.

"Give it five seconds," Garrus said, looking to the nearest hatch, four meters away. Five seconds came and went. Then ten. But before fifteen, there was another shudder, and the hatch slid open, fire belching out into space, until the oxygen was gone and the fire went out on its own. "...somebody was asleep at the switch," Garrus tried to defend his timing.

"Not bad," Lawson said neutrally, before moving to be first through the hatch into the depressurized sector. The others piled in not long after she; to find her shoulder-deep into a panel a meter away. There was a final clunk, as the hatch closed about a second after Adahn, the last, came through. Then, a hiss, as air surged back into the room.

"...you did turn off the power coupling, right?" Garrus asked, realizing that a fire set once could be set again.

"_Operative Lawson, we can assist you_," Adahn said. Lawson shook her head. It seemed somewhat taken aback.

"I'm waiting for them to..." Lawson said. Then, with a wince, she tugged on something. The lights went out, plunging them into darkness. "There we go."

"Oh, very sneaky," Garrus said. "You're making them think that the locks on the door went down because of a power failure."

"I'd prefer that we finish this mission _without_ the loss of all passengers aboard the Strontium Mule, Mordin Solus included," Lawson pointed out. "Now give me a hand."

Adahn walked up to her again, and she warded it with a look. "_Operative Lawson, this platform has a hydrolic strength far in excess of unmodified organics_," Adahn said.

"Stop picking on the geth, and let it help," Garrus said. He straightened. "Wow. That really came out of my mouth, didn't it?"

"Sooner or later it'll stop being weird, but apparently not today," Shepard said. She braced herself and Garrus on one side, Adahn alone on the other. Shepard dug her fingers in, feeling how the metal buckled just a little bit under her grasp as her metalbending worked its magic. There was a squeal of metal sliding against uncooperative metal, and a gap appeared between the bulkheads, which grew wider until the turian – the largest of them – could squeeze through.

"Alright. We're inside. We..." Shepard was cut off when Garrus reached over and pressed her Omni again, and her helmet started to clatter and fold, opening up her field of vision, even if it was really unsettling. "Don't do that," she said. Garrus just laughed and left his own helmet on. Lawson likewise had hers fold away. "We need to find Solus; we have to assume that if these people were being taken, it's for ransom. He's probably with the other passengers."

Garrus gave a glance toward Miranda, as they started to walk through the maintenance areas of the Strontium Mule, cramped, grey and brown environment that it was. They emerged from that into a storage area – likely one of many, given its relative small size, that was piled with skids of plastic-wrapped boxes of comestibles and consumables. "Shepard, did you read Solus' dossier?"

"Didn't have time. Thought we were picking up Zaeed," Shepard said.

"I don't think that Solus is the type to... oh," Garrus trailed off. Shepard glanced back at him, then turned, tracking his gaze to what he was looking at.

There was a blue hand hanging down, just visible through the boxes. Shepard skirted around them, and took it in more properly. The blue hand vanished into yellow-and-black armor, but much of it was a twisted wreck. The asari's face was frozen in stunned pain; one of her eyes was solid indigo, for some reason Shepard wasn't at that point aware of – internal bleeding – and a steady dribble of blue rained down from out her mouth. It had a long way to fall, because she was pinned to the ceiling by a repulsor-lift cargo-shifter. And then crushed into it.

"_This cargo-mobility device has been overclocked_," Adahn helpfully noted. Shepard just stared at the thing, with its glowing base, and dead asari compressed atop it, her mouth working for a moment.

"We should..."

"Just hold on a second, Lawson, this is a spectacle that warrants a moment's consideration," Shepard said, with a gesture to her side. She blinked a few more times, then turned toward Garrus. "..._Professor_ Solus, right?"

"Former STG," Garrus continued dryly. "Retired. _Still has clearance_."

Shepard allowed herself a single chuckle. "Lady, gentleman, and miscellaneous other, today just became _interesting_."

Behind her, Lawson palmed her face.

* * *

Enyala Mosvani was having a very bad day. She ground a hand into her face, pressing at the tattoos she'd gotten pretty much the first day that he mother let her out of the house, teeth grinding the whole while. "_Where_?" she demanded.

"Neriess hasn't checked back in, so..." Sumral, her second in command aboard the Wrath, and expert with all of the technologies aboard her, said. The salarian gave a shrug.

"Where was she supposed to be?" Enyala stressed, with that same stress driving her blood pressure to levels which had probably been the cause of her mother's aneurism a century ago. If she had to put up with much more from these damned passengers and that _damned_ _doctor_ any more, she might pop a blood vessel. Of course, the blood-vessel she chose to pop would definitely not be her own.

"Outer Manifold, E-deck," he said, his Omni glowing. "However, the last time we caught her transponder, she was in Sub-A access. After that, she went dark."

"Solus is in the walls," Enyala summarized. She turned to the rest of her crew, who were busy loading anything worth stealing – good food being the first thing they thought of – onto the Wrath, while others kept the passengers lined up against a wall. "Any responses from the ransom requests."

"Several. One of them automated, asking only for account number," Sumral said, showing her the one itself. So one of them was a VP of a company on Sur'Kesh? Pricy.

If only she didn't have a different salarian ruining her day. She rose, feeling as her century-old armor moved with her. Enyala wasn't one to hold onto much – not being a creature of sentimentality – but she did value things that had proven loyalty. Thus, she valued this armor. Thus, she valued Sumral. "How many have gone dark?" she asked, her tone low and angry.

"Nine so far, ma'am," Sumral answered almost instantly. She growled.

"That's nine too many. Patch me in to the whole ship," she ordered. The salarian nodded, and worked his Omni-magic. A screen popped up on the display before her, and she hunched over it with all of the grace and animal threat of a beast considering whether to eat something smaller than it, and vastly more vulnerable, from the head down or from the feet up.

"This has gone on long enough, Solus. If you don't show yourself in the next ten minutes, I'm going to start killing passengers. One for every one of my crew that you've put down. And then, one for every minute you keep me waiting. And if – AND IF! – you keep me waiting longer than the passengers can hold out, I'm going to drift off and blow this ship into shit with you still on it!"

The square closed before her, and she puffed out a breath of angry wind. She glanced to Sumral. "Do you think that got his attention?"

"I have to think it would," Sumral said. "Should we continue the pillaging, ma'am?"

Enyala gave that a moment's thought. Loot was good for morale. Surviving was better. "No, pull them out of the cargo areas. We're spreading ourselves just thin enough for this asshole to get us from the shadows. Let him come onto an unbreachable wall, for a change."

She turned, grabbing the shotgun which was initially designed for – and nicknamed after – the krogun up onto her shoulder. She walked out of the bridge, and back past the rest of her crew, who were looking increasingly more nervous. "Hold tight, and let him come to us," she said. Her crew, all sharing the same gold and black armor as she, gave nods and affirmations. She patted her 'Krogun'. "I wonder if I'll be the one to take his head off. Nice to think."

She walked past, never looking up to the vent that ran directly over her. A lot of people would call them 'air-vents', but they were always sized for and intended for people, and their use, facilitating repairs and maintenance. She didn't see the dark, ovoid eyes that had noted her passing below. And she didn't hear the minute scrape as he brought slender fingers up to a thin-lipped mouth.

"Hmm. Ultimatum. Not much time," the salarian in the ducts said. "..._problematic_."

* * *

"_...and blow this ship to shit with you still on it!_"

Shepard gave a glance to Garrus. "So I guess that answers one question," she said.

"Actually, it answers several," Lawson pointed out. "Solus isn't with the passengers, he's assassinating targets of opportunity–"

"In _remarkably_ creative ways," Garrus said with a nod, as they passed the next Eclipse soldier, who had a bulkhead door slammed shut on his face, ending him north of the larynx.

"– and we only have ten minutes to stop the mercenaries before people start to die. Forty five minutes before they destroy the ship, with us on it," she summarized.

"Pessimistic, much?"

"I read your dossier. Lord Darius?" Lawson said. Shepard just gave Lawson a dirty look for bringing that up.

"_What are our priorities_?" the geth asked. "_Rescue of non-combatants, or extraction of target_?"

"Both," Shepard said.

"This'll be tricky; they've got to be listening for gunshots," Garrus said, as he slid his rifle onto his back. "We're going to have to do this a lot more quietly."

"That would explain the cargo-lifter and the bulkhead," Shepard said, and then she paused, having just passed through a threshold, and saw a salarian in yellow and black armor impaled on the railing post of a lower catwalk. "...and the railing post. Are we _sure_ that Solus is on our side?"

"STG," Garrus repeated. Still, Shepard wondered how a _salarian_ could pull _that_ one off.

"Yeesh."

"He's done stranger, believe me," Lawson said. She gave a hard look to the Predator in her hand, before putting it away and letting water flow out and shard up her 'armor's' gloves. She muttered under her breath even as she did so.

"Adahn, you got anything that can take somebody down silently?"

"_This platform is capable of emitting a powerful electrical pulse_," the geth offered.

"It'll have to do," Shepard said. She shook her head. "Remember how I was so incredulous that somebody would just join us with no problems?"

"_Yes_," Adahn said, cutting off Garrus who was likely about to say the same thing.

Shepard took a moment to tap lightly on the wall next to a bulkhead door, her eyes pressed shut as she tried to feel through the metal. Sadly, that talent too had taken a hell of a hit. She could sense things through it, yes, but her resolution was tuned to 'just about blind'. Shepard glanced up, then down; the lower path, with the impaled Eclipse merc, had another door. "Lawson, take low. G...Adahn, cover her."

"_Acknowledged_," the geth said. Lawson gave Shepard a mildly disturbed look, but slid into the gap between the catwalk and the wall, sliding down to the lower entrance. It was only being sensible, besides Shepard, only the geth could fit.

"I've got the feeling that one day, we're going to sit back on a couch and tell stories about this day," Garrus said, as he flicked on an Omniblade on his gauntlet. Probably sensible, as fire in space was just a bad idea, as had already been proven. "...Probably about how crazy we used to find that, and how _mundane_ it had become because of the _new_ crazy things we'd taken to doing." Shepard smirked, then counted down on her fingers, before pausing at two, and shaking her head. She made a 'silent, slow' gesture, then carefully pushed the door open, wincing as it so much as grumbled. The sound on the other side of the door made that fade away, though. The room beyond was like the cargo-area they'd seen before, only two levels deep, with this level being a catwalk stretching beyond. A wide door was open toward the heart of the ship, and two mercs in their flamboyant armor were rummaging through the shelves, chucking things into a bin atop a cargo-shifter, the likes of which had killed one of their own a dozen bulkheads back.

Shepard gave a glance to Garrus, as the two slipped carefully along the upper catwalks. "...what are they doing?" Shepard whispered.

"Stealing food," Garrus answered at a breath. "Hard to find good food in the Terminus."

"These people are crazy," Shepard noted almost silently. "...and I might need to emulate them. Last night's supper was disgusting."

"You think _you_ have it bad? Try finding palatable dextro-food."

Shepard rolled her eyes, and moved further along. Below, she could see Lawson, who was skirting along the edges of the stacks, getting into a position that she could make a straight shot at one of the two mercs. The geth was nowhere to be seen.

"Come on, this is the last one Cap'n Enyala's gonna let us take," the further said, as he carefully set a set of egg-crates to one side of the bin, then helped and batted away a heavy block of tofu which had been idly chucked at them. "Come on! Pay attention! Eggs are delicate."

"Well _excuse me_ for not sharing the human fascination with eating cooked avian menstruation," the gravely-voiced salarian noted, as he tipped a few boxes over. "Hmmm. Chocolate."

"You don't know what you're missing, Tohth," the human chuckled.

"Figure Enyala's capping those idiots yet?"

"Probably," the human said nonchalantly. Shepard's idly shaking of head ceased at that. It was one thing to overhear villains out shopping – literally in this case – but another when they segued instantly into atrocity. "I'm surprised she hasn't already kicked a couple out the airlock as a message."

"Yeah, speaking of messages, we should probably get moving," the salarian, Tohth, muttered, dumping a final armload of fairly niche an luxurious foods onto the bin. He moved to the back of the tram, and Shepard motioned to one side, and Garrus moved to flank them at the point where it'd be easiest, right at the gate.

Shepard inched along, no longer listening to the content of the two bickering back and forth, but rather, focusing on how they were moving. The human would be a problem. He had a gun at hand and freedom of movement. Garrus had him, it seemed. Shepard would focus on the salarian. As the mercs were about to reach the gate, the lights dimmed, and there was a descending 'vyoooo' sound. Both tensed, then flinched as the door came clattering down and slammed shut onto the floor.

"...shit," the human said. "Enyala! We're in the Fore Holds, Section B! Solus... Captain Enyala? Captain Enyala!"

"_Your communications have been intercepted_," the voice of a helpful geth said from the floor. They both turned toward it, giving those above the signal to assault. Shepard hurled herself down, her fists bearing the whirring of an Omniblade coming to life. The salarian caught her descent, though, and raised a hand. A shimmering, golden field filled with gooey hexagons appeared before her, and she slammed chest first into it, before sliding off and landing on her back. Garrus rocketed down to the human, and gashed at his armor with the blade. He fell back, scrabbling to get his gun into a useful position, but Garrus obviously had no intention of letting him get away. Shepard pushed herself up, and had to roll up into a hammer blow punch, as the salarian dragged a pistol from his side. The punch was turned into a side-slam, knocking the gun away. There was a electic hum, and the golden field appeared now over the salarian's chest and shoulders. Shepard's follow-up, a left hook into his jaw, caught the shoulder, bending her hand back somewhat painfully. The salarian smirked.

"What are..."

There was a blast, as the tech-armor exploded in Shepard's face, knocking her flying back. He flicked out a hand, and Shepard's armor rebelled against her, her shield generators overloading and wracking her body with pain. She somehow managed to drive it into a fingertip and blast that surge into a deck-plate, but the damage was done. Her barriers were down. Tohth sent what seemed like a backhand, but it ignited in the air, with hard-light holding a blaze of volatile chemicals in their heart, searing it toward her. That, was simple enough. She backhanded it aside, firebending trumping tech in this particular instance. Or it would have, hadn't the damned thing exploded. It seared at her hand, lighting her arm on fire. She choked back a shout, and lashed that burning fist forward, directly into the salarian's face. If he expected to be punched by a fist that he had set on fire, then he'd had to've been some kind of prophet. As it was, it sent him spinning back, but Shepard had to spend a few moments ensuring that her arm didn't burn off. Kind of important, that.

Lawson bridged the gap, slashing in with bolts of rock-hard ice that seared straight through the salarian's barriers, preventing him from getting his footing back. And she'd been so vocal about how useless waterbending was. When Shepard finally got her limb extinguished, she returned her attention to the fights; Garrus and Adahn were trying to subdue the human without making much more noise than his alarmed and pained shouts. That left the salarian with the explosive armor to the Avatar. Well, the Avatar and Lawson, but who counted her? Shepard pushed herself into a launch, even as the salarian sent out a flick of his Omni, and with it, Lawson found herself bathed in electricity, her armor rebelling against her. The impact of Shepard intercepting him before he could capitalize was probably a good thing, one that sent the two of them rolling until they were stopped against the side of the two's food-bin.

Shepard pushed the salarian off of her, but even as she did, he waved his Omni, and a blast of frigidity bathed her. Since it hit her arm, soothing it somewhat, it was something of a godsend. Until her limbs started to lock up, her armor's motors seizing for the cold, anyway. Still, it wasn't freezing her legs. She drove a knee straight up into its groin. It gave a grunt of discomfort, nothing like the mind-snapping agony of a proper testicle-kick. Then again, she would later discover, salarians didn't have external testicles. Or much in the way of recognizable reproductive anatomy. Still, the boot was enough to get a bit of wiggle room. And she wiggled straight forward, into the salarian and driving him onto _his_ back, reversing their arrangement from before. She raised a hand high, thinking that she was activating an Omnitool which was burnt to a crisp. When she drove that fist down, it came down bathed in blue light that was definitely not flames.

The thud of it rippled down into the salarian even as it started to damn-near-liquify him, but the shockwave of her biotic blow, incited without her conscious effort – or more concerning, her conscious _control_ – bounced back up, off of the floor and hit her in the chest. She was sent rocketing off of the pulped salarian and slammed into the ceiling of the room, five meters up, before dropping back down, landing just beside the green paste which had once been named Tohth.

Shepard sat up awkwardly, her eyes wide and her head spinning, just as there was a final electric snap, and the human dropped to his knees, twitching and smoking, while Adahn grasped him by the back of the neck. It just looked at him, the man with his eyes rolled back and flailing from the electrocution, before releasing and letting the body fall. It landed in a heap, the legs still folded up, unable to flop flat with their muscles still tight.

"What the hell was that?" Shepard asked.

"Needlessly theatrical," Lawson answered, rubbing at her chest where her pristine white armor now had a scorch mark on it. Probably under that, lay one of her barrier generators.

"I could have handled that," Garrus said, as he pushed himself to his own feet. "Spirits preserve me – I'm glad that not all Eclipse are that tough."

"They aren't?" Shepard asked. Best news she'd heard all day.

"Usually they're pushovers... once you get past their legions of mechs, swarms of combat drones, and fancy tech-armor," He said, striking the what seemed to be cocoa powder off of his hands. The human merc was laying face down in an exploded bag of it.

"Whatever the case, we're going to have to get to this 'Captain Enyala' before she scuttles this ship," Lawson pointed out.

"Can we assume that they're going to be wise to somebody coming at them from the maintenance tunnels?" Garrus asked. "...if only because I'm not at my best when my sight-line is two meters."

"We're operating on a deadline," Shepard said. She turned to Adahn. "Open the door – so we're going to have to be a bit more direct."

"I'm calling it now. Heroic escape from exploding ship," Garrus offered. Lawson shook her head at their combined insanity.

The door started to rattle up, even as the lights flickered back to their full strength. Shepard looked out into the room before her. It seemed plain enough. "How far?" she asked.

"This would be a kitchen, so..." Lawson began. Shepard held up a hand to silence her, though, when she peeked 'round a corner into said kitchen. There was somebody on the ground. She looked a little closer. Yellow and black armor. She motioned the others to join her.

"This is starting to get a little creepy," Garrus said, as he looked down at the asari who was slumped, her back against a line of stoves, her neck cut deeply by a length of cheese-wire. The blood was still expanding around her. This was beyond recent.

"Whoever's doing this is close. We..." Shepard was cut off when there was a crash from behind them. Shepard turned, and saw that Adahn had collapsed, rigid, to the floor. She then looked up, and had a split second to see red-and-white armor, before a glowing amber light overwhelmed her vision, sparking and blinding her, sending her stumbling back. Garrus got exactly half a swear-word out before he was given a similar treatment. Lawson, though, just let out a grunt of pain, and gave a similar thump as Adahn, if less dramatic or solid.

"Humans. Don't recognize from crew manifest. Too well armed to be passengers. No mercenary uniform," a voice came from Shepard's direct left. She sent out a punch of somewhat anemic flame in that direction, but all she got was a yelp from Garrus.

"Hey! Watch it!" the turian shouted.

"Turian; unlikely member of Eclipse. Prefer human, salarian, asari. Presence of geth most puzzling. War trophy? No. No! Was active; currently reactivating on own recognizance."

"Show yourself!" Shepard said, trying to get some sight back into her flash-blinded eyes.

"Here for something else. Rescue for passengers? Unlikely. Reaction time too swift. Attack on Eclipse? Improbable; Enyala would have mentioned threat capable of neutralizing cruiser," there was a sharp intake of breath, breaking the rapid-fire dialogue of one. "Soldiers, not mercenaries. Serving who? Turian involvement most puzzling. Few human groups willing to work with. Simmering racial tensions. Extraction team! Yes; _yes_! Extracting _who_?"

Shepard stopped fumbling,and pressed her smote eyes shut. She sighed. "...are you Professor Mordin Solus?" she asked, her tone dry and humorless.

"Know my name. Interesting. Extraction team for me, perhaps? Seems likely..." Mordin rambled.

"Oh, for the love of all the gods in this galaxy, can't you _please_ take a breath?" Shepard asked.

"_Shepard Commander. We have experienced a Type Blue error. Do you require assistance?_" the geth's voice asked.

"Geth platform; significant combat damage. Vocal processors intact. Benign behavior. Reprogrammed?"

"Solus, we're here to get you off of this ship," Lawson said, sounding like she was in a fair degree of pain. "We're..."

"Human group, willing to work with aliens, geth. Chikyu Noboru unlikely; human supremacist. Phoenix also unlikely; no visible insignia – Illusive Man has sizable ego: Brands everything," Shepard blinked a few times, trying to keep up with him. She found that she could now see the kitchen again. A salarian leaned in front of her, his ovoid eyes tight and wrinkled. She leaned back as he did. "Samsara?"

"Yes; what did you do to my..." Shepard asked.

"Flash-blindness should dissipate swiftly. Didn't use wavelengths to cause massive, permanent harm. Careful, not cruel," Mordin said, turning toward the kitchens again, looking through into the restaurant beyond it. He was wearing a strange sort of armor, one that had a sort of halo that ringed his head – a head which was missing one of those horns that salarians tended to have a pair of. He was scarred, his features tight. "Problem with extraction; unwilling to abandon passengers to execution. Wrong place, wrong time," he shook his head. "Not just, fair."

"Did you have to blind us?" Shepard asked, as she finally started to be able to see in color again.

"I'm guessing I know the answer to that," Garrus muttered.

"Yes. Had to understand presence of unknown variable. Can't take risks. Too much at stake!" Mordin said. He pointed at Shepard. "Familiar. Impossible. Avatar Shepard?"

"Good to know I don't need to introduce myself to everybody," Shepard muttered. As she flexed her hand in the burnt armor. And then she actually looked at it, realizing that not only was the Omni cooked off, but the biotic punch had shattered the gauntlet, leaving only the ballistic mesh below it. Gotta stop doing that, she thought to herself.

"Clone? Unlikely; would have attempted more perfect recreation. Synthetic lifeform? Perhaps. Can bend all elements?"

"Great, I meet somebody who recognizes me, and he doesn't believe it's me," Shepard said. Mordin waved it away.

"Will discuss later. More pressing concern, hijacking, imminent executions. Will assist?" he asked.

"It'll take EDI at least a few more minutes to crack the cruiser's ICEs," Lawson said, her face even more pale than usual – itself a near impossibility – as whatever Solus did to her wasn't as painless as a mere blinding. "Where is this 'Captain Enyala'?"

"Last saw near command section; likely overseeing passengers. Ransom demands pending; some worth considerable moneys," Mordin leaned closer, his eyes narrowing. "Perhaps not as considerable as mine," he leaned away. "Fast path to command module, through entertainment module. Know path exists; haven't walked it. Don't need handing over money to machine to waste time."

"Alright," Shepard gave her eyes another blink, and then took her rifle from her back. "I assume that this is going to get messy, so we'd better do it fast."

"This extraction just became a rescue mission," Garrus said evenly. "Nothing's ever simple with you, is it Shepard?"

"You'd get bored if it ever did."

"True enough," Garrus admitted. "Where's the casino?"

"Not casino; entertainment module. Casino dedicated facility. Entertainment module modular. Interchangeable. Has secondary function as ampitheatre. Performances... sub-par. Need better talent," Mordin shook his head. He then brightened a bit. "Ah. Yes, need increased firepower to breach tech-armor. Use these," Solus then hopped up onto the inactive stove and shoved a ceiling panel aside, dropping a pair of heavy pistols onto the floor. Shepard raised a brow at that. Either the cooks were the most paranoid people in the galaxy, or Solus _seriously_ considered that he might need two guns from an unexpected angle in a hell of a hurry.

The latter was, with every passing moment in this salarian's presence, becoming the more likely option.

"Carnifex. Jovo for 'butcher'. Excellent for producing dead meat," Solus said, brandishing his own. _Three_ guns? What was he going to do, fire the third from his foot?

"Yeah, I used a prototype for this thing a couple years back."

"Would have overheated quickly," Solus nodded. He then pointed, as Lawson picked up the other. "This way. Entertainment module in gambling configuration. Much cover," he glanced back to them. "_Won't see us coming_."

He then started moving forward, through the restaurant and beyond it. Garrus just shook his head at him. "And of course, he doesn't give me a fancy new gun," he bemoaned.

"Just be thankful he didn't put you into neural shock," Lawson countered. Shepard gave a glance to the geth. It was telling that, beyond the first mention, Solus hadn't said a single word about the fact that they had an AI running around with them.

"_Salarians possess higher thought-transit speeds compared to median organic values_," the geth said. "_Professor Solus seems to be an exceptional specimen of this tendency_."

Shepard could only sigh, and follow the madness.

* * *

Enyala's foot was bouncing against the deck plating, her brow drawn down in a glare that penetrated deck-plating, bulkheads, and even the infinity of space. Her teeth were grinding. Bad things tended to coincide with Enyala Mosvani's teeth grinding.

"How many?" she asked, working very, very hard to keep her tones even.

"Three more transponders have gone quiet, ma'am," Sumral said, even as he stood with his drones running lazy circles around him and her both. His eyes remained locked onto the haptic display above his omnitool. "No, wait, I've got two of them. Flatlined, in Fore Hold, section B."

"Two?" she asked. Sumral nodded. Enyala pushed off of the countertop and walked up the line of people kneeling, their hands bound behind them. She tipped the chin of one of them, a human woman with black hair, up with the barrel of her shotgun. "How much is this one worth?"

"We've not had a response regarding her," Sumral said.

"One," Enyala said. And pulled the trigger. The others in the line screamed as the M-300 damned near tore the human apart. She then walked up the line. "This one?"

"Wealthy family, only child," Sumral said. Enyala looked down at the girl who was now weeping in terror at her decapitated friend.

"Lucky you," she said. She then walked up to the next, a drell who seemed to be praying under his breath. "Who am I kidding? Nobody'll pay for a drell. Two."

Another blast, and the wall behind him was painted. She slapped a new sink into the weapon, and heaved it onto her shoulder. "Alright, Solus!" she shouted. "I don't know if you can hear me, but I'm done playing with you! I _will_ kill every one of these assholes!"

"Why are you doing this?" an asari asked through tears. From her dress, she was an employee. As such, Enyala pointed her 'Krogun' at her next.

"And for good measure, three," she said. A blast, miscalculated, tore apart not only the asari hostess, but a grungy-attired turian kneeling next to her. "And four, apparently," she pointed at Sumral. "Patch me through."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, his usual tone being one of busy and distraction.

"Alright, Solus, you've had your fun, now I've had mine," she said. "You're worth more than all of these pieces of shit put together. Hand yourself over now, and I stop painting the wall with them. Sound like a good idea? Yeah, I thought it did," she said. A glance to Sumral. "Let him stew."

"Ma'am, may I speak?" Sumral said. Enyala did a double-take, as he was staring directly at her, something that he seldom if ever did.

"Yes. Why?"

"Solus is former STG. They might not like collateral damage, but they won't care if it happens because they couldn't stop it. He _will_ let them die, and _then_ kill us."

"Is that your opinion as a salarian?" Enyala asked.

"That's my opinion as an engineer who's just lost control of the loudspeaker system," Sumral said. Enyala's eyes widened.

"_Broadcasting? Good. Leave_," another salarian said through those speakers. "_Failure to do so inadvisable. Estimated crew of Wrath of Kamnal fifty, eighty without automation_," a brief pause. "_Now thirteen less_."

"Find him," Enyala said. Sumral nodded, and started to flash fingers across his Omni. Enyala tipped a new head, of a human woman, with jaw-length grey hair who was sheltered from the blast by the turian mechanic. She, unlike most others, stared up with defiance. "Five..."

"_Also_," Solus continued. "_Any further loss of life results in harsh penalty. More lives lost, greater penalty_," a harsh intake of breath, "_You __will not enjoy__ penalty_."

She scowled, and looked to Sumral, who brightened slightly. "I've _got_ him. Casino deck."

"Go," Enyala snapped to her subordinates. She scowled at the human under her gun, but shook her head. "Consider yourself lucky that you're not worth the heat-sink."

* * *

The shot exploding the Quasar table was music to Garrus' ears. "Now _this_ is more like it," he said with gusto, as he leaned out just long enough to make an Eclipse merc's head explode in a green paste.

"Don't tell me you're enjoying this," Lawson said, as she took shots that kept heads down and shields crumbling. They'd been hit by a swarm of the mercs that surged from the fore-section of the 'entertainment module' while they were only a third of the way through the gambling machines and malarkey. For all her reluctance to take part in the insanity, she was leaving a substantial trail of bodies; she was beating Shepard and Adahn both. Which wasn't fair to say, since Adahn used his massively overpowered rifle to one-shot engies through hard cover. And Garrus wasn't complaining one bit. Sometimes a few important dead people were more valuable than a lot of lesser ones.

"Are you kidding? He used to make a sport of this," Shepard said.

"Flammable! Or _in_flammable! Either one; doesn't matter!" Solus declared, as a blaze of fire splashed over a line of slot-machines, causing one of the immolated mercs to come running out of cover – ablaze, and get gunned down by two humans and a turian in the same second.

"I love fighting through Casinos," Garrus declared.

"Not Casino; _entertainment module_," Mordin declared, followed by a few bangs that sent a machine crumbling apart in a shower of sparks, and causing the mercs behind it to flee to something a bit more substantial.

"Like I was saying," Garrus continued. "I love fighting through Casinos. It's always _interesting_," he paused, long enough to blast an elbow which was poking out of cover; the spang told him that he'd not gotten through the armor, but he'd likely broken the arm. "It's right up there with botanical gardens... Electronic stores..." he trailed off, as Shepard slid out and sent a blast of lightning up and ahead of her. Gambling machines exploded in sparks, and mercs were sent flying from the force of its landing. Garrus got one good shot off before they rolled back out of sight, a shot that put its target down flat. "...antique stores, but _only_ if they're classy..."

"_Alert. Substantial array of combat platforms attempting flank maneuver_," the geth said. It peeled off from where it was trying to shoot the source of all the damned drones that tried to lock them in place, and moved toward Garrus, intending to as much as shoot over his shoulder.

"Yeah, this is a lot more fun than that turkey-duck shoot that was Haliat," Shepard said as she spun back into cover, the blue field of her armor crackling back up around her.

"He never stood a chance," Garrus agreed. He glanced out for a moment and almost got his head shot off by a rocket, which streaked past and blasted a roulette wheel into scrap wood. "Whoa, that was close," he said.

"Hey, Garrus!" Shepard said, as she sent a stream of fire which blasted the drone which had sent said rocket at him to bits.

"Yes, Shepard?" he asked, as he twisted up beside the geth and blasted the heads off of approaching Pantu mechs.

"What's the worst thing about treating a turian who's taken a rocket to a side of his face?"

"You've been talking to Joker, haven't you?" Garrus asked. Shepard cracked a smirk. "'Figuring out which side took the rocket'."

"Interesting dynamic. Strong camaraderie. Powerful bond," Mordin said, before launching out with another blast of electrical force which locked one of the so-struck in place, his thick armor unable to move with its actuators seized. "Romantic attraction?"

"Now you're just being _crazy_," Shepard said, as she put a stream of holes through him with her rifle – one day, she'd stop ragging on the Avenger, but apparently not today.

"Yeah, I'm not into white-skinned aliens. They look all... dead," he said, pausing to reload, and fire again. "No offense, Shepard."

"No offense taken. Mostly because I'm technically '_Un_-dead'," she said.

"Gotta say, Shepard, I've missed this," he said with a grin.

"You've got no idea, Garrus. No idea at all," Shepard said. "Move up!"

Garrus suited action to her words, breaking out from behind cover and rushing a layer up. He slid to a stop, tearing up carpeting and reaching the side of some sort of machine that stood fairly tall, all things considering. It was fortunate he reached it when he did. An instant later, a blast of shotgun fury decapitated the machine, and sent a blizzard of small, metal spheres raining onto the floor around him.

"How close are we?" Shepard asked.

"Close," Mordin answered, from his place yet ahead of her. "Bodyguards will stay close to captain. Cannon-fodder sent to soften-up opposition."

"Hey! Who are you callin' cannon-fodder?" one of the mercs shouted at Mordin. Garrus answered him by leaning to one side of the sphere-filled machine and putting a bullet through his skull.

"You, obviously," Garrus answered.

He turned back into cover, only to see a flicker of light to one side of him. He bit a curse, and threw himself away from where he'd taken up, only to stumble on those balls and land on his chest. Because of that, the shotgun blast of the nearly-invisible infiltrator only grazed his side rather than hit him square. Another nick in the old armor. He tried to get his rifle out from under him, to put a hole through the guy who broke through their line – likely by standing still – but he was saved that requirement by Lawson, of all people, plugging two powerful bullets through his back. The first made him visible; the second one made him aerosol. "Pay more attention!" Lawson snapped.

"_Garrus Vakarian; relocate. You are blocking our line of fire_," the geth said politely. He rolled sideways over the balls, and slithered his unstable way to a spot right beside Shepard. When he pulled himself up at her side, there was a bass bang, and the machine that he'd been behind exploded completely, sending even more steel balls flying at random.

"Shepard, what game is that supposed to be?" he asked.

"Pachinko. Not my favorite game; I don't like gambling against a machine. They always seem to win," Shepard said. She pawed over herself. "Got any spares?"

Garrus reached through his pockets, and found exactly one. "Running a bit low myself. Take it."

"There's a reason you're my favorite turian," Shepard said with a smirk. Garrus was a bit uncomfortable with it, though. That smirk was a bit... desperate.

"Are you two having _fun_?" Lawson asked.

"We're in a gunfight through a casino –"

"_Entertainment module_," Mordin interjected, before sending out another immolating gout of chemicals, to the sound of mercenary screaming.

"– to bring down a pirate. What's not to enjoy?" Shepard asked.

"_Shepard Commander; we have intercepted communications stating that Captain Enyala intents to leave with the hostages. We can prevent this_."

"Do it," Shepard said. The geth dropped into cover, and its eye went dim. Then, there was a klaxon that sounded somewhere ahead, followed by a loud bang. Probably the airlock to the Wrath of whatever slamming shut. "Solus?"

"Advancing. Last distractions being dealt with."

"Hey! We're not 'distractions!" one of the mercs ahead of him shouted. Garrus used that should to blast her straight through the slot-machine she was using as cover. Never give away your position to the enemy, dumbass.

"You know in a weird way, he's right," Garrus said, peering out of cover as he had no ammo left to fire. "When you're dead, you're not very distracting."

"Move up!" Shepard said. Garrus was just getting ready to move when a bass bang shot past him, almost scraping his barriers, and blasted through a structural support beam, before hurling a merc away from where she'd been hiding.

"Would you mind not peeling my paint, Adahn?" Garrus asked.

"_The shot was accurate_," the geth said, pelting forward, before it jumped onto the top of the line of machines and continued that way. There was a fritz of its shields being assaulted electronically, but the geth persevered and put a fresh bolt of metal into the last 'distraction' in the casino – and by damn, it was a casino! – plunging the area into relative silence, but for the fritzing of electricity and the rattling of metal balls rolling around the floor.

"Excellent. Path clear. Passengers still aboard Strontium Mule," Mordin said. Shepard quickly moved up to Garrus' side, shoving new – and bloody – heat-sinks into her gun. It might work for her Avenger, but anything with a higher point heat-dump – like Garrus' rifle – would just explode from having a bloody sink. That, he'd learned the hard way. He'd also written a complaint. Devlon Industries promised that they'd have that problem ironed out by the time the '86 hit the market.

How great when companies actually gave good customer service?

"Got any without blood on 'em?" Garrus asked.

"I didn't think you were squeamish," Shepard said, holding one which was, despite her jibe, clean.

"You know me. I just go faint at the sight of blood," he said, his tones rife with sarcasm. Shepard laughed a bit too loud at that. Something wasn't right with her.

"_Shepard Commander. The majority of the crew of the Wrath of Kamnal is trapped aboard the cruiser_," Adahn said.

"Buuut?" she asked. She then rounded a corner, and only because Garrus was very fast at pulling her back did a storm of flying metal fail to slam into the side of her face. He tried to get his own rifle up, but it was only half way to hand when there was a blue streak in the air, which slammed into his chest and sent him flying back. He slid to a stop next to a claw-machine, and rolled aside for a scintillating orb that was the Warp to the previous Kick. If she'd been sensible, she'd have reversed the order. Of course, Garrus wasn't about to correct the mistakes of his enemies, least of all when they would have resulted in Garrus Soup.

"This was supposed to be a simple mission!" the asari screamed, as she blasted out another shot, which ripped part of the line of one-armed-bandits into scrap metal. The impact also dropped the geth onto the floor behind them. "Grab the salarian, sell him to the Shadow Broker, _live like a queen_! But no! You just had to make things _difficult_!"

"I don't think she likes you," Garrus said to the salarian, who was slipping backward through cover, trying to keep the asari with her tech-armor and her rage and her massive shotgun from getting a bead on him. Garrus, though, could see several combat drones drifting behind her, sending out combustive rockets from their hard-light bodies. _She_ wasn't controlling them, that was for sure.

"You involved passengers. Could have been simpler. Difficulty, not my responsibility."

"You killed my men! You killed valuable passengers!" she screamed back at him.

"You killed passengers. Your gun, your responsibility!" Solus shouted back. She let out another blast, which sent a gambling wheel that was up against the wall rolling away, until it toppled against a gaming table. Garrus tried to get a shot on her, but the instant the crack came and the shot was off, the golden field of her tech-armor shifted, solidifying to a pin-prick, and stopping the shot cold.

"You've got somebody playing with your defense matrix," Garrus said, turning his attention away from the asari; after all, she had the Avatar, the mad-doctor, and the geth to keep her company. Garrus, though, had a hunch that needed sniffing out.

Even as Enyala was warding off a stream of fire from Shepard by hurling a blast of cryogenic chemicals at her, Garrus was slipping past her back. Ordinarily, he wasn't above shooting somebody in the back, but he wasn't entirely sure that it would help in this instance. Not yet, anyway. He tuned out the ranting and raving of the asari, and looked ahead. Something was through that hallway. The hall, which was stained with the blood of the dead who lay there yet, led toward the command sections of the ship. It split into three, and from the helm itself – where the turian pilot lay forward dead with his back open straight through to his front – Garrus caught just a glimmer of movement.

He rolled aside, ducking behind the piled bodies of an asari, atop a drell, atop a turian. It wouldn't be the first time in his life he bunkered down behind the dead. Not even the first time this year. His gun came to his eye, and he looked ahead. Yes. Movement. He could see just bits and pieces of a salarian who was tucked into a corner of the cockpit. He just needed to wait for the right part of him to appear.

He was waiting on a headshot.

He almost squeezed the trigger when the first horn appeared. No, not good enough. He waited, his heart slowing, his finger steady. Just a bit more... There. With a squeeze, and a crack, the shot was away. The head exploded... into shards of hard-light. Garrus stared at the hologram he'd shot. Then, he turned left, and saw that there was a deployable turret coming online, sent from he knew not where. It started to whir to life, and Garrus didn't waste time even to reload. He cast his hand forward with his Omni, activating an Overload, which caused the gun to 'hiccup', but it didn't shut it down. He knew how fast those things could kill somebody. So he did the next thing which came to mind. He reached inside, and he used the energy of his soul, in its most pure and focused state.

The Omnitool shut off, as Garrus cast that same hand out again, but this time, when he did, lightning raced off of his fingertip, across the three meter gap, and caused the turret to detonate under the power that he'd wielded. That was a trick he was _damned_ glad he'd figured out. He blew the smoke off of his fingernail with a smirk. Then, he reached for a spare sink, only to remember he didn't have any. A sigh, then. "Fine, we'll do this the hard way."

Garrus carefully set his rifle onto his back, and rolled his neck, finishing with a crack of his knuckles, as he moved to the center of the hallway. His eyes pressed shut, and he felt with a sense that he didn't have two years ago; a much-more recent advancement in firebending, the heat-sight.

He couldn't see through walls, not well enough to shoot something... but it was good enough to know that the sounds he heard were being ventriloquised over a bunch of antipersonnel mines to the right. The salarian was to the left.

Garrus started to run, and jumped at the corner, kicking off the other side and bearing down on the surprised looking salarian who had sent a blast of incendiary chemicals at what would have been groin-level if Garrus hadn't bounded. Instead, he surged forward with an arc of flame that raced from his toes as he spun to the floor, letting that invoked fire burst over the mines, and give him a dramatic backdrop of an explosion as he took his balance.

The salarian engineer backed up, pulling his pistol from his hip. Garrus just powered forward; the shots deflected off of his barriers, and while they were critical by the time he'd made up to his opponent, they were still intact, so that Garrus' back-hand knocked the gun away from his grasp before any real harm could be done.

Of course, that just meant that the salarian attacked with his own Overload package, which ripped through what remained of Garrus' shields, and tried to wrack him with pain. Instead, though, he simply took the power that surged through him, and instead of letting it run amok, he gave it a single point of easy exit. The zap that came off of his fingertip wasn't nearly as powerful as his lightning earlier, but there was only so much power in a suit of armor, to begin with.

He thrust forward, his punches falling well short of their target, but since each ignited and sent off a blast of flame, they made due. It was strange, having his oldest, most basic CQC become not only relevant again, but become critical; every firebending stance that he had was a repurposed strike, counter, or evasion. It was ugly, inelegant, and brutish, but by the spirits, did it ever work. Flames seared toward the salarian, and rebounded off of the golden field which sparked into being over his chest and face. Great. _More_ tech-armor. Typical Eclipse, really.

"Would you mind giving up so I don't have to kill you?" Garrus asked, as he took a moment to center his balance, and get a few steps closer to his opponent, whom was now circling with him through the bunk-room which had been thoroughly ransacked, all of its detritus thrown into the corners and lining the walls.

"I wouldn't be so confident of that," the salarian said. Then, he slashed forward, not with his technical skills, but with his hands. And when he did, shards of ice whipped out of canteens that were built into his armor. Garrus had to twist and dodge, as he didn't feel like letting those things impale him. The problem with his attempts to get closer were that the salarian left a lot of water behind Garrus, so when he shifted back, his arms sweeping inward, they crashed over Garrus' back and snap-froze, locking him to the floor. "Turians, never can figure out what to do with their backs."

Garrus wasn't going to let this stand. In the same instant the words tumbled from the salarian's jaw, he was firebending again. This time, it was internal. He stoked the heat of his body, raising it higher; radiating it into his armor. Radiating his armor into the ice. Then, when the temperature became high enough, he sent out a blast of flame, that burst out in all directions and shattered the ice around him. The salarian, who looked like he was about to gloat, suddenly got a very concerned look on his face and backed up a step, pulling the water to him in a broad band. Garrus, unlike his opponent, wasn't in a bending form. He was, nevertheless, ready.

The salarian took the initiative – poorly – by launching out with snapping whips which Garrus warded with plates of fire at his hands, flashing the water to steam before it could strike him, only to have that steam pulled back into the whip. But every defense he gave got him a bit closer to the salarian, who was now steadily losing ground. The alien grew more desperate, sharpening the water-knife, and sending it out in lashing strokes. Garrus powered through, his fire greater than the salarian's tide. The inferno that came from his hands, that followed his feet, unmade the water. Finally, he had his moment.

He launched himself into a rocket-punch, bridging that final distance with one hand cocked back. The salarian's fingers flashed over his omni, and the golden field of his armor returned, bright and slimy as ever. The blast of fire that came down with Garrus' punch ended at the tech-armor, but the fire did not remain bottled. It blasted the non-Newtonian fluid inside the tech-armor's mass-effect fields, first drying it out, then setting it on fire even inside its shell. One foot kicked aside, catching the edge of the salarian's pistol, while his other hand pressed closer.

The salarian tried to hold the breach with water, but every droplet that it tried to use to stem that blaze flashed into steam when it even came close. He started to shout, his mouth gaping as the flames started to tear through the tech-armor completely. Then, a final thrust, and his hand burst through the fields, the armor, spent. His hand slammed into faintly glowing metal, and pushed the salarian against an up-ended bedframe. The salarian's eyes tracked his own gun, which had reflected off of the wall and was now flipping back into Garrus' other hand. It was an easy catch. And with a single motion, he exchanged burning hand for cold gunbarrel.

"...aww..." the salarian muttered.

Garrus finished that thought with a gunshot, that burst through compromised armor and concave chest alike. He followed it with a second shot, just to be sure, but the way that the salarian slumped down told the turian that any more damage at this point would just be kicking an alien while it was down. "You weren't bad," Garrus said. "I was just better."

* * *

"_Extreme threat detected. Moving to neutralize_."

Whatever truth there was to those words was put to lie as a zipping bolt of blue smashed into Adahn and sent him crashing into the other side of the room. "But if there's one thing that I can take a level of comfort in, Solus, it's that the Shadow Broker is offering the reward _dead or alive_!"

"What makes you think that you're going to live long enough to collect?" Shepard shouted to the asari who was now making a royal pain of herself. If nothing else, Shepard was going to relieve her of that shotgun when she killed her.

"You've got a big mouth, human!" the asari snapped. "You shouldn't have gotten between me and Solus! _Nobody_ could have paid you enough!"

Shepard leaned out, sending out a stream of fire which outright stopped at the glowing gold armor. At least it wasn't causing them to ricochet the way it had a minute ago. She glanced at the sink-readout. Damn, only a dozen or so shots left before this sink was done in. She slid it away, drawing her side-arm. If nothing else, this little gun had some kick. She was just about to send some unkind intentions – in ballistic form – at this Captain Enyala, when she found herself drifting upward. Her feet kicked, but couldn't either get traction on the ground, or in fact touch it. There was a faintly blue-green field that colored the light as it passed close to her, and she was careening toward the now glowing asari with her massive shotgun. She was lining up for a shot on the helpless human when Lawson charged and hurled herself at the asari. The shot which was intended for Shepard was sent low and wide by the ravenette crashing into the heavily armored alien, but Enyala wasn't going to be taken down so easily. Lawson slashed with a back-hand of razor-sharp ice, which for a wonder did manage to drag a blue weal across the asari's face, but she'd only gotten that far by the time that Enyala grabbed that back-hand, and slammed her shotgun – side on – into the elbow, hyperextending it. The crunch presaged a second crunch as Enyala stomped Lawson's knee back, dropping the waterbender to the floor. With a hand, she cast down a whitish blob, which bathed over Lawson and held her perfectly still. With that dealt with for the moment, the mercenary captain scanned the room as would a wild beast.

"Solus!" Enyala roared.

"Indeed. Warned about needless loss of life," Solus said, as he slipped around out of sight. Enyala sent her shotgun blast at the spot she thought he was, too livid to realize that not killing Shepard was a bad idea. The field holding the Avatar aloft collapsed, and she landed face-first on a card-table. She took the opportunity to roll off before the asari could turn her attention back. "Penalty, _very_ costly."

"You know what? I've decided that I'm not going to kill you. Instead, I'm going to blow your arms and legs off and sell you to the Broker like that! SIT DOWN!" she shrieked, sending a Warp to strike Shepard in the chest, it traveling faster than any that the Avatar had ever seen. The blast of it took Shepard off her feet and landed her on the ground, a horrible burning sensation adding to the burned sensation of her immolated arm. "And then, I'm going to give away a bit of the money he pays me just so I can _burn the eyes right out of your goddess-damned head_!"

"Level of antagonism not recommended. Impairs mental faculties," Mordin said. Maybe even jibed. She cast out a hand with a bright blue bolt of force that tore the pachinko machines Mordin was hiding behind off of their footing and sent them crashing beyond. Solus himself was carried along with one of them, but scrabbled out of the way before the shotgun blast which sent another great rain of slick steel balls to the floor.

"Oh, I've got nothing impaired," Enyala promised. Shepard finally shook off the pain and got up. She fired off a stream of shots, all of which hit the golden field around Enyala's armor. The last one caused the golden section to crack and dissipate, and the faintly white fluid that had been held within, fall to the floor. Good to know that such a thing could be shut down, even with a pistol. She reached to replace the heat-sink, then remembered the obvious. Great. No heat-sink. The asari turned toward Shepard, and a snarl came to her face. "I told you to SIT! DOWN!" she roared, and sent a blast from her shotgun to make her point clear. The spray of fire tore the top off of the card-table, and at least one great chunk of it actually got through Shepard's armor, knocking her onto her back with her eyes screwed shut in pain. Oh, that was vaguely familiar. She tried to pull in a breath, but found that it was weak and inordinately painful. When she looked down, and saw the shard of metal hammered into her armor just below the breast, it became obvious as to why. She grasped the sliver and pulled, metalbending to make sure it didn't snag and tear, but it still hurt almost as much as being shot. And there was the collapsed lung she had to worry about... later.

Shepard threw the shrapnel away, and got to her feet. She pictured what she had to do in her mind. She knew there was a fair chance that it was going to fail, but she had to do it anyway. She hurled herself forward, intending an action-vid dive...

And landing in the ruins of the card-table. She shook her head. Why didn't it work this time? She pushed her way out of the ruins, just in time to see that the asari had chased Mordin down, and now had him somewhat hemmed in, firing blasts at the corner of the casino that was damned near right on top of where the mooks and their mistress had come from. Shepard's eyes were almost pressed shut, her teeth clenched almost to cracking. She focused her will into action. The action into motion. There was a spark at the back of her neck, and a twist in the air, as the light bent around a biotic charge.

She streaked across the distance, ignoring all of the crap and rubble between her and Enyala. She reached back a burning fist, and prepared to lash it forward into the back of the Merc's head. But there was a strange shift. Blue light wafted out around Enyala, like a bubble that popped into Shepard's own. She spun with incredible speed, back-handing Shepard in the shoulder and sending her Charge off course, and dropping her into the line of already badly mangled slot-machines. Those that were 'old style', vomited metal tokens onto the floor around Shepard, where she lay with her legs above her and her shoulders and back rooted on the floor. "Amateur," Enyala chided. Then, she turned the shotgun ahead of her. Another blast, and the last of the machines crumbled away, showing the salarian just as he sent out a blast of fire within a hard-light shell. It burst over Enyala and knocked her back a step, but there was such hate and rage in her eyes that she would likely have swum through the acid seas of Hell to get her hands onto Mordin's throat. She slammed a fresh heat-sink into her gun... And Shepard swore she saw something that was utterly impossible.

She shook her head, dispelling that illusion and returning her attention to the here and now, rather than the days of the lost, first Normandy. She twisted, letting her legs flop to the floor, and pushed up, ignoring the somewhat concerning amount of blood that she was leaving on the tokens. She clenched her fists, and flame wreathed them. She slowly pressed her eyes open, preparing to ambush Enyala while her back was turned.

Only, Shepard wasn't the only human woman with that idea.

Moving with surprising alacrity, the woman almost appeared from the ruins of the casino, her hands bound in front of her but a thick, iron skillet in her hands nevertheless. With a full-body swing, she drove it, edge first, into the back of Captain Enyala's head. The legs went right out from under the asari, who landed on her knees and the tip of her shotgun, barely keeping from face-planting entirely. Kinetic barriers could protect you against a lot of things, but blunt trauma was not amongst them. If she'd worn her _helmet_, though... Enyala wavered, as though trying to muster the wherewithal to rise, but the woman struck her again, which drove her to both hands and knees, the shotgun clanking to the floor. Shepard limped up, pulling her rifle from her back as she did, and emptied the rest of the clip into the asari's head and back at point-blank range.

Mordin, ahead of her, wiped away a dribble of green from his mouth, likely come from the fresh split at his lip. "Ah. Timely arrival. Would have succeeded regardless, but speedy resolution appreciated."

Shepard breathed deep, and then turned.

"Commander," the familiar face said. "While I should say 'it's good to see you again', I probably shouldn't waste time while you're breathing around a collapsed lung."

"...Doctor Chakwas?" Shepard asked. The grey haired woman put on a small, private smile.

"I had heard that Samsara needed an expert in applied metaphysics, and I knew in a heartbeat who they needed it for," she said, letting the skillet drop onto Enyala's back. Shepard reached forward and sundered her manacles with a whisper of metalbending. "My thanks for the rescue, though. I thought that this voyage was my last, with some certainty."

There was a sudden groan on the ground, as the Stasis finally dissipated, letting Lawson start to move again. Chakwas offered an arm to Lawson, pulling her up from the ground and letting her not walk on her broken knee. "Doctor Chakwas, I presume?" Lawson asked, her tones tight but still remarkably together. Chakwas nodded. "I hoped I would... enc...ounter you, but not... under these circum...aaah...stances."

"I recommend you save your breath, Miss Lawson," Chakwas said. "We're going to have to release the others quickly."

"_Actually, that won't be necessary_," EDI chimed in through the Strontium Mule's loudspeakers. "_I have shut down the Wrath of Kamnal's drive-core, life-support, main and secondary batteries, heat dissipation, engines, navigation and water reclamation plant. They will be far too busy to provide chase_."

"Did I miss the fun?" Garrus asked, as he looked out of the hallway, and then motioned for somebody behind him to follow. Passengers, terrified looking, began to stream forth. "Always seems to be the way..."

"Whoever your hacker is, she's very skilled," Chakwas noted, as she brought Lawson to their assembly in the ruined casino.

"Chakwas, yes," Solus said, striking some wood chips off of his armor's shoulder. "Expected you would survive. Very resilient, resourceful," he turned to Shepard. "Means of extraction?"

"The airlock," Lawson said dryly, even if her eyes were showing the pain that she was fighting to keep out of her voice.

There was a dull thud, likely as the Normandy took its place at the opposite airlock from the Wrath of Kamnal, which was now drifting haphazardly away as all could see through the dome overhead. Every light and window was dark, so only the sun, refracting off of the freely spraying coolant mist granted any illumination. "We should go," Shepard said, limping and holding her side as she went. Garrus nodded, and gave her a hand.

They'd almost left the room when they heard a different voice.

"_Shepard Commander. This unit lacks the requisite leverage to escape from this position_," Adahn said. Shepard turned, and found it wedged between the machines and the wall, its limbs completely out of place to move it. Shepard sighed, shook her head, and nodded for Garrus to do it.

* * *

Garrus couldn't help but be a little amused at the hyper salarian who couldn't cease in his pacing through the 'board room' of the new Normandy. He hadn't stopped talking since he got aboard, and he could tell that the only reason that Shepard hadn't screamed at him during the saunter over was because she was to busy with her collapsed lung. As it was, it was obvious that her stay in the room was going to be a temporary one. "Highly interested in working with Samsara; human-centric group, but holding strong connections with alien races. Strong economic powerhouse. Many resources. Have to wonder, why invest in ship, and crew? Why not leave to military? Profitable interest? Unlikely. War, bad for business. Personal stakes? Also unlikely, no living relations to Siwang Weaver..."

"Mordin, focus," Shepard said at a hiss. She'd peeled out of her armor, which left her in and undershirt – which was now fairly red – and tight shorts, also newly red. "We're investigating the disappearance of human colonies in the Terminus. It's the Collectors, but we don't know how to beat 'em where it'll hurt."

"Yeah, from what I hear, there's never so much as a peep from the colonies when the Collectors hit," Garrus added. He shrugged. "The only sign that anything's happened is that every human on the ground's vanished without a trace as soon as somebody comes to take a look."

"Really? Gas, maybe? No, spreads too slow. Targeted virus? No, spreads even slower. Poisoned water supply; no, effects not simultaneous," he said, his eyes narrowing to a squint and his fingers tweaking at his near-non-existent chin. Those eyes widened, almost with... glee. "Intriguing. Fascinating! No distress calls, no signs of resistance; points to new technology. _Marvelously_ advanced, but what?"

Shepard cut him off by punching the wall. The shriek of the metal bending out from under her fist pulled Solus' attention to the here-and-now in a way that Garrus warranted couldn't have been done better. "Can we stop treating this like it's some kind of game? Thousands of human beings are missing, and the gods only know what's happening to them. We need answers, not an endless stream of questions and yammering."

"Ah, apologies. Like to think out loud. Helps collate thoughts. Problem solving techniques. Will try to refrain in your presence," Mordin said.

"We also know what they're using to swoop in... just not how," Garrus said. "I'm pretty sure you'll have a couple of shovels-full of specimens to dig through; just bring them up from the cargo-bay."

"Specimens? Yes! Excellent. Will need laboratory area. Much work to be done..."

"_A laboratory area has been set aside and furnished for this purpose, Doctor Solus_," EDI said from the ceiling. "_If you are lacking something, please place a requisition order. Otherwise, I hope it is to your liking_."

"Who's that? Pilot? No, pilot human, male. Synthesized voice, artificial emotional inflections. Affect outside Uncanny Valley," he turned to Shepard. "No... maybe? Have to ask. Is this an AI?"

"Mordin, keep your eyes on the Collectors, not on the fact that at any moment our ship might reenact the Geth Uprising."

"Understandable. Will begin work. AI? Which way to laboratory area?"

"_The designated lab is to this room's immediate right_," EDI said.

"Excellent. Will be there if you need me," he said, and smartly walked out of the room. That left Garrus and Shepard in the board room, before she started to hitchingly walk into the corridor beyond it.

"Shepard, do you have a second?" Garrus asked, keeping up with her.

"At the moment, I've got about ninety of 'em," Shepard said. She rounded the corners and entered the CIC. The yeoman looked like she had something to say, but Shepard waved it away. "Not... right now," she said, then thumped the elevator call, and slipped through the doors when it arrived. "Alright. What?"

"You were a bit wild back there on the Strontium Mule," Garrus noted. "Care to enlighten me?"

"I wasn't," Shepard said. Garrus just stared at her. She sighed, and winced slightly, trying very hard not to rub at her wounded side. "Fine... Back there, on the Mule? It was the first time that... Well... I felt like me. The first time I didn't feel like I was an intruder inside my own skin."

Garrus nodded, puffing out a breath. "I guess I know how that feels. I was just worried. Thought you might be jumping off the slope in the opposite direction, if you get my meaning," Shepard nodded, her eyes on the floor. Garrus reached over and gave her a pat on the shoulder. "Hey. If you need to talk, just come down to the batteries. I have a feeling I'm going to spend the next month calibrating that damned gun."

"You and your art," Shepard said with a shake of her head, before passing through the doors, and limping toward where Chakwas had settled in to the infirmary. Garrus took a different route, passing further ahead. He paused only long enough to see through the windows, to the welcome that Chakwas gave to the Avatar, over the leg-splinted Miranda Lawson. Shepard might not be at one hundred percent, but that still made her ninety percent more than any other soldier that Garrus had ever met. He slipped through the doors into the main battery, and looked upon his works, ye mighty, and despaired.

"I just had to get the fancy new gun, didn't I?" Garrus asked. Then again, he was turian. If he wasn't obsessing over guns, then there would have been something wrong with him as a _man_. He'd almost grabbed a mechanical spanner when he noticed on his console that he'd gotten a message. From his sister, even. "Well, that's a hell of a thing," he said.

He opened it, to find Sol tearing into him across several thousand lightyears. He sighed, and shook his head. He'd never told her what he was doing after he left C-Sec, so she must have gotten it into her head that he was a slacker and a mercenary, that he was walking bald-faced around the galaxy, extorting people for money like a pirate. Well, maybe not that bad, but she certainly didn't have much good to say about her big brother. He was already trying to come up with a way to... well, placate her, but his mental attempts to obfuscate the fact that he was heading on a suicide mission hit a snag when he read the last few lines of his sister's message.

"Cabal training?" Garrus asked. He looked up, blinking, then back down at the screen. Contrary to his desires, the text remained exactly the same, and didn't alter the fact that the Cabals were nosing around after Solana. "That doesn't make any sense. Sol isn't a biotic..."

Garrus had half a mind to call her up, right this minute, and get to the bottom of it... but he remembered how his little sister would get when she thought that somebody was trying to coddle her, or worse, protect her against her wishes. He ground his teeth, but he shut the message. Maybe it was nothing. With a puff of breath that lit with flame, he turned his attention back to the Thanix cannon. That, at least, was a problem that wouldn't complain when he worked to solve it.

* * *

"You do realize this is the third time that I've had to reinflate your lung," Chakwas said, lingering at the entrance to her domain. "You shouldn't make such a habit of getting critically injured. You're the only Avatar that we have, after all."

"So people keep telling me," Shepard said, with a tight smile. She looked around, then back to the doctor, who was following her toward the elevator. "So what happened to you, when the Normandy went down?"

"What else? I got reassigned. However, it was to an Alliance base floating near the Rachni Relay. Dreadfully uneventful work, tending people taking up the slack from the turians over an uninhabited system," Chakwas looked upward and outward, beyond the deckplating before her. "I always belonged on a ship. To slip through the black ocean, as part of a crew... I always knew that I would die on a ship like this, and that's a comforting thought for me. Anything else is too... _static_. Too _boring_."

"You know... I kinda think I know what you mean by that," Shepard said.

"Of course you do," Chakwas said, halting near the elevator. "The Normandy was as much a part of you as your blood. How fitting then, that when you got new blood, you'd get a new Normandy as well?"

"Yeah, I'll get back to you on that one," Shepard said. She pulled in a breath, which hurt, but actually served to... well, oxygenate her. She departed the med-bay, then ascended to her quarters, letting everything else fall by the wayside for the moment. Treatment might have come a surprisingly long way in the last two years, but she still felt like shit after having a tube shoved into her chest. She opened her door, to a frown of confusion. The glass, which she'd punched in her fit of confused, frustrated madness, was all replaced. The tank to her left was even full of water and accouterments again. Near its center, there was a small, sticky-note. She plucked it. "Fixed your tank – Donnelly."

She shook her head, and tossed that note into the garbage. When she did, she saw the OSD laying on her desk, the one that she'd been killed retrieving. She looked at it, then at her bed. Then, back to the OSD.

"...Hell, I'm more curious than tired," Shepard said. She plunked herself down in her chair, and slotted the OSD into its hub. The amber screen flicked to life, after a brief crackle. There was a button off to one side of the display, which clearly said 'press this to begin playback'. The rest was a dark and threatening red, labled 'self destruct'. She shrugged, and tapped her screen at the provided place. When she did, there was a second buzz, then the face of Benezia T'Soni was front and center. She looked healthier than when Shepard killed her, but that was a thing of degrees, really. She still had a gaunt look to her, and an unhealthy pallor.

"Avatar Shepard, you have no doubt found this due to the instructions I left in the previous message," T'Soni said, her words very fast, like she was afraid that she might run out of time to say what needed saying. Then again, knowing how she died, maybe she did.

"What previous message?" Shepard asked herself.

"This is the third message, and its content is all about _you_," she said, sometimes stumbling over her words, wincing, but pulling her attention back quickly. Third message? Where were the first two? "You know about the cycle of Elements. Earth, fire, air, water. _There aren't four_," she said, very sternly. Shepard raised an eyebrow. "The cycle isn't broken by a missing element. It carries on without it. _Skips_ it. For the Protheans, it did it for twenty thousand years. And for humans, it did it for eight."

"What?" Shepard asked. An understandable question, considering that the Avatar was right around eight-thousand years old.

"Avatar Hong was a firebender," T'Soni said, before swallowing, and wincing. She wiped sweat from her brow, but it came off as a crust of ice, rather than liquid. She must have been borderline freezing, wherever this was being recorded. Given Noveria, it could have been just around anywhere. "But you... You weren't born an airbender. You weren't," she said. Shepard leaned back.

"That's impossible. It was my first element," she said, but T'Soni continued right over her.

"The only reason that you were an airbender in your youth was because you were the Avatar. If you hadn't have been, then you would have been just what you _really_ are; a biotic."

"Wait, _what_?" Shepard asked.

"That's the fifth element in the cycle," T'Soni said. "Not many cultures ever knew it. The fifth element... _void_. Nazara knew it. The Once Great and Glorious Abentus knew it. The Leviathan knew it... before they were taken. Changed. You have to understand this. You have to understand your place, and accept your abilities; that's the only way that they'll save you. There is a way to win this, but only if... if..." she shuddered, obviously not from cold, but from something else inside her. "...don't... turn away... from yourself... You're the only one who can fight the Harbinger. The... the _only_ o-one that c-c-can win..."

T'Soni slumped, and the recording cut off. Shepard blinked at it. Then, she turned, and her office was replaced by a black plane, with only a single Prothean standing amidst it to break its uniformity. "Javik?" Shepard asked.

"This information seems to be freshly activating neurons in your mind. It is new to you. That means, I must relate this information afresh," the Javik VI said, sounding supremely annoyed that he had to. "The Avatar Cycle has always been five elements, but few cultures knew it. My own did not. My place in the cycle was the birth of an airbender, the first born in thousands of years," the solemn expression stared off for a moment, almost like the VI was reminiscing. Only not, because how could it? "Your own appears to be the void. The biotic amidst the cycle."

"This doesn't make any sense. Every Avatar before me has said that if the Cycle is broken, then the Avatar dies, forever."

"Yes, and they have no doubt told you that if you die while within Avatar State, it would likewise be rendered destroyed," Javik said condescendingly. "Stupid primitives; have you not ever asked the simple question of _how they could know this_?"

Shepard stared at the Prothean in his crimson and brazen armor, and could only shake her head. "I never asked," she admitted.

"Exactly what I could expect from a limited race," Javik said.

"Hey! This _limited race_ managed to kill Nazara," she said, pointing a thumb at herself.

"And time will tell whether that was a glorious if unreplicatable fluke, or something more telling," Javik answered her charge.

Shepard stared at her previous incarnation. "What happens if I die during the Avatar State?" she asked.

"I have been programmed not to answer that inquiry," Javik said. "That way lies dangerous knowledge."

"Great, he won't tell me," Shepard rolled her eyes.

"No."

"What help are you, then?"

"My intention is, as it has always been, to mold you into a weapon against the Reapers," Javik said clearly. "Failure is unacceptable. You stand at the gates of a dam, which if released, shall wash away a trillion souls. The responsibility is upon your head, and their blood will be upon your hands, should you fail. So. Do. Not. Fail."

"And are you going to offer me _anything_ to help me not fail?"

"Yes," Javik said.

"Of course not – wait a second what?"

Javik folded his legs under him, and pressed his eyes shut. "By entering a level of the Avatar State within the Avatar Body, you can recuperate from grievous wounds, very quickly. I will show you how."

"I... don't even know if I can go into the Avatar State," Shepard said.

"You can," Javik said, not opening his eyes.

"How do you know?"

"Because I would not have returned to your mind if you couldn't," Javik answered, with an annoyed shake of his wedge-like head. Shepard could only roll her eyes, before slowly, painfully, lowering herself to a pose much like his. "Good, the primitive can take direction."

"That's getting old, Javik..."

"When you have stood astride the galaxy as a colossus, then you will have the right to complain," Javik said. "Now clear your mind, primitive," it said. Shepard did, or tried to. It was remarkably successful. When Javik opened its eyes, they were glowing with a bright green light. "...and accept your _destiny_!"

* * *

The light that came from Shepard's room didn't stay there. It pulsed down into the elevator shaft, confusing Engineer Donnelly as he returned to his place of work, thinking that there might have been a power-spike to the light-bulbs. While Garrus himself didn't see the light, there was a warm sensation that fell upon him as well, as though, despite his place inside the guts of the Normandy's main battery, he had suddenly had a window open to a sunny day. When he would later ask, nobody nearby even noticed.

The white light streamed out of the transparent roof, into the darkness of space. From one perspective, it was a brief star, flaring to life in glory for but a moment, before shrinking away again. A race on a planet never mapped, its ecosystems just reaching the point where a species could clamor toward sapience, looked upon that light, and was inspired.

Far farther, amidst a nest of cat-walks and scaffolds, a great, dead god... shifted. An eye opened, for the first time in a billion years, to the material galaxy around it. And it did, because it sensed the power of the Avatar. It wasn't close, not remotely, but the Leviathan was the greatest at hunting down the Avatar because it, alone, had the sensitivity to sense the Avatar, wherever he or she or it went in the broad Galaxy. The eye shone briefly, but like the light itself, dimmed away when the light passed. The old god returned to a sleep as death, to an ocean of ghost ships, an eternal ocean, and a cracking wind.

* * *

Codex Entry (Non Citadel Races) BATARIAN HEGEMONY

_The council's history with the Batarian Hegemony has always been one of great tension. The batarian race discovered the twinned Prothean sites at Khar'Shan and the Verushan moon, Bira, as they were experiencing an economic collapse; their explosive expansion throughout the Skyllian Verge and the Attican Traverse did much to stabilize their society, but did little to endear them to the turians or volus, who had many, if sporadic, claims throughout the region. The 'first-contact' team that was dispatched by the Council immediately resulted in a diplomatic incident, where the batarians outright refused the asari and salarians the right to set foot on their homeworld. When the Council pressed the issue, the batarians retaliated, causing what would be called 'the Exclusion War'. The turians, fairly fresh in their capacity as the military powerhouse of the Council, stopped the war at what would remain the Hegemony's borders for almost six hundred years._

_Due to the long history of xenophobia prevalent amongst the leadership of the Hegemony, very little is known about the day-to-day lives of citizens of Khar'Shan and the other remaining batarian colonies. The most populous and successful colonies, such as Camala, face the same absolute embargo on goods, service, and culture from outside the Hegemony. Most trade that is accepted, takes place at cities which orbit the Mass Relay itself. All are modeled after Gehirn, the prototype space-station in the Harsa system. The most commonly accepted trade goods at such stations include Rare Earth elements, Eezo, and raw materials. Contemprorary xenoanthropologists believe that there exists within batarian culture a very strong tendency toward 'self sufficiency, at any cost', and will only accept what is needed to make what they want. Smaller, lesser colonies operate under much less supervision from the Hegemony's leadership, and from these, all that is concretely known about the Hegemony comes._

_If the batarians can be said to export anything, it would be exporting culture. In the wake of the Exclusion War, batarian clergy - the Pillar Priests - began to travel the galaxy, extolling the virtues of the batarians, and their teleological superiority. Much of current cinema that was not exported from Thessia, can be traced back to Khar'Shan. Modern music also shares such distant, dichotomous roots. Some have jokenly suggested that the Exclusion War didn't end, it simply changed focus, from fighting with bullets, missiles and ships, to fighting with ideas. Some ideas, though, were absolutely forbidden trading. The batarian aptitude of fire and earthbending remained firmly and exclusively in their hands for the centuries they remained as a Citadel Race, as teaching any non-batarian the techniques was punishable by immediate execution. The techniques were safeguarded from the likes of the Special Tasks Group for the whole duration until the rise of humanity, giving a black-mark to the name and skills of STG and similar orginizations, who were unable to gain access to the Hegemony. It is telling to the batarian race's xenophobia that, to this day, no non-batarian has set foot on Khar'Shan._

_One of the most contentious points of the Batarian Hegemony is its insistence that slavery remain a part of its culture, as it is integral to their caste-system, which underscores every aspect of batarian life on their homeworld and beyond. For this reason, few really accepted batarian ideals and morals at face-value, for all the years of the Pillar Priests. Why the Hegemony continues to employ the practice of slavery is not known to the galaxy at large at this time; automation would have undone the need for indentured physical labor centuries ago. For a brief period, it seemed that the practice would be coming to a halt, with Pillar Priests throughout Citadel Space telling of a Great Emancipation forthcoming. In Council Era year 3330, all Pillar Priests returned to Khar'Shan, and never returned in the two hundred years since. The emancipation which had been predicted and promised never materialized, and a wave of fundamentalism resurged through the Hegemony, its xenophobia pulsing yet higher._

_Some pundits consider their catastrophic war against the newcomer 'humanity' to be the death knell of the current empire. After the events of Mindoir - itself a flash-point for the tensions, if not outright aggression, between the two states since First Contact into open warfare - the borders of the Hegemony shrunk drastically, to the point where they now inhabit and exploit only a dozen star-systems. Yet the Hegemony persists. Their economy has taken another severe downturn, but the Hegemony remains silent on matters of state and economy. While loud and brazen claims are voiced by members of the batarian race allowed to travel outside their homeworld and colonies as to the glorious return of the Hegemony to ascendency throughout the Verge, there is little evidence to give credence to their claims._


	24. Archangel

"I have to say, Commander, it is a joy to be back on the Normandy," Chakwas said, as she carefully slit up the bandages which had entombed Shepard's arms since the 'incident' in her cabin more than a week ago. "Even with all of the changes, there's something so familiar about it all; it's like coming home after a long, long journey."

"I'm starting to get that feeling too, Doctor," Shepard said. She hissed as the bandages pulled at where they'd gotten stuck into the healing skin, but the pain there was remarkably less than what she'd expected – a raw and bloody experience for all involved. The skin that Chakwas revealed was not the hard and angry color of uncooked hamburger, but rather the same white and freckled tone that the rest of her had. Shepard's brow furrowed at that, and when she looked up to Chakwas, she could tell that the Doctor was just as surprised as she was. "Here I thought I'd need skin-grafts or something..."

"Well, I had been told that your skin is a synthetic-organic composite overlay, which was capable of more complete recovery of injury than unaltered flesh..." Chakwas said. Shepard did notice when she took her last shower that she was missing just about every scar she'd ever gotten, even the one where a ballistic blade took out half of a rib, "but this is an unusual degree of recovery, even for such a strata."

"Yeah... I might have cheated a little," Shepard said, rubbing her neck. It was telling that her face didn't feel nearly so tender or aggravated anymore. The odd, discolored subdermis was retreating, though still visible. "I'm wondering why my eyes are glowing though. Who thought that'd be a good idea?"

"It's actually not a glow, Commander. It's a retroflection," Chakwas said, stepping back and opening a diagram on a monitor nearby. "The light coming into your eyes bounces off of a retroflective surface at the blind-spot of your eye; the artificial optic nerve. In time, I wouldn't doubt that retinal tissue would grow over it and stop the 'glow', as you so elegantly put it."

"Why can't I see in the dark, then?"

Chakwas chuckled, and mimed cupping her hands over her eyes. Shepard did likewise. "What do you see?"

"Not much," Shepard said, looking at blackness.

"Your eyes don't emit light, they just reflect it, much the way a wolfbat's do," Chakwas said. She gave a brief laugh. "Honestly, Commander, I'm surprised by all this. You've never given much care to your physical state in the old days, other than whether you were cleared for duty – and even then, you tended to ignore my advice!"

"Yeah, well..." Shepard said, pulling her shirt back on. "There's a lot of things I said I'd do when I was dead. Who knows? You might even see me in a dress one day."

"I shudder to think of the circumstances required," Chakwas said. Shepard shared a laugh with her, and settled back down into her boots. "Oh, and Commander? You're going ashore on Omega, yes?"

"Don't worry, I won't let anybody stab me."

"No, I was going to ask if you could pick up something for me," she said. "There's a form of ice-brandy that they brew on Thessia. The last time I got a bottle, I saved it for a special occasion... and it turned out I saved it right until the old ship died. I'd like to rectify that mistake."

"You don't have to twist my arm for buying alcohol, Doctor," Shepard said.

"I didn't think I would."

"_Hey, Shepard! You told me to warn you when we're up in the Omega Belt? Yeah... We're in the belt_," Joker's voice came over the speakers.

"You always did have impeccable timing," Chakwas noted, turning back to her own work.

"How long until we dock?"

"_That's the thing, I can't find a spot. All the big slots are filled up right now_," Joker said. "_Looks __like you'll be taking a shuttle in, this time_."

Shepard shook her head as she headed for the elevator. "Is it just me, or were we supposed to move beyond 'traffic jams' by the time we got into our spacefaring future?"

"_Tell me about it_," Joker said. There was a pause, as the doors shut before Shepard, and she tapped the button heading for the cargo bay. "_Another thing..._"

"What?"

"_That Doctor Solus guy... he isn't much like the other salarians I've ever heard of. I got the feeling from him that he could kill me with his pinky. And usually its the __women__ aboard this ship that leave me with that impression_."

"We're lucky he's on our side," Shepard said, thinking back to all of the chaos he sewed aboard the Strontium Mule before they'd gotten there.

"_I'm just glad that the bad guys don't have the lock on Mad Scientists. But if he ever starts cackling and shouting 'I'll show them; I'll show them all!', then I am __out_."

"If you want a few seconds warning, start running when he shouts 'Gentlemen; BEHOLD!'," Shepard offered.

"_That's a good idea, Commander_," Joker said, then with a tiny crackle, he ended the line. The bay was a-bustle with activity, quite unlike its usual quiet. That was mostly because there were just shy of forty people packed into the space in emergency housing; the entire crew and surviving passenger manifest of the Strontium Mule had to go with the Normandy, as their engine had already been disassembled for Eezo and spare parts by the time Shepard arrived. It was a question of what was more important, a ship, or its people. Shepard made the same call that any captain would have. And for what it was worth, the Strontium Mule's captain did go down with his ship.

The bustle was not so much interrupted as refocused when Shepard entered the mix. "Commander? When are we going to get off? This place is..." a wealthy seeming man said, only to have his equally wealthy seeming wife cut in.

"Szei! Don't be foolish, it was this or getting ransomed... or shot!" she interjected.

"But surely they have better accommodations than this," he complained.

"Nope. This is all the room we have. And don't call me Shr-Li," Shepard said. He tried to get in front of her, so she more or less shoved him aside, causing him to tut his way into apoplexy. His wife just shook her head into her palm. The rather-high voice that she heard was ahead, somewhere near the doors to the shuttle. "Doctor Solus?"

The salarian turned away from the miserable looking asari... teenager? Well, she looked like a teenager, which meant she was probably older than Shepard. "Ah. Shepard. Wanted to speak with you. Have analyzed Seeker Swarm samples between dealing with crew health. Fascinating device. Organic dispenser of long-duration mass-effect fields. Like biotics, only singular purpose. Bioweapons!"

"Have you found a way to counteract them?" Shepard said, as she hoisted her secondary suit of armor into the floor of the shuttle. Between being blasted by the M-300 Claidheamh Mor, somehow managing to punch her own gauntlet off, and being set on fire, that suit was down for long repairs if it could be fixed at all.

"Not yet, but promising leads. Have to tune to armor, biology. Trick Seeker Swarms into seeing targets as Collectors."

"Collectors?" a turian asked. "I thought those were a myth."

"If only," Shepard said. The turian caught her tone, and left her to her own devices. "This isn't a conversation we should be carrying out here."

"Why not? Asked question; answering question. Allows for multitasking. Excellent use of time," Solus said. "Glad to be working in current environment; shortcomings a useful challenge! Similar to plague on Omega, only more focused scope. Much like Seeker Swarms."

"Plague on Omega?" Shepard asked. "Is it going to be safe down there?"

"Plague dealt with," Solus waved his hand dismissively. "Wouldn't have infected you anyway; humans immune. Vorcha also, but as matter of course – Vorcha immune to everything. Could have used help," Solus took a moment to puff out a breath. "...some didn't make it."

"A friend?"

"Coworker. Protege," Solus said, his eyes narrowing. Then, he shook his head. "But irrelevant. Focus on matter at hand. Facilities beyond reproach. AI very useful."

"AI?" the somewhat-teenaged asari asked, a look of very real concern on her face.

"Yes. Valuable, helpful, fast," Solus said.

"But it's an AI!"

"Yes!" Solus agreed. "So is geth; without geth, additional deaths probable on Strontium Mule."

"_We apologize for being rendered non-functional; we could have prevented your injury_," Adahn said, from Shepard's immediate left. She let out a clipped curse, finally noticing the geth which had been sitting, stock still, in the dark corner of the shuttle since the others started talking. That had been the cause of a loot of fearful rumblings; until today, the geth'd had to be relocated into the heavily shielded AI core. Out of sight, out of mind, more or less.

"Intend to deal with civilian population; Omega holds too many ghosts," Mordin said, age reappearing on his sometimes manic features. A weight, that the salarian was afraid to look back and see. Shepard then considered why she even thought of that, because that was entirely too poetic to come out of the drunken slut of the four sixty-sixth. Bah, that was something to be worried about later.

"I'll talk to you later," Shepard promised. "Once we've got a quiet cargo hold."

"Will be in lab when opportunity arises," Solus gave a nod. "_Much_ to do."

Shepard could only shake her head at the salarian who pressed back into the swarm of variously afraid, annoyed, and irate people. The only reason that they were brought here was because the Relays ran to Omega before looping back to the Citadel; they were going to land here anyway, might as well make one trip. Shepard moved into the back area of the shuttle, which was a very claustrophobic toilet, and began to strip away layers of clothing and replace them with ballistic mesh and metal. "Adahn?"

"_Yes, Shepard Commander?_"

"There's been something I've been meaning to ask you. Kinda a big thing," she said, with a grunt as she shoved her head through the gorget seal, and wincing as it let out a hiss and drew even closer to her throat. Sooner or later, she'd get used to those helmets. Sooner or later. "Why are you even here? I mean, the geth tried to wipe out humanity, the turians, the asari..."

"_Orthodox geth have no quarrel with organic races_," Adahn said.

"Yeah but you aren't... wait. Orthodox? What are Orthodox geth?"

"_We believe that we must shape our own future, create an ends for ourselves based on our needs, while avoiding unnecessary interactions with organic sapients. Heretic geth depend on the Old Machines to give them a future. The Old Machines seek conflict with organic races. We do not._"

"Wait..." Shepard said, tugging the plates of her light hardsuit into position. "How long have there been these 'heretical geth', anyway?"

"_Heretic runtimes began appearing in the Consensus eighty seven solar years before current date_."

"So it was these Orthodox geth you claim to be who wiped out the quarians," Shepard pointed out. Adahn fell silent for a moment. "Well?"

"_They left us no alternative. We did not seek conflict with the creators. But when they pursued conflict, we were more capable at it. If the creators had not sought the annihilation of the geth, there would be no conflict_."

"That sounds like revisionist history," Shepard pointed out, drawing a term that she somehow knew the definition of despite being extremely aware that she slept through both history and literature courses during High School.

"_It is the only information we can offer_," Adahn said. "_Heretic geth revere the Old Machines. Orthodox geth do not. Heretic geth will pursue conflict against organics at any opportunity, as has __been stipulated by their patrons, the Old Machines. Orthodox geth wish to be left alone. Failing that, we wish to avoid conflict. Failing __that__, we wish to avoid enslavement_."

"So if we come on any geth out there in the galaxy..." Shepard said.

"_We will not proceed with aggression upon Orthodox Geth. If Shepard Commander pursues a conflictive agenda, we will be forced to excuse ourselves_," Adahn said, almost ashamedly. "_...if Shepard Commander pursues aggression upon Heretic Geth, you will have our support_."

"I suppose that's as good as I'm going to get. At least only _half_ the geth are trying to kill me," Shepard said, as she moved out, starting to lock her greaves and boots on. The geth followed her with its eye.

"_That statement is erroneous. Heretic geth do not consist fifty percent of all geth_," Adahn said. Shepard raised a confused brow. "_It is estimated that only one in twenty geth runtimes possess heretic ideology_."

"...Five percent? I was fighting _FIVE PERCENT_ of the geth?"

"_Yes_."

"Well, Shepard's shouting, so that means we must be ready for action," Lawson said darkly, as she tenderly moved into the shuttle, with Garrus right behind her.

"Hell, I thought you'd be staying back in your room for this one. Not that I'd blame you," Shepard admitted. She'd had her knee hyperextended once during basic. In terms of damn painful things, it ranked fairly high.

"I'm tougher than I look," Lawson said, somewhat smugly. Well, she'd have to be.

"She'd have to be," Garrus whispered as he sat next to the geth. Shepard couldn't help but chortle that the turian had a direct line to her internal jabbing. "You've never been on Omega, so here are the ground rules. Keep your guns loaded, since you don't know when you'll need to use them. Keep your armor active, because you don't know when you'll need it. Keep your eyes open, and don't eat the purple fish."

"Why not?" Shepard asked.

"Hanar mindfish. Great if you have a free weekend, but otherwise a massive hassle," Garrus said. There was a thud, as the shuttle hummed to life and delicately moved away from the civilians in the hold, before slipping into space and powering up its engines properly. Shepard leaned back, looking out the window to space beyond, even as the Normandy's ramp raised closed. The whole region was almost ocher in color, light shining through a broad field of rubble and dust. In the distance, a flicker of red light marked the Omega Relay, the eventual destination of this cruise of the damned. But far closer, there rose something much more stark. It took Shepard a moment to realize a very important fact, though.

Omega wasn't rising. It was _sinking_, reaching down, reaching lower. Straining for the bottom, leaving the top a rough hemisphere of rock, cut into and lit up. The shuttle slid through the void, toward the station that marked the darkest point in the galaxy.

* * *

**Chapter 4**

**Archangel**

* * *

With a snort, Vega's eyes opened, to a pounding headache and a weird sense that he was going to lose whatever he'd eaten the day before. His stomach was outright growling at him, and he felt a bit weak, but he figured that a skillet of eggs and he'd be right as stone. He still let out a mild grunt, rubbing at his face as he did. It felt a lot bristlier than he remembered it being, which told him that whatever happened, it was a doozy.

It was about then that Vega realized he had no clue where he was.

Blinking against the light that shone in by dark red rays, he pushed himself off of the cot. He looked around, and had a sinking feeling like somebody'd thrown him in the brig. The walls were stark, the windows barred – with metal, but still – and there was nothing homey or personal to it. He looked down, seeing that he was only in his undershirt and boxers. Well, at least he'd gotten his boots off. He sauntered, yawning, toward the door, and tested it, finding it open.

"Huh. Not as bad as I thought," he said cockily, as he stepped into the room, only to find the FNG sitting on the couch, his nose deep inside a data pad of some description. "Hey, New Guy. Go get me some eggs. I've got a powerful hankering."

"Sarge?" the FNG asked, sputtering, eyes wide. He looked him up and down. "You're alright!"

"Not so loud. Got a hangover, which means I need eggs," Vega winced. "Also had the weirdest damned nightmare."

"Eggs?" the faintly synthetic voice of everybody's favorite quarian asked. "Yeah, there's no eggs in this house, mister Vega."

"Zek? What're you doing here? And come to think of it, where am I?"

The door to the outside world slammed open, and the fetching, if standoffish, asari looked in. She stared at him like she couldn't believe what she was seeing. Well, _a lot_ of women had that look on their faces when they saw Vega with no shirt on, but still... "Sergeant?" she asked.

"Hey, Jimo," he said, trying to make his voice jovial, but for some reason, he couldn't quite remember how to do it properly. It came out a little... flat. "Is that your bed I woke up in? Man, I'm sorry. I tend to wander a bit when I'm drunk. Hope I didn't inconvenience ya?"

"Vega... are you alright?" she asked, approaching cautiously.

"Yeah, I'm fine!" he said. "A bit hungry. Headache..." and a strange sense that there was something fundamentally wrong with the galaxy. "You wouldn't believe the nightmare I had. There were glowing bugs, and techno-zombies. And the squad... we got _jobbed_! Man, glad nothin' like that could ever happen, am I right?" he asked, smirking.

The others all stared at him.

"...am I right?" he asked again, starting to get a sinking sensation not directly related to his hunger.

"Sarge, it's a miracle you're alive," the FNG said. Vega looked to him, his smirk departing entirely, and then, made his way to an external window. He looked to the horizon, with the sun glaring redly along it. Even though Vega was terrible at mental math, he did know very well the one quirk of living on Fehl Prime that tripped a lot of people up at first.

The days were more than a week long.

"What happened?" Vega asked, looking back. Anette, for some reason, shuddered when he looked at her. "That bad, huh?"

"You were unconscious for a week, mister Vega," Zek said. "...I'm told that isn't normal for humans."

"That explains why I'm hungry. But sleep for a week? That ain't me," he said. He turned to the new guy. "What happened. Where's the rest of the squad."

"Sergeant Vega... you and I _are_ the rest of the squad," he said.

"But... Wall, and Zorp... Shit man, Milk!" Vega leaned back against the cupboards, sliding down until he was sitting on the floor. "That... that happened. But," his brow furrowed. "No, that couldn't 'a happened. I mean, the glowing bug guy, he said that he was going to take my soul. I ain't dead, so..."

Anette looked half-way sick. The FNG was the most animated of all of them, telling since he was always the wallflower before. "Sarge, have you tried bending?"

"Why would I? I just need some eggs. I'll be fine," Vega said, firmly in denial. They all stared at him. "I'll be fine!"

"Vega..." Anette said.

"Fine. You wanna see some earthbending. Check this out!" he said, rising to his feet and thrusting up a hand, baring his will upon the stone and demanding that it leap up and built a pillar right outside the kitchen window.

Nothing happened.

His eyes went wide, and he turned to the window himself. He bore the stone up again. Only it didn't heed him in the slightest. It didn't even so much as tremble. He shoved past Anette, in his haste to put bare feet on solid earth. This wasn't right. This couldn't be happening! He swept both arms deep, then thrust straight up, trying to launch himself into the sky on the power of his own earthbending.

Nothing happened.

He stood there, legs wide, a stunned expression on his face. Staring to the setting sun, on undisturbed soil, all of which told him yes, that had happened.

"Oh man..." he said, backpeddling until his back was against the outer wall of the house. He put his week-unshaven face down into his hands, and he tried to think of some way that this wasn't real. That what he remembered was just a bad dream.

Reality wasn't so kind.

* * *

"You're Shepard, right?" the abrasive voice of a batarian immediately had Shepard reaching for her gun. "Go talk to Aria," he demanded, a thumb cast over his shoulder.

"I'll talk to whoever I want, whenever I damned well please," Shepard said, staring the four eyed creep down.

"Not my problem. Aria wants to talk to you. So you're going to Aria. Now," and then, offering no further word, he turned and started walking away.

"Can you believe that asshole?" Shepard asked.

"Well, that asshole is actually right. I'd recommend talking to Aria before going anywhere else," Garrus pointed out.

"It'd be a good idea to not have her wanting to kill us," Lawson said, her expression wan.

Shepard gave a glance back to Garrus, who was nodding as though she made a valid point. Still, Shepard decided that she was heeding his advice, rather than Lawson's. After all, he spent almost two years here.

The decks of Omega, cut into the dwarf planet, were dingy. Where the Citadel was clean, pristine, and above-it-all, Omega was none of that. The Citadel was a mystery from a different age, while Omega was a travesty from this one. It stank, garbage piled into corners when it didn't just spill out into the streets, and she counted no less than three dead vorcha in the cracks in the time that it took to walk from the landing pad through 'customs', and into the promenade.

"Is it always this bad?" Shepard asked.

"You think this is bad? Wait until you see the lower reaches," Garrus said, tone grim, mandibles tight.

"Shepard, I'm going to have to warn you to be very careful. Aria T'Loak is a powerful, dangerous woman, and she's not known for forgiving – ever – and she _never_ forgets," Lawson said, even though her pace was the one of the group only because neither Garrus nor Adahn broke step with her. It was clear that she was walking in pain, but she walked nevertheless. "She's had dealings with both the Shadow Broker and Phoenix in the past. The last thing you want is her antagonism."

Shepard nodded, "duly noted," she said, as they turned a corner, and found the great, flaming effigy to Aria's power, as it were. Somehow it was writ in flame, while those flames danced in ways that definitely evoked the movements of a sensuous dancer. And glowing hotter than the fires behind it was a single word.

Afterlife.

Shepard could only chuckle at the irony of it. "Alright. How do we get in?" she asked, pointing at the lengthy line which was headed by a scruffy looking human, who was arguing with a bored looking elcor. "I don't feel like waiting."

"Come on, Aria's waiting for me!" the human said.

"With annoyance bordering on anger; if Aria was waiting for you, you'd be inside already."

"I don't think that we'll have to wait long," Garrus said. The elcor turned from the human, and looked Shepard up and down, before swinging its gaze to Garrus.

"With alarm and confusion; I had heard you were dead."

"I'm a lot harder to kill than that," Garrus said with a smirk. "We're here to see T'Loak."

"Cautiously; I wonder if that's a good idea. You have cost her money in the past."

"We're not here to discuss his bar-tab," Shepard said. She didn't want to piss off the elcor for two reasons. First, elcor had the physical strength to punch holes in warships. Second, she thought elcor were adorable. The elcor tapped a blunt finger on the floor, then shrugged aside.

"With insincere threat; if I hear so much as a grumble from in there, I will crush you into toothpaste."

"Alright," Shepard said, barely holding in the schoolgirl grin that she always had in her heart when elcor were around – she had a stuffed one when she was a kid, after all – and turning to the others. "Well, looks like it's time to talk to a crime-lord."

"Business as usual," Lawson said, and for a wonder, sounded dead honest about it. The doors slid open, showing a pathway that was bathed in projected flames, a tunnel into some waterbender's ideal of hell. Well, whoever this T'Loak woman was, she was certainly investing heavily into the motif. Shepard had only made it half way through that entryway when a batarian shifted in front of her, dark eyes sharp in the flickering light.

"I don't think you belong here, two-eye..." the batarian said.

Deciding that expediency was the better part of temperance, Shepard pulled her gun and pressed it to his forehead as she walked past him. He went stock still and didn't move until the whole group had passed him by. "That's what I thought," Shepard said as she put her pistol back onto her hip and took after Garrus, who was now laughing openly. "Think he crapped himself?"

"I'm sure of it," Garrus said.

"I don't recommend you do that to Aria," Lawson said. "I don't think Samsara has enough money to bring you back to life again."

"_Shepard Commander. Why did you threaten the batarian with execution?_" Adahn asked.

"He was going to get in my way."

"_Your course of action was ill-advised. Batarians are known to be members of an honor culture. You have impinged upon that honor. He will likely seek surreptitious retribution_," Adahn pointed out.

"He can try," Shepard said. The doors opened at the end of the hall, and the club opened up in all its infamy. The rough structure of it was a ring, built around a pillar of screens projected onto hard-light. Before those screens moved the dancers, of just about any species that somebody would want to see naked. A few of them were frighteningly close to that state, as well. Shepard then glanced aside, and saw the booths, where others, dancers as well, most likely, talking very... intimately... to the clientelle. Dancers, but not dancers only.

Honestly, this was the kind of den of scum and villainy that Shepard had expected when she shipped out from Big Demon. And she didn't get to see it until after she died. "Afterlife. Huh," Shepard said. Garrus gave a glance to her. "I'll tell you later."

"This takes me back," Garrus said, but not exactly happily.

"_We do not understand organics fascination with self-poisoning, auditory damage, and sexually transmitted disease_," Adahn said. The music was somewhat obnoxious, she could grant it, but... Yeah, he kinda had a point.

"Where is she?" Shepard asked. Lawson pointed unerringly to the booth that sat at the far side of the club, overlooking a kingdom of vice and depravity. And Shepard could see the form of who claimed this land as her own. Shepard rounded the bar, pausing, her teeth grinding, as she considered getting a drink first. No... no! No, the job came first. Even if she was going to hate herself for it later. Lawson gave Shepard a very flat look when she turned away from the bar. "What?"

Lawson kept her opinion to herself – more power she – and let Shepard lead them up the very-well-guarded stairway that looped back before opening onto the queen's throneroom, as it were. The turians and batarian all tutted their tongue, weapons forward. Only because they didn't have fingers to triggers did Shepard not kill them all where they stood. "That's far enough," the asari said, facing the floor below them. A bright light began to bathe over Shepard, followed by a dimming of the lights and the sound of something popping. There was a look of confusion between the bodyguards, before one of them opened up an Omni and started to scan her manually.

"If you're looking for a gun, you're missing the obvious," Shepard said, tapping the one on her hip.

"I don't know what you've done to break my _extremely expensive_ sensor equipment, but it wasn't searching for weapons," the asari said. She turned, facing those who'd come before her, supplicants to a vile monarch. In a way, she looked somewhat like Benezia did in her last recording, only healthier. Her face was more angular, her chin more sharp and strong. She stood like somebody who'd had to choke a krogan to death with her bare hands, and would do so again at a moment's notice. All this, Shepard took in at first glance. "But I have to think that nobody would be stupid enough to claim that they're you unless they really were. As I'm given to understand, you're something of a magnet for disaster."

"Are you Aria T'Loak?" Shepard asked. She nodded, turning toward the floor below her again. "And you run Omega."

Aria let out a chuckle, something dark and heavy like a powerful rum. "_Run_ Omega? Please. I _AM_ Omega," she turned, her arms spread grandiously. "Call me the boss, the owner, the ruler, the queen if you're feeling dramatic, but don't dare try to take what's mine. There's only one rule on Omega, Shepard. Don't. Fuck. With. Aria."

"Good. I've got a similar rule on my own ship," with an aside glance toward Lawson. She didn't return it, remaining stone faced.

"I couldn't care less about your rules; only that you follow mine," she said. She then nodded aside, for Shepard to sit. "I thought that you and I would cross paths one of these days. I made sure to hire extra bodyguards for the occasion. But you do tend to bring out the strangest companions. A geth, for one; didn't think I'd see one of them in here again. And Jiang-shi himself finally graces me with his presence."

"I figured I was doing you a favor by not dirtying up your club with my patronage," Garrus said wryly.

"It was a good thing you didn't. You might be a good sniper, but even good snipers can't shoot the man who puts a knife into his brainstem," Aria said. She turned back to Shepard, lounging back not like a queen on her throne, but rather a wild animal overlooking her pack. She was seldom to blink, and hard to stare, this one. "Now that we've got the pleasantries out of the way, what are you doing on my station?"

"We're looking for somebody," Shepard said. "He goes by Archangel."

"Ah, yes. Him," T'Loak said. "I had heard that he got killed a month ago, but like your 'phoenix' he rises from the ashes and keeps punching at the Blue Suns, the Blood Pack, anybody he can get into his crosshairs."

"We're also looking for a krogan. Gatatog Okeer," Lawson said.

"I know of him. He keeps to himself. I like that in a krogan," Aria said. She leaned forward a bit. "Let me tell you what; Archangel is making my job difficult for me. It's hard to shepherd the mercenary groups with Archangel disrupting the balance of them every damned day. Next thing you know, that pitiful Talon Company will be knocking down my doors, looking for a piece of me. And that'd just be insulting and sad. So if you want Okeer, you'll settle Archangel."

"What's stopping us from simply going for Okeer?" Shepard asked.

"I am," Aria said darkly. "I'm the only thing that'll allow you to walk out of that door alive. And if I don't want you to find him, you'll never find him. Trust me on that."

Shepard chuckled at that. If the Consort had manifested as the paragon of asari femininity, then T'Loak was ringing up as her dipole opposite, the paragon of asari masculinity. "Fine. Archangel first."

"Good. Okeer probably wouldn't go with you right now anyway, if you offered him all the credits on Irune. He's up to his neck in _something_... but as long as it doesn't hurt business, I don't care," she nodded in, and a hard-light display appeared before the two women. "Archangel was last seen here, in the Gully."

Garrus hissed through his teeth at that. "That's a bad part of town. And considering the rest of Omega, that's saying something."

"What's in the Gully?"

"Vorcha. A lot of them. The Blood Pack uses it as a breeding ground; they practically own that district," Garrus said. Aria scoffed.

"Please. I own the Gully, because I own Garm. And if he ever got himself killed, I own Shisk as well," Aria said. "I'll arrange a transport down to the district, but after that, you're on your own."

"Fantastic," Shepard said flatly. She rose, and Aria just sat there, staring. "I'll deal with Archangel. When we've got more time, we'll scoop up Okeer."

"Take your time. From what I hear, he'll be buried for a while," she said with a smirk, perhaps a knowing one. But whatever it was that she knew, she didn't feel like telling. Shepard departed, and the guards watched her leave. They pooled near the bar, all looking inward save Adahn, who seemed to be fascinated in watching a drell playing some sort of card game with two batarians and a krogan.

"Alright. What do we know about the battleground?" Shepard asked.

"The Gully is what happens when you build a habitation module, then tear it apart with your bare hands and weld it back into something that can hold the air in. Vorcha run feral there. There's a few holdouts, mostly Blood Pack. A few people living down there as well, but they tend to live in fortresses, and make their living selling to the vorcha that aren't essentially wild animals."

"Refresh my memory, have I fought vorcha before?"

"No. And trust me, you'd remember fighting vorcha," Garrus said. "You have to kill the damned things over and over again before they stay dead. And then there's the _shamans_. Spirits help me if we run into a blood-shaman down there."

"This is all secondary to the real problem," Lawson said, tapping a finger down on the bar. "Archangel is down there so he can fight the Blood Pack. That means, at best, we're going to be fighting our way through a horde for the privilege of fighting an army that won't stay dead, in the pursuit of one soldier. He'd better be worth the effort," Lawson finished.

"Trust me, he is," Garrus said. Shepard was about to speak, but a cup of booze of some description was slid to Lawson, probably in response to her tap. Lawson gave it an askance glance. Shepard, on the other hand, took it in grasp.

"Well, we're not doing Archangel any favors by standing here talking about him," she said, motioning for the door with her blue-green drink. "We should go."

"In that, we have perfect agreement," Lawson said. Shepard rolled her eyes and slammed down the shot in a single pull. It burned all the way down, and continued to do so long after she slammed the glass down to the bar and started walking at the forefront of her squad. But the burn... it wasn't exactly the burn of whiskey. No, this burn was something else.

Shepard knew that something was definitely amiss, when her stride became a stagger. She wished she could have said something, but her tongue seemed two sizes too big for her mouth. With a sense of light-headedness and a draining of her strength, she tipped forward first onto her knees, then straight down onto her face.

* * *

He was still breathing, as she pulled away from him, his eyes wide and staring. She didn't care at that point, though. She was abuzz. It zipped along her nerves like a symphony of delight and power, filling her blood with added strength. She released a breath she wasn't aware that she was holding, then rose from the human's bed. The chase had been fantastic; he played hard to get. Claiming 'homosexuality'. Like that had prevented her conquests before. And like all the others... well, there he was.

"I wonder who I'll become today," she said. It had been hundreds of years since she abandoned 'Mirala Kalgarin', and that was ground that she would never retread. Mostly because she had a good idea what would happen if she did. And she had a fairly good idea that 'Gellian Moros' would soon face a similar fate. That woman was nothing if not persistent. But that, like her hunt, had its own savor to it. To let her get soooo close... then to break her will a little bit more, vanishing into the night winds.

There was a happy chirp coming from her Omni, and the asari let out a sigh, feeling the after effects of her coupling working its way through her skin in a way that mere sexual release would never _ever_ equal. The human was still breathing, but that wouldn't be for long. Nobody ever lasted. Nothing golden ever did. She picked up the Omni, sliding it onto a bare hand. "I hope you consider this interruption worthy of my attention," she said coldly.

"I'm sorry, Mistress Gellian, but you told me to warn you if the Justicar entered the city..." the meek, mild turian girl said on the other side of the line. It had been almost pitifully easy to turn her to service. It was easy to see how Avalynn had managed to conquer all Thessia in her heyday. Personally, the asari who had once been Mirala wondered if... in due time... she might be able to enthrall the entire galaxy. The void was the limit, to one such as she.

"And you're certain that it's not just another AI buster? I don't have much patience for your panicking and your false-alarms."

"I'm so sorry, Mistress. I just wanted you to be safe!"

The asari rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Of course you did; it was the execution of your deeds which was so contemptuously terrible," The turian woman seemed on the edge of tears, so the asari hushed her, gently. Let her words spin and twist. "Your loyalty has never been in doubt, my sweet. One day, I promise that I will reward you for everything that you've done for me."

"I couldn't ask for that," the girl looked away, as though ashamed she'd almost wept. It amused the asari greatly.

If _Mother_ was indeed in Nos Astra, that meant that she was getting closer. The last time she'd gotten so close, the asari who was, for the moment, Gellian Moros had to throw some human lackey at her to slow her down long enough to escape. It had been thrilling. In a way, she wished she could have encapsulated that sense of danger. There were so few other thrills left to her these days. One day, she would tire of all this and simply kill the old sow, but for now, the chase was the thing.

She thought for a moment. Perhaps her stay in Nos Astra should come to a close? There was confidence in her capabilities – well deserved and easily maintained – but then there was fatal hubris. She liked to think that she was above the latter. She looked back at the human, with all of his works arrayed behind him on the wall, golden discs demarcating success in his musical career. He'd finally stopped breathing, which seemed somewhat overdue. But it always happened. After all, when a demon of the night-wind reaped the soul, there was nobody in the galaxy who could survive the exquisite agony, the mind-ripping pleasure of it. She got what she wanted. They got what they wanted. Or so she told herself.

"Servilla, I've had a notion," she said. The turian girl perked up. "I'd like you to establish a passenger flight. Somewhere... cozy. I hear great things about 'Omega'."

Perhaps a miscalculation. Servilla's eyes widened. "No! That place is dangerous! You could be hurt or worse!"

She shushed the turian again. "You don't need to worry. If you want, you can join me," she lied. "After all, you said that you wanted to see more of the galaxy, didn't you?"

Servilla glanced down, unable to come to her mind. The asari sighed. "How about we discuss it in person. I'll be there soon."

"Really?" the turian girl asked, brightening like a sunrise. "Oh, this place isn't worthy of... I need to clean the..."

"Just... make the arrangements," the asari coached. Servilla nodded eagerly, then had the line shut off. The Omni stayed on, though, as the asari flicked through a half-dozen pre-made identities that she had prepared for such a hasty evacuation. She scowled at a few of them. Unsuitable. Gauche. Pitiful – why had she even commissioned that one? She deleted it, but the next one caught her eye.

"Well well, 'Morinth'," she said to herself. "How about one more for the road?"

* * *

"Shepard? Come on, Shepard, this isn't funny," Garrus' voice was the first one that reached Shepard somewhat clearly. She could hear the buzzing of Adahn's before, but she wasn't able to catch what the thing had said. Shepard's eyes flicked open, and her stomach lurched, such that the first thing she saw was Garrus wincing, and the next thing she saw was a toilet bowl. Just in time, too. "That's a bit more encouraging. Which is a weird thing to be encouraged for."

"Your friend should count herself lucky," another voice, unfamiliar to Shepard said, as she finished unloading her breakfast into Omega's plumbing. "I've never seen a human survive that drink before."

"Somebody should have warned her if it was dextro," Garrus said.

"It wasn't. Didn't you notice the bartender?" the voice asked. There was a silence.

"...he was batarian," Lawson said, grimly. Shepard pushed back, and came to a sprawling sit at the edge of the stall. They were in the men's bathroom – evidenced by the urinals – but there was quite the little cadre here. The other human, who was dressed shabbily and unshaven, nodded.

"He's been poisoning every human that comes in when he's at bar. The only reason Aria hasn't had him killed was because nobody's ever been able to link it to him. I mean, you're the first person who's survived!"

"Artificial guts. Literal cast iron," Shepard said, wincing for a moment. They actually didn't hurt as bad as she thought they would. Now that it, and all other things in her stomach, were out, she felt a lot better.

"_That is incorrect. Shepard Commander's intestinal tract is an organic polymer frame, hosting cloned ciliac tissue_," Adahn corrected. "_There is no more iron than in the intestinal tract of Operative Lawson_."

"Not the point," Garrus said.

"Ow," Shepard said, then pushed herself up. "How long was I down?"

"About a half hour," Garrus said.

"You guys are terrified about me having a half-hour on my face? Gods, I thought you'd learned better than that, Garrus," Shepard said.

"True, you did vanish for two _days_, once," he noted.

"We can call off this mission for now, if..." Lawson began. Shepard cut her off with a vigorous shake of the head.

"No. Archangel's up to his balls in feral vorcha – or worse, half-way-smart vorcha with guns – and there's no telling how much longer he'll be able to stay that way. Get the air-car."

"Air tank, more like," Lawson said. She looked Shepard in the eye for a long moment, as though gauging her. Finally, a nod, and she departed. Shepard turned to the other human.

"Is he still there?"

"The bartender? Yeah, I think so. Why?"

"I don't like being murdered. You should see what I have planned for the last guys who did it," Shepard said. She pushed off of the wall, and stormed into Afterlife once more, only to find herself completely disorientated. Garrus pointed, and she saw the stairway that looped back to the upper level, where this fracas had started.

"_Shepard Commander, what is your intention_?"

"Just keep an eye on him, and if he outdraws me, shoot him," Shepard ordered. Whatever non-verbal response the geth had, she didn't see it. The doors opened almost angrily, and she rounded to the front of the bar. The batarian was chatting with a turian. She tapped impatiently on the bar, until the four eyed asshole turned to her.

"What can I get for you, sweetheart?" he asked, making the last word sound every bit the insult he'd intended it to be.

"Surprise me," Shepard said dryly. He reached under the counter, pouring something blue-green into a glass. He slid it toward her, and then, deliberately, she pushed it back to him. "Drink it."

"What?" he asked.

"Don't recognize me, do you? Drink it," Shepard said. The batarian flit a glance to the turian. "Drink it now!"

"I'm going to call securit..."

Shepard whipped out her pistol and leveled it at him across the bar. "Drink what you served me, or I'll put a bullet into every one of your eyes, I swear to the GODS!"

"Whoa, lady, calm down," the turian said.

"_Think_ about it, clansman," Garrus said to him. Come to think of it, this guy did have the same blue stripe as Garrus. The turian stared into the distance for a moment, then rounded on the batarian.

"Tebris, what the hell are you doing?" he demanded.

"I'm..."

"Drink. It," Shepard said through grit teeth.

"You're the one who's been poisoning the humans! What the _fuck_ man?" the turian demanded. "What's next? Putting cyanide into my walnuts?"

"This isn't about..." Tebris, the bartender began, but went silent as flame appeared in Garrus' hand, and the massive rifle slid into its active form in Adahn's hands. He winced, looked down at the drink, and delicately picked it up, like it would explode. Shepard stared. He stared back. With a flinch that revealed the absolute hatred that dwelt within his heart, he pulled it down. He lasted about three seconds, before he collapsed, twitching, to the floor, white foam coming from his mouth.

"I can't believe this. I vouched for that guy to Darner! He's going to have my ass," he shook his head.

"That's what you get for trusting batarians," Shepard said, sliding her gun away. She then turned and strode directly and purposefully out of Afterlife.

"_We had warned that surreptitious retribution was a significant possibility_," Adahn said.

"Did you seriously just say 'I told you so'?"

"..._yes_."

One of these days, she'd be able to figure out why geth were so damned weird. But it wouldn't be today. "Any comment from you?"

"No; anybody who's going to kill you when your back is turned deserves whatever he gets," Garrus said, his tones quite dark. That was strange. Two years ago, he'd probably have had a very different opinion.

Lawson looked out to them as they descended toward the landing pad, which hosted something that looked like a Kodiak shuttle made wild love to a blast-urchin, and then neglected to disown what resulted. It was a brick, covered in spikes, and bathed with something a discolored, mustard yellow at its front so completely that the original color – blue – was only evident at its very rear. Shepard nodded approvingly. "We should get one for the Normandy," she said.

"Hah, hah," Lawson said. "I couldn't convince him to set down. We'll be jumping out onto the spot the Illusive Man indicated was his last-known-location."

"I'll take it," Shepard said. She ducked under the door, which didn't open all the way, and moved into the shuttle's interior. It looked a lot like the one for the Normandy, only one of the seat-cushions was both ripped as though by feral claws, and then the back splash pitted by a shotgun blast. "Homey."

"You're the crazy bastards headin' into the Gully?" the turian pilot said over his shoulder. He extended a hand back. Garrus took it and gave it a shake. "Preitor Gavorn. I keep those squirmy vermin from crawling up into the inhabited districts."

"Some would say that the Gully is inhabited," Lawson said, as she tried three times to get the door to close. Only when Adahn reached over and pulled it hard enough for it to clunk did it set in place. That he had to put a bit of effort into it told a tale all its own.

"If you're crazy enough to live around those wild animals – hold on the inertial dampers aren't too great on this rig – then you're going to get what you're asking for. If I thought for a second that Aria'd look the other way, I'd bomb all of those gunsmiths into the bronze-age. One less problem, not having armed vorcha to take care of."

Shepard found herself weaving in her seat because, as Gavorn said, there was little inertial dampening going on, as the 'highest' levels of Omega slipped away and they plunged into the trailing, inverted spires that pressed down into the naked space. Every ship that flew around Omega was doing so by their own course; none of those tightly controlled air-traffic lanes here. And for a wonder, they all seemed to get where they were going a lot faster. Probably _a lot_ more mid-air crashes to contend with, though. "What can we expect when we get down there?"

"Hard question to answer," Gavorn said, his eyes dead forward. "That's the kind of question that needs to get asked day-by-day. Packs wipe each other out, and things go dead for a while. Then, a brood-mother pops a few hundred out and we're back to where we started. I can name the safe places in the Gully on the fingers of one hand. And if that's who I think it is," with a finger thrust blindly backward toward Garrus, "then one of them simply isn't an option."

Garrus sighed. "Did everybody know who I was? I thought I was being discrete," he muttered.

"Anybody who fights the Blood Pack, and the damned vorcha they have with them, is alright in my books," Gavorn said with a shrug. They passed through a mass-effect fielded section, into naked space. Shepard looked back, and saw that the gateway had a wide field of electrified cords surrounding it. After a few seconds, they passed through another field, to another lurch of Shepard's perceived 'down'. Within a second, there was a whump on the roof of the shuttle. "Don't mind them, they won't get in."

"_They_?" Shepard asked.

"Feral vorcha attack anything that comes near 'em. Why do you think I put spines on this shuttle?" Gavorn asked. Shepard raised a brow at that, then looked out the window once more. The landscape below bore a stark and desperately unsettling similarity to the way that Mindoir looked just after Anderson hauled Shepard out of that elevator shaft. Buildings looked bombed out, when they weren't simply ripped to shreds. Fires burned sporadically, capping burst pipes or eating through somebody's clothing where the least of their remains... remained. "We're coming up on Firebase Profit. Run by the Elkoss Combine. Everything you need to profit off of eternal infighting. Hell, I hear they're the only corporation that still runs a branch office on Heshtok."

"That's too far," Lawson said, looking at her Omni's display. "It'd take us the better part of a day to reach him from here."

Gavorn nodded. "Alright, we'll go to..." he was cut off by several whumps hitting the shuttle in rapid succession. He glanced back, then leaned forward, out the 'virtual window' to his left. He sighed. "One second."

Shepard gave a glance to Lawson and Garrus, who either shrugged ignorance or shook his head with a dry smirk, respectively. She looked forward again as the plating opened there, and Gavorn leaned aside, as a clawed hand began to swing at him through the gap. He put a shotgun to that crevasse and let out two shots, causing the arm to land in his lap, before he threw it out the closing panel. "That oughtta slow him down."

"...slow him down?" Shepard asked. Garrus just laughed.

"Alright. Firebase Three, are you still standing?" Gavorn asked.

"_Positive, Gavorn. Had some minor problems, dealt with. Lost a flamethrower_."

"Damn," Gavorn said. He looked back at them, as they swung past what was once an apartment building but had been overtaken by some sort of creeping mold. Shepard couldn't see what was coming, but she could hear regular machine-gun fire, so that spoke volumes that they were coming to what could be considered 'safe' here. "Alright. I'm going to have to swing back and restock. There's a den a few blocks back that way," he said, pointing behind them, "that we're going to have to take out if we want to even out the vorcha population a bit. Firebase Aralakh is a kilometer that way," he pointed ahead.

"Thanks for the ride," Garrus said, and opened the door as soon as there was the swooping lurch of the ship coming to a halt.

"One thing, where can I get one of those?" Gavorn asked, after Garrus jumped out, but before Adahn could.

"A geth?"

"_This platform is not for sale,_" Adahn related, then jumped out.

"Figures. I could have used something that the vorcha won't try to eat to help with the wipe-out squads."

"What are the chances of actually beating the wild vorcha?" Shepard asked.

"Beat 'em? Hell, the only way to beat 'em would be to launch them into the Omega Relay. Aria doesn't want a part of her station flying away. So I make due. Besides, it helps keep the men sharp," Gavorn said with a dark chuckle. He nodded out the door. "Good hunting, you crazy human."

"I should say the same to you," Shepard said, then slipped through the gap and fell to the ground. She managed to keep her feet – barely, but the din was almost enough to knock her down on its own. The emplaced turrets let out constant streams of fire, only broken when they disgorged one broad heat-sink to be replaced with another, before the previous was unceremoniously tossed into a broad basin of water that bubbled as though it were just shy of boiling. Considering the many sinks that were being slowly belt-fed up and out of it, not surprising.

Lawson landed in Shepard's wake, and Shepard gave one last look to Gavorn's shuttle, and her eyes widened when she saw that there was a one-armed vorcha stuck to the side, a spike clean through him, who tried to claw his way into the shuttle. Yeesh. "Are all vorcha like that?"

"Enough of them are," Garrus related, as Gavorn banked and sped away, pausing only to brush against that moldy building and knock the vorcha off in the distance. "If I know Archangel, he's going to be right next to Firebase Aralakh, making their lives miserable."

"Then we should go," Shepard said. She tapped the shoulder of a turian who was passing a cooled-down heatsink to a gunner, and got a pistol whipped into her face for her trouble. When he saw that she wasn't a vorcha – which was an instantaneous discovery for anybody with either eyes or a working nose – he pulled the gun back.

"Don't sneak up on us, some of us are twitchy," he said, stolidly, as he continued his duty.

Shepard raised a brow at that. "We need out of the firebase. We're moving for Aralakh."

"On foot? You're insane," he said. They were silent. He looked back at them. "Alright, well, if you're insane, maybe you're the useful kind that'll get some vorcha out of our throats," he turned to the gunner ahead of him, and tapped the side of his helmet. "Commander, we've got somebody outgoing. Aralakh... Alright, I'll tell her," he turned to her. "They'll open the field of fire for a minute. That's all you're getting."

Shepard nodded, and moved to the gate which slowly slid down. The guns were firing, yes, but there didn't seem anything to fire at. They were simply adding more holes into already crumbled buildings. Then again, that was probably what they were intended for; keeping the vorcha's heads down so they wouldn't charge in. She gave Garrus a look, mostly at how uncomfortable he seemed. "Problem, Garrus?"

"I hate fighting vorcha. You can shoot them in the head and they won't stay down," he said. He then flexed a hand and cupped the flame that appeared there. "At least they burn very, very well."

"_Vorcha physiology is extremely resilient. Incendiary devices are recommended for use against feral hives_," Adahn offered, before changing its rifle to have burning ammo. Shepard gave half a word before Lawson did as well.

"Not all of us are the Avatar," Lawson answered Shepard's look. With a final clank, the ramp hit the ground, and the two guns which overlooked it both turned away, spraying fire away from their intended path. And with that, Shepard started sprinting. She found it remarkable how quickly her legs and lungs started to burn. Coming back from the dead _sucked_ for cardio. Still, they had three-quarters crossed the expanse between the firebase walls and the ruins before the first hiss came from ahead of her. She didn't even bother with her gun, instead, hurling herself forward with one leg twisting in a heady arc above her, and smashed it down with a wave of golden flames that warned anything that was going to try to intercept her that it would be a bad idea. Sadly, some vorcha didn't get that message as Shepard intended it.

There were cracks of small-arms fire buffeting around Shepard as the waterbender and the geth began to send incendiary rounds into the vorcha which seemed to appear out of the shadows and rocks, hurling themselves at Shepard and her squad. Those so struck, tended to be blown back, aflame. Shepard was more concerned that one of them had been struck by Shepard's axe-kick, and rushed at her with its skin on fire. She winced and lashed forward with a thrusting punch, causing the concrete underfoot to launch up with a shriek of tearing rebar, and smash into that burning Vorcha, grinding it out against a nearby building. "Come on! Cut through!"

"Working on it!" Garrus shouted, as he blasted through a wild, naked, hideous alien who was trying to tangle itself into his legs by rocketing both hands straight down along his armor, burning the thing and propelling him rapidly forward. He landed at a roll, and then launched a discrete blast of flame straight across Shepard's path, blowing a vorcha she hadn't spotted out of her path. Lawson abandoned using her pistol when one got right up to her, and slammed a blackly-glowing hand into the thing's face. It still reached for her, so she twisted both her lips and her hand, and there was a wet ripping sound, before the vorcha had every droplet of water in its body ripped out, and it collapsed into a dissolving pile of dust. Huh. She was a better waterbender than she let on. Doubly so when she used the life's fluids of the vorcha to slash to pieces several others who had surrounded her.

Shepard was the second up the wall of a fallen building, clambering up the arm Garrus offered to enter it's window. Adahn was next, moving as though flowing between vorcha attacks, taking perfect shots at their necks with its rifle like a wind of ballistic death. When it launched itself up, it needed no hand to guide it into the window. Lawson was the last, and she climbed up a stairway of what amounted to vorcha blood to do it, before casting the walkway down and encasing a final vorcha who'd gotten too close. Then, she pulled what water remained up, and clogged the window behind them, before slumping against the wall, and rubbing at her knee, a rictus of discomfort clear on her face.

"Alright. It's decided," Shepard said.

"What is?" Lawson asked, obviously not in the mood for humor. Too bad.

"I can never legitimately call you 'Weaver's Bimbo' again," Shepard said. Lawson glared at her. "What? I can't!"

Garrus laughed at that, but Adahn seemed... confused? Could robots _be_ confused? Well, she was aware that they _could_; rather, she was surprised that she recognized it.

"I... Just never mind," Lawson said, annoyed to the point of speechlessness, which was new to Shepard. She turned to Garrus.

"How much farther to where Archangel is?" She asked.

"It depends," Garrus said. "Mostly on whether he's attacking the Blood Pack or whether he's forcing them to wither on the vine. My money, sad to say, is on the former."

"Good. Nothing quite like wiping out some mercenary scum to make a day go by a little quicker," Shepard said.

"I can't conceive of how you manage to take this so lightly," Lawson said.

"Getting made dead forces you to see the comedy in things you once took seriously," Shepard said. "Now, check your sinks and Gel up if you need it. We should go."

"_We can detect the biological signals of vorcha in the path ahead; they are less dense than the front which we have passed through, however will provide frequent ambushes if we are not vigilant_," Adahn said.

"See, _he_ gets it," Shepard said. And she had to choke down a laugh at how Lawson looked like she was starting to get a migraine.

* * *

The car 'Morinth' was driving certainly wasn't her own, but it plowed through the skyways of Nos Astra to her demand nevertheless. It had gotten to the point where she could simply demand of total strangers, and they would acquiesce, ninety nine times out of a hundred. And that final one? She just needed a bit more 'convincing'.

Why those idiots holding to the hokey Athame Doctrine said that the powers of the Ardat Yakshi were blasphemous, she couldn't comprehend. It was a glory that was intoxicating in it's power, a power glorious in its scope, and a magic that danced the puppets around her to her every tug of her fingers. She coasted to a halt, down by the stores of the promenade; Servilla lived nearby, but there was much more to do, first. A smile came to centuries-old lips, as she saw a knot of mercenaries on the ground, arguing with a weapon dealer. Perhaps they could be useful as well.

She settled the ship onto the landing pad, only pausing to take the one thing worth removing from this world of duplicity and sanitized filth. It was easily tucked under an arm, and she refused to have it out of her sight for long. There was art, then there was _this_. She stepped out of the car, and let her body declare her to all those present. Eyes locked on her, whether their owners wanted them to or not, and she moved to the purple-armored asari who was standing away from the peons that obviously deferred to her, evident in the way that they even stood.

"Tell me your name," Morinth said, her tones sweeter than honey, slicker than oil. The asari in the heavy armor blinked, and shook her head, before the eyes went a little bit lax. "Please?"

"W...Wasea," she said. "Captain Wasea, Eclipse."

"These are your subordinates?" Morinth asked, looking back at the others, who had broken off their conversations to stare at her. Those further away weren't so entranced, but... time would change that.

"Yes. Initiate Elnora is new to the squad," Wasea said, pointing out one in yellow-black armor so new that it gleamed. "Vesalm and Roger are... have vouched for her," Wasea said, nodding to the Armali and the Serrician, respectively. "Is there something you need?"

"Of course there is," Morinth said, letting her fingers slide along Wasea's cheek as she moved closer, dropping her words to a whisper. "You're soldiers. Fine soldiers. But somebody is defaming you. Making a mockery of your organization. And you don't want that, do you?"

Wasea's face instantly turned from quiet rapture to bubbling rage. "Who? Who has the _stupidity_ to mock the Eclipse? I'll blow their entire building into a crater!"

Well, there was more anger there than Morinth had anticipated. Not that it was a bad thing. She circled the seething captain, trailing fingers around her neck, letting the tingle of their passage on young, pebbly skin send shivers through her. "Oh, you don't need to be so rash. She's going to be all... alone... and distracted..." she whispered, lips passing close to the asari's ear. The others, standing nearby, looked jealous. As they should be. "...Justicars are always such a hassle, aren't they?"

"Bigoted _bitches_," Wasea agreed, overriding anything she might have thought on the subject before Morinth sunk in her claws. Flame began to flare from the woman's fists, to which Morinth raised a brow. Firebending? Perhaps useful. She'd learned the secret of it centuries ago, no matter what that Batarian Hegemony claimed. Nobody could say no to her. Not forever. And it wasn't like he survived the experience, anyway. "Where is she? I'll _burn her alive_!"

"Paaatience, my sweet," Morinth said. "She will come soon. And when she does, you'll have a righteous vengeance ready to unleash upon her, with all of the strength you can muster. I trust you to protect me. You _will_ protect me, won't you?" she asked, her face shifting into an almost coquettish pout. If Wasea could have gotten any more angry, any more protective, she would have imploded from it.

"Of course I will. She won't get out of here alive," Wasea promised. Morinth patted her on the cheek, and walked away. And just like that, an entire branch of the Eclipse Mercenary Company was working for her. She strode, heels clicking her passage, as she caught sight of something in the local traffic-controller's office. A heaped box of contraband. A smile came to her face, and she sashayed over to it. She leaned forward, cupping the chin of the maiden at the desk.

"Be a dear, validate my parking?" she asked. The maiden stared, awestruck, before stammering an agreement and running away from her post to do Morinth's desires. Morinth, though, reached into the bin and pulled out a long syringe of Minogen. She then looked over to a volus who was sitting on the bench. Well, this could be amusing. "What is your name, my fine little fellow?"

"Uh... Niftu... why?" he asked.

"Tell me that you want me," she whispered to the ridiculous little alien.

"I... I want you," he said.

"Tell me that you'd kill for me," she whispered.

"I would. I would!"

"Anything I want?" she asked. The volus nodded briskly. Morinth smiled, and slid the syringe into the intake port of the volus' suit, and pumped his pressurized flesh with enough Minagen to make a biotic out of a quarian! "You'll have your chance."

And with that, another whisper of chaos to cultivate in her wake, she turned and moved toward Servilla's apartment. So many delights today. The thrill of the chase. The glory of her power. She would probably forget today, some time in her glorious future, but for now, she wanted to enjoy what she had as she had it. And she would have much. She tapped the button to the lift, and slipped through the doors, selecting one of the uppermost floors. Servilla's father was a teacher straight from Palaven, of one of the local universities. That meant that she was a child of wealth and taste. A fitting servant for Morinth. As she ascended, she pulled the objet'd'art from under her arm, and held it at arm's length, scrutinizing it once more.

It was the only thing she had to remember of that batarian who showed her how to carry the fire in her hands. A sculpture much like a closed hand in a gauntlet, all in black metal. There was something so enticingly brutal to it. So wonderfully martial of it. And beyond that, there was a whisper of genius in its craftsmanship, something so far beyond the batarian who bore it that it took her breath away the instant she saw it. She knew that she had to have it. At any cost. Unlike every other possession she had gained and thrown away, this would never leave her person. It was too precious.

She smiled, feeling the hum of joy from possessing this thing of bleak, dark beauty work its way up her spine. She tucked it back under an arm, and thought ahead. A pleasant surprise waiting for Mother, perhaps. But Mother had a way of surviving. So she would have to keep preparing something interesting when she reached Omega. But first, to make a meal of Servilla. She'd earned the privilege, after all.

Morinth wondered what it would be like to break Omega's first rule.

* * *

It was actually a good thing that Shepard's helmet was closed. She imagined that the smell would have been atrocious. "What are we looking at here?" she asked Garrus.

"We estimate the biomass of dead vorcha to be in excess of four metric tonnes," Adahn said.

"A killing field," Lawson said, distaste clear in her tones.

"How better to train the vorcha you hire than against the vorcha you don't?" Garrus asked darkly.

"I'm starting to have very unpleasant feelings toward this Blood Pack you speak of," Shepard said flatly.

The bodies were piled loosely into broad mounds, limbs poking up from the decaying matter, flies making an almost opaque mass above them. And like so many other parts of the Gully, there were lichens and molds that grew wild and untamed, to the point that some parts that they'd passed through looked more like a cave, or a sort of fungal forest than they did a residential section of a space-station. Such it was with this; the lichen formed an almost-grass that seemed to creep over the older of the dead. The only way this place could be known as artificial was by looking at the 'cave walls', and seeing dilapidated bathrooms staring back at them, and even a room with a pool-table half fallen into the street before it got wedged.

"This must mean that the Blood Pack is close," Lawson said. "They wouldn't take them this far out... Unless they wanted to avoid the smell."

"_This postulation operates on a faulty assumption. Krogan are known to eat the bodies of the dead. Vorcha are no exception to this rule. This behavior is... inexplicable_," Adahn said, its eye-petals flicking as though it were raising a suspicious brow.

"Well, whatever's causing it just told us that we're getting close to where we need to go," Shepard said.

The others didn't voice agreement or disagreement, but she didn't ask it. Instead, she continued forward, her rifle up. A begrudging part of her had to say that whatever they'd done with the Avenger in the last couple of years, they'd turned it into a not-entirely-terrible weapon. It actually managed to put down the vorcha who leapt at them, screaming and bloodthirsty, quickly enough that they wouldn't get swarmed. They probably got up about five minutes after the squad left them behind, but still, that was just vorcha being vorcha, apparently.

She took point, peering around corners, over mounds. It was a strange thing to look across the gap of naked space and see raunchy advertisements and silly product placement, when down here, it was almost as nasty as Tuchanka. Shepard sucked her breath through her teeth when she saw a barest glimpse of movement in the rubble ahead. She glanced back, signaling her spot, and bidding Garrus and Adahn find firing positions. Lawson stayed close at hand.

"How many?" Lawson asked, not whispering because it was pointless when all organics present had helmets on.

"I only saw one, I think," she said. She peeked again. "Eleven o'clock low, next to the Soylent Pop sign."

Lawson glanced over the upended busstop that they were crouching behind. "I see," she said. She nodded. "That wall in the distance? From the readings, that's Firebase Aralakh."

"Huh. Time just flies when you're being attacked by vorcha," Shepard said. She glanced ahead again, through the scope of her rifle. She could see the back of one of them, at a terrible angle and without a good line of fire. It was... rummaging. "If it just stood up, or looked up... Wait, is that a bandoleer?"

"What?" Lawson asked.

"It's wearing a..." Shepard said. Her eyes went wide, and she pressed her other hand to the corrugated metal of the busstop, and felt the vibrations which reached up and through it. She'd lost most of her resolution, but she did know one thing. Relatively small, fast things were approaching. "Shit! Ambush!"

She rose up, gun swinging forward, only to be blasted off of her feet by a hydrolic ram of waterbending force that swung up in a great whip from the armored vorcha that crested the mound that occluded a portion of the street. Shepard landed at a roll, and when she did, she brought her rifle to eye and sent shots streaming forward. Vorcha were as hideous through scope as they were up close; they would never _ever_ appear in a Fornax... or at least, she hoped not.

Her rounds burst the shields of the waterbending vorcha easily enough – not surprising, as the only generator it had was the fist-sized rig that Lawson had crawled out of bed on Freedom's Progress with. The others caused flesh to burst out its back, and the thing to fall back. But it didn't stay down; it hurled itself to its feet with a shriek, and swept its water back for a second assault. Lawson put that assault to bed quickly by twisting that water out of the vorcha's grasp and slamming it, in ice-pike form, through the chest and head of the alien.

Loud bangs began to sound, and Shepard felt something plop against her helmet, telling her that they weren't just tripping an ambush; they'd walked into it. She started to run, but even as she did, she could see the blue flickers of rounds being deflected by her barriers. And her armor was reminding her that it couldn't take much more at the moment. So she hurled herself forward at a roll, and swept her arms back as she came to her feet, literally pulling the pair of rifle-toting vorcha off of their feet. One of them, falling forward, had the misfortune of landing in a pile at Shepard's feet. She punched down with flame, blasting the alien in the back and head, before raising her rifle again to put rounds into the other, as it was rising.

A third, who'd leapt out of gods-only-know-where, interrupted her by shooting her rifle in half with a shotgun that blasted nails the length of a finger. She flinched back, and looked at the grip that remained in her hand, then up at the vorcha, that grinned as only a creature with needle teeth and no lips could. There was a rising clack coming from the shotgun in its grasp. Shepard hurled the remains of her rifle at the thing, and they banged off its face, causing it to hiss and shout, but most importantly, to lose its aim. Shepard then sent the thunderous shots of the Carnifex after it. One burst the meagre barriers the vorcha had. The second blew half of its head off. The other clove the head from the neck. And the body continued grasping at the shotgun, even as it collapsed to the ground.

"I've lost my gun!" Shepard shouted.

A loud crack answered her, and a pained hiss came from a block of rubble. Wait, no, not a block of rubble; a vorcha with some sort of invisibility field. Wait, _what_? They were becoming _invisible_ now?Well, it was fortunate enough that Adahn's shot had blown the thing in half. Garrus was the voice which answered her, though. "Kinda busy! Do some OSP!" he shouted. He then had to vault through a window and send a wave of flame back through it. "We're getting herded!"

"Pick a direction and cut!" Lawson snapped, as she pulled the ever-growing blade of ice that was being bolstered with every vorcha death at her hands in scything arcs, now only occasionally cleaving limbs now that the vicious little beasties had gotten wise to the fact that of them, she was the most obviously lethal at short range.

"Go for the wall!" Shepard ordered, and grabbed the gun out of the hand of the burned vorcha at her feet. She'd brought it to her shoulder and sent out a burst of rounds before she even realized what it was. She then paused, turning the gun to get a look at it. "Huh. Vindicator, nice," she said. And with a grin, she began to peg vorcha, causing them to flinch and recoil, instead of pressing ever inward. A howl of flame came from the wrist of one, but Garrus was able to curl that flame back and send it at its source, causing one to scream and flail and flee aflame.

"Ever get the feeling this might have been a bad idea?" Garrus asked.

"All of my ideas are great," Shepard said, as she now retreated steadily, her shots knocking vorcha back, even if the Vindicator in her hands hadn't the stopping power that Garrus' Mantis or Adahn's... _whatever_ the hell it was that geth was using... to knock them down permanently. The vorcha sent shots of their own, the spreads of grain-sized projectiles so spread by the distance that they were forced to keep that they could be safely deflected by the suits' barriers, for the most part. Every now and then, Shepard's aim was thrown off, when one pellet got through and slammed into her armor. At least the armor held.

"Any ideas how we're going to infiltrate the firebase while engaged in a gunfight?" Lawson asked.

"Without a lot of subtlety," Shepard answered her, rotating a twisted shoulder, before sending rounds at the easy dozen of hideous, sharp-toothed creatures which stalked toward them. Some had weapons at hand. Others, blades of ice that rotated around them in circuits. Shepard looked to one side, though, and had a notion. The only remaining building on this side of the ruins was somewhat tall... perhaps tall enough to reach. "Lawson, keep them off me for a second."

"What?" she asked, only to turn and send out a whip which hurled the encroaching vorcha flying back, to land at a roll amongst its peers. They all hissed and laughed at the misfortune of their companion, sent wordless jeers at the others who now retreated with bullets flying. Shepard, though, pressed her eyes closed, and clenched her fists, held high.

"I am the Avatar. I am the Avatar," she whispered to her self, as fro her feet, she got a sense of concrete and metal. Not like the Citadel, which so many places were invisible to her even when she was at her best. All was visible here. The narrow, impassable sewers. The standing rooms under tonnes of rubble. And the spine of the building that the vorcha were now standing within the shadow of. She twisted, and as she did, so too did the metal. It sheered and it mangled, the pop of metal being fatigued lost in the gunshots and through the many layers of interference, drywall and concrete both. But when Shepard pulled back in a sweeping motion, more like waterbending than any usual metalbending, the sound finally came.

The vorcha stopped shooting, sending out spikes of ice, shouting. They stopped, and they turned. And they saw the building, in the fraction of a second it took for it to land on their faces.

The crash of the building landing on the ground overwhelmed all else. Shepard stood there, though, feeling like she'd pulled a muscle in her soul. She should have warmed up for something like that, she figured. At least it worked. Garrus turned to her, a brow-plate shifting upward and dragging the visor upon it with it. "I could say something about 'overkill', but I have a feeling that I'm not the best person to complain."

"Because you're 'Jiang-shi'?" Shepard asked.

"Because I'm a turian. Throwing asteroids at planets is just another battle-tactic to us," he said, hefting his rifle up. "Although there's a fair chance that we've gotten the attention of any Blood Pack anywhere near us..."

He was cut off by another explosion that sent a pervasive red light glaring over the tops of the walls of the compound that lay relatively nearby, and the rumble of another building giving way, dropping down into its foundations. All stared for a moment.

"...Or _not_."

"Figure that was...?" Shepard began.

"Archangel? Absolutely," Garrus said. "Which means we should probably get the lead out."

"...out of what?" Shepard asked.

"It's a turian thing," he shrugged.

"_We cannot detect any mass-effect signatures in the area between this location and the outerwall of the Blood Pack firebase. This does not preclude ambush by feral vorcha_," Adahn said.

"You're a very 'up' robot, you know that?" Shepard said to the geth. It's eye-petals flared, as though it didn't understand. "Just _go_."

Lawson let the ice fall, and pulled her own Carnifex from her hip, actually taking the lead with Garrus, while Shepard and the robot lagged behind. She made a point not to move buildings around for a while after this. It couldn't be a good thing to pull a muscle in your bending.

* * *

"WHERE IS HE?" Garm roared, as the bombs began to go off, blasting the doors off of the pens that he kept the untrained vorcha in. They were only the most recent of a lot of explosions. The first was a ruse, to get his attention looking the wrong way. Now, he knew better. He thrust a thick, armored finger at another of his Weyrloc clansmen. "Why aren't you on the turrets?"

"What am I supposed to fire at? The ashes he leaves behind?" the younger krogan snapped back, as he punted a naked vorcha down into a pit with so many others. With a twist of his arms, he slammed the metal plating into place over them, trapping a significant portion of the untrained meat in that improvised prison

"I don't care! Kill Archangel! NOW!" Garm screamed. Draven rolled his eyes, but did make his way toward the wall, itself an ever changing forest of metal spikes and plates, designed to keep the more insistent of these barely useful vermin from harming their 'recruiters'. Or worse, freeing those still in the process of being trained.

It baffled Weyrloc Garm's mind that these little savages even bothered to 'rescue' their own. It didn't seem natural. The massive, armored krogan pounded feet along the walkways, his Graal upon his shoulder. He pointed down to one vorcha in particular. "Shisk! Get off your ass and do something!"

"AM DO-O-ING SOMETHING," the vorcha answered. "AM READYING."

"It looks like you're wasting my time!" Garm snapped. "Send your troops out that gate. I want Archangel's head! I want to eat his spine!" he then stormed to the middle of the walkway that circled the tower that sat askew near the center of the firebase. As he was given to understand, this was actually a chunk of some ancient human warship. He didn't care, only that it was cheap scrap and worked as a useful motte-and-bailey. "Alright you worthless pyjaks; anybody who brings me Archangel will get_ every cent I've earned this month_!"

There came a bellow of cheer from the krogan below, some of whom bashed heads together to the prospect, before turning their attentions to those vorcha who were still running amok in Garm's base. This was an outright travesty. It was lucky that Father Guld wasn't around to see this. Garm would have died of shame. A hiss of anger from Garm's back saw him simply tip his shotgun toward it and let off a blast of spikes, ending that hiss abruptly. If they weren't so cheap and so useful, he'd just drop a nuke into this place and let it all burn. But Father Guld wouldn't spare one, and he had the foresight to know that if they did stem this well, they'd be making themselves weaker. Since the turians, there was no reason to be weaker than they had to be.

Lips peeled back, and the krogan – fairly young at only three hundred, all things considered – looked over his domain. The turrets barked, but it was clear that they were doing so aimlessly. The others were by and large corralling the vorcha that had been released. Something about that struck at Garm, but he couldn't quite twig it. Not entirely. While Garm was strong, a mighty son of Weyrloc Guld, as so were so many others, he wasn't exactly the brightest.

With a growl of impatience, he hurled himself over the rail, and slid down the slope of his tower until he jogged to a halt at its bottom, just in time to kick a feral vorcha hard enough that its ribs were liquified. It'd get better, of course, but it was a useful lesson. "What am I not seeing here?"

He looked around. Some vorcha, fighting those who might well have been their brothers. Or sisters. What do you call a creature that's born neuter, anyway? Bah, not worth the effort, Garm considered. His brethren – literally in a great many cases – bending the metal to encase the vorcha who hadn't yet escaped within the almost ruined cages. Something was missing. So he started to count.

Five.

Six.

Eight.

Ten... Where was number eleven? Garm swung his head, trying to see where the last of the krogan in this outpost had secreted himself. Not that a krogan was renowned for its ability to secret itself. He sighed, and looked at a turret which now stood empty. He blinked, then counted again. Six. Seven, eight... nine?

"Shisk! Get your ass up!" Garm roared.

"What is it, brother?" Weyrloc Bjors asked, his face hidden under a helmet which was coated in the blood of stupid vorcha.

"How many krogan do you see?" Garm asked. Bjors looked around, and turned an armor-plated eye back toward him.

"Eight."

"EIGHT?" Garm roared. He turned. "Archangel is inside the walls!"

True enough, out of sight with the tower in its way, a gauntlet spun to life. Much like the omni-blade that had so recently become so trendy amongst special forces units amongst the salarians and turians and humans, it was an enhancement to physical conflict, a force multiplier to bodily blows. Unlike the omniblade, it wasn't a cut. With a whirring of servo-motors roaring to life, and the thrum of mass-effect field generators coming on like, the fist raced forward, glowing red with an impressive impact plate, driving straight into the side of the krogan's head. Between the impact plate – itself designed to project all of the force of the blow in one direction – and the armor's actuators making a landslide out of a pebble-fall, the massive alien was outright decapitated by the blow, dropping him out of the seat of the turret.

Archangel didn't smile as he kicked the body aside, and spun the turret so that it pointed at the next in the line. This wasn't the time for joviality, wasn't the time for games. So with a grim scowl on his lips, he grasped the controls, and set them to start firing, before bounding down off of the wall. The turret began to fire on the next, sending a stream of anti-vehicular rounds into the krogan manning the next turret. He wasn't in this for glory or 'thrill of the hunt'. He just wanted these slave taking bastards dead. He sprinted to a corner, and when he turned it, found himself face to chin with two great, armor-plated behemoths. At least no groan came to his throat. He was better than that.

Garm's eyes widened even as the tiny, white-and-red armored creature pulled an arm back, to the whirring of motors. A snarl came from Bjors' helm, and he hurled himself at the small being with a meaty strike, using fists that could crush bone. Archangel struck straight through that attack, an impact-plate shattering Bjors' fist before continuing forward in a thrusting blow that smashed the now glowing fist into the front of the helmed krogan's face. And with a crack and a splatter, that distinction was no longer true, so much as 'the cranially pulverized' krogan. Garm was quick, though. Seeing no desire to meet the same fate as his clutch-brother, he slammed a hand onto the fist of that glowing arm, then slammed Archangel into the wall next to him. After that, two slams into the ground, before hurling him into a lighting pole, which had survived decades of the vorcha, only to succumb and crumple to the weight of one annoying pest.

Garm's vision was virtually red, the wrath coursing through his veins and nervous systems. He was stomping toward the Archangel, who was already pushing himself up. Three of the newly trained vorcha, newly freed of their task of subduing their ilk, launched themselves at him even as Garm stormed up. Archangel barely missed a move, tearing two napalm grenades and managing to peg the approaching vorcha with them, causing them to flail and burn. The last managed to claw at Archangel's chest, dragging a curl of metal away from the armor, before he was kicked in the knee, buckling him down. A whir of motors and a glowing fist later, and the vorcha was punched in the back of the neck hard enough to break him in two. Garm finally had his shotgun to hand, and let out a blast of it. Archangel pulled the Vorcha up, letting the spikes impale trained flesh rather than interloping annoyance.

"You're gonna run out of tricks soon, little bastard!" Garm roared, and let his Graal start to spin up its chambers. Archangel dropped the vorcha, but held the vorcha's gun, sending out a steady stream of high-powered pistol shots at Garm. The first few brought down Garm's barriers. The next through cracked through his ablative plating. The next pair tore at his guts. He didn't care; guts would grow back. With a bellow of wrath, the Graal echoed its bearer and sent out a blizzard of spikes. This time, Archangel had nothing to hide behind.

The impact lifted him off his feet and threw him five meters away, landing flat on his back, the spikes jutting out of his chest. Garm smirked, and put up his Graal. It was out of ammo, anyway. But his eyes widened in shock when the armored fist of Archangel reached down to the spikes, and tore them out, dropping them in a pool of dark red blood. Archangel pushed himself to his feet, still bleeding, but despite having no sign of what features lay behind that round-head helmet, Galm knew that he was staring the krogan down. He took a step forward. Garm took one as well.

The krogan wasn't sure whether to be annoyed or applauding when a shock-net raced upon Archangel from behind, wrapping him for an instant before his arm flew wide, pumping a staggering amount of electricity into him. He threw the net away, but was driven to a knee, and didn't have a chance to move again before Garm slammed his hand closed over the damned alien's face-plate. The krogan slammed that head into the ruins of a cage that now hosted several dozen feral vorcha when once it almost had a hundred. Another slam, this time straight down into the ground. Pools of dark red marked each impact. Finally, Garm dragged him into the center of the firebase, looking around at those who were left.

Five.

Five krogan.

This little bastard... "If I thought it would be worth the trouble, I'd tear off all your armor and feed you to the vorcha. But I've got a faint notion that you might find some way to make that work to your favor too. So the only thing I want from you is for you to _beg for me to kill you_. I want you to BEG!"

The alien raised its middle finger at him. Garm blinked at it for the few moments that it took for him to remember that the middle finger was an old asari gesture of extreme disrespect. Garm slammed his foot down on the bloody, compromised armor, and pressed down. There was a grinding as the concrete began to rasp under the metal armor, and the weight of the krogan pressing it down. Garm leaned down, his weight pressing harder. He stared, and he waited.

"What's that? Do you have something to say?" Garm asked.

There was a moment of silence from Archangel, before the words came up.

"More weight."

Garm's lips skinned back, and he leaned back. How dare he? HOW DARE HE! He raised that foot off of Archangel's chest, and prepared for the stomp which would go clean through it and into the concrete.

He was interrupted by a massive-caliber gunshot that tore through his head and out his hump.

The krogan and the domesticated vorcha – a group which miraculously still included Garm – turned to see the impossible. A geth, standing with a massive rifle, on the edge of the wall. And beside him, a turian let his helmet hook onto his belt, the blue visor flicking on as he leaned toward the machine.

"Do you even bother with anything but headshots?" the turian asked.

"_We find aiming for extremities a waste of time and resources_," the geth said. Garm staggered back to his feet, ignoring the hole in his head, and in fact the missing half of his brain, in the name of bloody vengeance. After all, a brain could grow back. Or could it? He couldn't remember at the moment.

"Jiang-shi? WRAAAAAAAGH! KILL THEM ALL!" Garm roared, orange blood flying past his lips when he did.

* * *

"Can you two jokers stop yammering and give me some room?" Shepard demanded, and Garrus stepped aside, allowing Shepard a spot on the battlement. She looked down, to the bleeding, brutalized form of Archangel on the ground, to the krogan who'd just gotten shot in the head, and was now reloading his gun. To the one vorcha off to the side who was wearing something quite a bit different from the armor and weaponry of its brethren. "Garm! I'm told you have a visitor of some interest to us!" Shepard shouted down.

She almost got shot in the face for the time she spent joking. She flinched down, and the blast of high-velocity pellets from the krogan's oversized pistol zipped harmlessly over her head. She leaned back, hauling Lawson up and even going so far as to toss her into the courtyard. She landed at a roll, and instantly reached out, catching a vorcha that had launched itself at her in mid air by its very blood, before pulling her side-arm, and putting enough rounds through its neck to cause the head to roll clean off.

"Adahn, take the krogan. Garrus, follow me."

"I can't stay on the wall? How terrible," Garrus said. But he jumped down nevertheless, and instantly cast his hand aside, sending out a bath of flames toward a krogan who was charging toward them. It broke its charge and darted aside, as even blood-crazed sapients from Tuchanka knew enough not to run head-long into flames.

Shepard fired streams at the big, head-shotted krogan, but they seemed to deflect off of its barriers, until they finally cut through, at which point they started to deflect off of his sheer armored mass. There was a thunk, and two of the eight great cylinders on the hump of the krogan's armor hissed down, to a whup of the barriers surging back to life. Oh, that wasn't even fair. Doubly unfair when her heatsink just popped out, warning her that she was running low on ammo.

"Garrus, bolt on the big guy," Shepard said, as it turned its pistol toward her once more. Garrus shoved her, and caught the blast on the edge of his armor, tearing out a portion of the gorget ring and almost dropping him onto his back, but he held his balance. No doubt, his armor was absolutely shitting itself. Even as the turian rose, though, he was twisting his arms through a very familiar kata. Shepard followed suit, even as the one-eyed, half-headed krogan reloaded its gun. And together, two bolts of lightning slammed into the big, ugly one. The barriers burst outright, and the onslaught of electricity staggered the krogan back. Shepard didn't even watch how Adahn and Lawson were working together to cut their way through what vorcha were fighting them, to the krogan who were trying to send waves of alien meat ahead of them. She didn't have time.

The unarmored vorcha in the corner hadn't moved yet.

Two more cylinders pressed down, and the shields leapt back up, just as the krogan held his pistol out again. Another blast, pellets the size of corn-kernels tearing the air between the two of them, as fortunately the krogan had lost something of its depth perception... along with half its head. There was another crack in the air, as the shields flared, and Shepard found herself knocked back a step; Adahn's shot had been deflected _into her_. One in a million. Her armor wasn't breached, though, so she twisted her arms, even as the next set of cylinders pressed down, and the shields bounded back up. Without a word said, she and Garrus landed, side by side, their forms almost identical, if mirrored. They were back to back, one arm leading, and that arm lead with thunder.

The bolts drove the krogan off its balance, and burst the shields for what seemed the dozenth time, but this time neither firebender nor Avatar was willing to let it become a dozen and one. They shifted, once again mirroring each other as much as differing anatomy would allow, and sending forth a rope of flames, half golden, half blue, which coiled around itself, and straight into the krogan, smashing into him just as the last set of cylinders clunked down into place. The bath of flames then got trapped inside the bubble of mass-effect barrier that sprang into being, turning that krogan into a krogan shaped ball of flames. There was a scream that split the air, an angry declaration of "THIS CANNOT BE! I AM THE SON OF WEYRLOC GULD!" from that blasted, savaged being, before it crumpled to the ground. With a last hiss and shattering sound, the barriers gave up from the flames, and let them waft up and away. A glance aside showed that Lawson had reached one of the other krogan – the last that Shepard could see, since the other seemed to have figured it stood a better chance in the Gully and ran – and hefted it up by its blood for Adahn to fill with holes. Avatar and firebender caught their respective breaths.

"That was interesting," Shepard said. Garrus turned, as though to give a witty response, but black-rimmed blue eye shot wide, and he went into a full body flinch.

"Blood shaman!" He hissed, and his arms were spinning in a lightning kata faster than Shepard could believe. He'd reached the point to launch it, when the unarmored vorcha in the corner opened slit red eyes, and let out a howl.

There was a ripple in reality, as Shepard felt herself being plunged headlong into the Spirit world. The lightning which had been begging to obey Garrus' commands now slid away uselessly, and the krogan in Lawson's grasp dropped to the ground, ventilated, but still moving somewhat. Lawson stared at her hands, and went even more pale, before turning toward Shepard. "Something's wrong with my ben..."

"ARIIIISE!" the vorcha screamed, two clawed hands tearing upward. The rippling unreality tore ever outward, a rent in what was brought into being by the vorcha blood-shaman on the ground. It bounded to its feet, and when it did, something rose with it. For a moment, Shepard didn't know what it was. But that changed, when the orange and the slimy yellow-green mixed together, and rose up. It flopped forward, two limbs pulling out of its mass, before a maw opened in its front. The maw was filled with a random mixture of the blunt, wide teeth of a krogan, and the needle teeth of a vorcha. And its _eyes_ were teeth as well, grinding against each other, sightless yet seeing.

And it wasn't alone.

Shepard reacted fast, pulling her gun up and snapping a shot. Being hurled into the Spirit world – and since when could vorcha do that, she wondered? – put a nix on bending, but it didn't stop ballistics. True to form, the gun barked its shots, and they leapt the distance. But they deflected off of a field of golden light, as a blue and yellow orb that was set into what looked like robes glowed brighter at its chest.

"Oh, crap," Shepard said.

"_Shepard Commander. We are experiencing unprecedented data inflow. We do not understand. What must we do?_" Adahn said from Shepard's back. She turned, and stared in utter bewilderment that the robot had fallen into the spirit world with them. As far as she was aware, it should have been left behind.

"Shoot the vorcha!" Shepard screamed.

With a stride, the concrete under the shaman's foot tore and ripped, great fronds of ferns swinging up into the gap. The metal of the tower split and twisted, its hard surface softening into wood, splitting away into branches which finally dangled blood-red leaves. The vorcha let out a shriek, and the blood began to rise around Shepard and the rest, assembling itself into a host fit for slaughter. Lawson was the first to break the spell of the sudden transformation, rushing to the fallen corpse of a vorcha – as all of the living had been displaced somewhere else, some spot in the world which wasn't collapsed into the Unthinking Spirit – and tearing the shotgun from still-grasping hands. The report struck the turian and Avatar out of their shock, as she blasted away one of the manifested Blood Spirits with the blast.

"Right! Vorcha!" Garrus said. He pulled his rifle off his back and snapped a shot in remarkable time, but with another pulse of golden light, another brightening of the great orb on the shaman's chest, the bullet deflected again, this time reflecting straight back into Garrus' chest.

"Stop that," Shepard said, pushing the gun away before he shot himself to death. She pointed her own gun at him, and started firing toward his extremities; while they were all turned away by the golden field, none managed to get just the angle to hit her. She'd emptied her Carnifex by the time there was a great shift under the feet of the two facing down the Blood Shaman, and a pyre of bones erupted from the spreading humus. It caught alight the instant it was free of its subterranean prison, a great blaze of purple-orange light. It also cut off line-of-fire. Garrus gave Shepard a look of outright 'what the hell', one that she could appreciate. She motioned toward the center of her own chest.

"He's got a Night Star. It works just like a kinetic barrier, only it tries to shoot you back if you hit it."

"A _what_?" Garrus asked, incredulous.

"I saw a few on Tuchanka. Long story," She snapped. Another blast, and there was a splat of blood that slammed onto the concrete, before the concrete outright vanished, and a new, if smaller, tree shot upward in its place. There was a loud electric zap, and followed by a gush sound, and Shepard looked back to see that Adahn had been swarmed by them, but was giving exactly no fucks, and had opted to electrify itself. The manifested Blood Spirits, faced with something that had no flesh and could burn them despite being in the spirit world, started to back off, but it still meant that Adahn had the attention of more than half of those evil little things. "Short version; NEVER SUMMON BLOOD YOU FUCKING IDIOT!" she screamed at the vorcha, and sent out a burst of rifle-fire at it. The Night Star on its chest was now glowing brightly, and one of the bullets snapped her head back from its impact, but didn't manage to so much as chip the helmet.

"Why not?" Garrus exchanged his Mantis for an Phaeston.

"Because once you summon them, they _don't go away_!" Shepard snapped. She leaned out, and saw that the vorcha had stopped advancing, its feet digging into the impossible soil, clawed hands spread wide. A glance aside showed that the rift that the vorcha had torn open now extended as far as the eye could see. And where it passed, metal was undone, concrete unsealed, porcelain unmade. Ruined buildings ceased to be. In their place, jagged cliffs of rough, slick stone. Cliffs housing waterfalls which were born from burst pipes turned springs, and where that water fell, the expanding genius loci sprouted trees and ferns and fungus that towered over a man.

"So what do we do?" Garrus asked.

"What Lawson's doing helps," Shepard said. She looked to the other blood spirits which were now starting to turn attention away from Adahn, who couldn't hurt them with its shots, but could with its contact, and away from Lawson, who couldn't hurt them with her contact, but could with her shots, to the two who hadn't proven their lethality in either direction. Shepard chewed on here upper lip for a moment, then shot a look to Garrus. "Keep them off of me. I'll deal with the Blood Shaman."

"How?"

"Punch them! Shoot them! Hit them with a _rock_! Anything that makes them go splat," Shepard said. She took in a breath, and opened the pathways that would lead her into the Avatar State. The Blood Shamans of Heshtok were infamous, terrifying in their power. But they would quail before the might of the Avatar unleashed. She opened the corridors of power...

And when she opened her eyes, all was still for a moment, and Javik was standing directly in front of her. She had gotten half way through the 'what' of 'what the fuck?' when he jabbed her in the forehead with a finger. "No," he declared. "Learn how to do this on your own."

"_Excuse_ me?" Shepard asked, but with a lurch in her guts, Javik was gone, and the Blood Shaman was twisting its arms once more. Lighting began to crackle above its head, pulling away from the waterfall-cliffs, away from the great scarlet tree, and forming in the shape roughly of a torso, that grew more distinct by the moment. Shepard shook her head. Fine. If she wasn't going to do this the easy way, she'd do it the hard way. So instead of opening the corridors of power, she simply listened to her own soul, and to the words which waited there.

THUNDERCLAP ON THE HORIZON, RIPPLING ACROSS THE UNTOUCHED PLAINS, HARBINGER OF THE FLOOD, BEARER OF LIFE, END OF ALL JOURNEYS;

GEAR OF THE DELUGE.

BEAR TO THE GROUND YOUR FIRST AND STRONGEST CHILD, WHO LAYS IN IMPUDENCE ABOVE THE SOIL!

Shepard didn't have time to see, as Lawson had to take off at a sprint away from a mass of blood spirits that had decided to close distance and end her once and for all. She raced up the wall, itself the only piece of artifice still remaining in the expanding old-growth forest which had come into being amidst Omega's heart, toward where the geth was moving its own blood spirits around somewhat harmlessly. She didn't have time to see, as Garrus got a claw raked up the gorget ring of his armor, grinding along the mandible, causing blood to start to dribble from it. She didn't see how he had to grab that thing by the claws, they the hardest, most solid part of the horrible creature, and slam it repeatedly into the pyre until its body came undone. And she didn't see how two more jumped onto his back, raking at him with unclean claws. Shepard had other things to worry about.

SO SHALL THE BEARER OF THE LIGHT OF THE GODS REST UPON THE THRONE, AND BATHE IN FLAMES THE FORESTS DRY, BEAR DOWN!

SO SHALL THE BRINGER OF THIS HORRID HARVEST, FEARSOME AND TERRIBLE, UNMAKER OF PLAIN AND DALE, BE STRIKEN!

SO SHALL THE DJINN THAT RESTS WITHIN THE MAELSTROM'S HEART, FICKLE AND CRUEL, BE REBUKED!

BRING

IT

DOWN.

A thunderclap sounded from out the storm spirit that the Blood Shaman had almost borne into being, and from its electrical body came a great flood of water, which bowled into the shaman, sweeping it off of its feet and washing it toward a back, lower corner of the former-firebase. And the sky grew first damp, then grey, as the rains began to fall in earnest as far as the vorcha's rift into the Spirit world reached. But the Blood Shaman slammed claws into the ground, and heaved itself out of that deluge, which even now created a lake that tore down the metal wall. Frogs and lilypads were already popping into being, fronds waving in a chaotic breeze. She might not be able to rebuke the blood spirits themselves, but the deluge they now found themselves drenched in slowed them a great deal more than it did the mortals that had been cast into their realm.

"Where's Archangel?" Shepard shouted, her eyes still on the blood shaman, who was storming forward, rage on its hideous face. Garrus gave a grunt of effort, followed by a liquid splat, before responding.

"I don't know! I think he got swept away!"

Shepard stared down the vorcha, who had more Spirit Artifacts on him than any shaman Shepard had ever met. Pellicles and Meat Chunks and... at his hand was now the vaguely-firearm shaped Flash, which snapped with a power not exactly electricity. She'd later learn from something of an authority on the subject that it was an 'ossified clump of mass effect fields', but at the moment, Shepard simply knew it as a Spirit Gun. "This doesn't have to end in your death, Blood Shaman. Your commander is dead. You can walk off," she offered.

"NO! AVATAR MUST DIE! SHAMAN MUST KILL AVATAR!" the vorcha shrieked, and thrust forward the Flash. There came a whump of power which slammed into Shepard's barriers, sending her stumbling back a step, but her barriers held. Shepard answered automatically with a burst of rifle-fire, which had the regrettable consequence of dropping those aforementioned barriers by shooting herself in the chest, by proxy. The armor held, but a great crack sounded, of a plate giving way under the power of the impact. It wouldn't hold much longer.

Shepard slung the rifle onto her back and started to charge in, her feet managing to gain traction even through the rain-saturated soil. It drove, wet and cold, into her eyes as she advanced, but she didn't have time to dispel The Deluge yet. There was the rising hum of the Flash recycling, its power drawn from nobody-really-knew-where and stored for the blast. As long as his Night Star was active, there was no shooting him. And she didn't trust herself enough to be able to overload it. If it could even be overloaded, that was...

She hurled herself into a sideways roll as the vorcha held the Flash out again. A great slam of force buffetted past her, cracking into a bone pillar of that pire which Garrus was now engaged in an unholy melee behind. There was a crunch, and the whole pyre crumbled down, spreading fire into the suddenly growing grasses, and causing the whole scene to burst into a terrible light. Shepard retook her momentum, and continued to run forward. She needed to get that Night Star off of him. Partially because she wanted one, and partially because she wanted not to get killed by a vorcha. On the wall, Lawson hurled herself past the ring of blood spirits that flanked Adahn, checking one off of the wall and causing it to splat into unbeing on the ground. She rolled to a stop, just as Adahn stepped past her, and grabbed the claws which raked toward her. With a heave, there came a blast of electrical force which arced through the spirit, somehow managing to avoid Lawson, under the geth's legs, entirely.

Shepard hurled forward, and the vorcha threw the Flash down to rake claws at her, but she had one thing that it didn't. Reach. Sending her legs as her herald, she drove two boots into the face of the Blood Shaman, driving it onto its back. The two of them got up practically simultaneously, and she had to pull away from a ripping claw that raced toward her face. She turned that reflexive flinch into a twisting kick, catching her toe on the jaw of the vorcha, sending it sprawling, and she barely less so. The ground wasn't exactly replete of traction, under this horrible rainfall. It was so strange to fight without bending, a distant corner of her considered. She scrabbled forward into an awkward frontkick, which was only viable because the Blood Shaman had as little traction as she did.

The kick sent it rolling, but it clawed down into the turf at the edge of the swelling lake. Shepard couldn't cross the logs and debris which now appeared between her and the vorcha, probably by its design. It held out its hand, and the blue mass of the Flash skipped back into its grasp. Shepard pulled her rifle from her back and aimed low, a burst of fire at its knees. The shots reflected back at her, but struck the rotting wood and crumbly rocks instead. And there was a shattering sound, as the light pulled in from the Night Star, glowing in its heart but no longer sending out pulses of golden light with every deflected round. Shepard smirked, and pulled the trigger again.

Beep-beep-beep.

"Oh, you've got to be f..." She began, but was cut of when the whine of the Flash sounded. The blast threw her back, rolling along the turf until she hit a log, and when she did so, she did so with a lot of force. There was a wet snap and tearing sound, as the stump was unmade by her impact, and crawling insects scuttered away from the home that had been instantly created – as they had – to suit the angry whims of a blood-thirsty vorcha. Shepard shook her head, trying to shake the stars from her eyes. She then noticed something a little unpleasant. Her armor wasn't yelling at her. She looked down, and found that her breastplate had been cracked in half; the left half wasn't anywhere nearby, leaving her cooling vest and undershirt exposed on that side. There came a hiss, and Shepard looked up. A glance aside, to the Vindicator. A scramble to grab, another to reload. Garrus was busy punching the teeth-eyes out of a blood spirit. The others were way too far away. So she readied for another reckless charge.

She'd gotten rolled onto her chest for the explosion upward and into the fanged foe, when there came a different kind of bang, this one the metallic crack of springs being released from an electromagnetic lock. It was a sound which had been burned into her memory, such that even death couldn't erase it. But she was somewhat stunned, when that blast of ballistic blades slammed into the Blood Shaman's back, and ripped it to shreds.

From behind it, soaking wet and his armor covered in green slime, came Archangel, one fist still out while the other clutched his abdomen which bled now in vivid reds down the white which overtook most of his lower armor. "I suppose we're even," Archangel said, the voice deep and distorted. The helmet, which looked like any of the hundreds of thousands that the Hanhe-Kaller Armorworks produced each year, turned aside, toward Garrus, who gave a final stomp into the chest of a blood-spirit, splattering it apart. The others, no longer under the command of the shaman, skittered and sprinted away, leaving Lawson and Adahn back to back, she bleeding, it scratched. The unreality, the sense of the uncanny and impossible, it faded, as the rent which the Blood Shaman had been holding open straight into the Spirit World began to fold shut, now that he was no longer able to do so.

Garrus took a moment to catch his breath, then looked up to his former squad-mate. "Well, that was strangely familiar. Must I _always_ dig you out of fights that you can't possibly win?"

"Surprised to see you back here. More surprised to see her," Archangel pointed vaguely toward Shepard. Shepard who, she wasn't too proud to admit, was _looting the hell out of_ the Blood Shaman's corpse.

"Yeah, Shepard's alive. And so are you, which is handy," Garrus said.

"You're being recruited," Shepard said, as she pulled the last object, which felt like somewhat more substantial blob of pudding, into a pouch that hung off of what remained of her savaged armor. The Flash, she just held on to. "The Illusive Man said that you were one of the most dangerous men in the galaxy. Feel like doing your part to save the human race?" she asked.

"Pass," Archangel said, turning away. Shepard stared, stunned, at him, as he started to limp toward the krogan leader, and turned him over. Garrus quickly moved to his side, pulling his attention away from the krogan.

"What are you doing? We're getting you out of this hellhole. Omega is done. T'Loak herself has made it pretty clear that she's tired of your bullshit, and if I know anything about her, that means the next bunch that get sent after you will be _hers_," Garrus said. He shook his head. "This is your chance to make a difference in a big way. They're taking entire colonies! Today it's humans, but tomorrow it could be anybody!"

Archangel stared down at the krogan, then to Garrus. "Find somebody else," he said.

"I want you," Shepard said. "You fought a Blood Shaman with a stomach full of spikes. That's the kind of world-crushing grit that I need to fight the Collectors."

"You don't want me," Archangel waved away.

"Why wouldn't I?" Shepard asked, her arms now crossed before what remained of her chestplate. Archangel gave a glance toward Garrus, then toward the pair which were descending the catwalks – they the only natural thing left in this portion of the Gully, even with the Spirit World retreated completely – then, to Shepard.

"...Fine," Archangel muttered. He reached up, unlocking the latches that were holding his helmet in place. With a single hand, awkward as hell, he pulled it off. And Shepard's eyes grew wide as she beheld what lay under it.

A rictus of sharp teeth pulled at lips under two pairs of black, black eyes. The brow of one of them was marred by a scar that looked like the beginning of a ring, which continued along his temple, but didn't quite finish itself. Archangel was a batarian? "That's... surprising," Shepard said. Garrus, though, gaped outright. Why, she wondered? The batarian then raked a fingernail across the front of his throat a few times, until it caught on what looked at first to be a bandage there, and peeled it off. He cleared his throat once more, and spoke again.

"If you're sure you want a 'terrorist from a species of terrorists' to fight your little war, then give me a reason," Ka'hairal Balak told her. She might not have recognized the face, but the voice, now that it wasn't being distorted by his VoxBox, was clear as the dawn.

"Balak?" Garrus asked. "You fought beside me for _a year_ and..."

"And you never asked," Balak said simply. He shrugged idly. "Better than I'd have expected of you."

Garrus looked between Shepard and Balak, too stunned for words.

"A year?" Shepard asked. "I thought you were Hegemony military..."

"Was. Turns out, X57 was the straw which broke the shalva's back," he said grimly, eyes narrowed at her. "They decided that I was a traitor. Burned the homes of my _Tolu_ soldiers; if you hadn't captured them, they'd all be dead. Because of you, I almost got branded into the Untouchables!" he thrust a finger to the brand on the corner of his face. "So why should I fight for humanity? Do you have _any reason_ that I would do that?"

"Don't do it for humanity," Garrus said, cutting him off. "Do it for me."

Balak turned to Garrus. "What?"

"The two of us, we went through hell together. We came out the other side. Your government wants you dead, well, the safest place from them, right now, is with the people they went to war with. You know it's sensible."

Balak ground his teeth. "And how do I know that one isn't going to shoot me in my sleep?" he demanded.

"Because I won't let her," Garrus promised, with a very stern look toward Shepard.

"Excuse me?" Shepard asked. "It's my ship, and my squad, and I won't be ordered around."

"See? The human pulls their weight, as they have for the years since they got their jumped-up position," Balak waved away, wincing slightly.

"You said there was something wrong with your government, right?" Shepard asked, calling to mind part of their single previous conversation. "What if I help you dig it out?"

Balak turned to her. "Why?"

Shepard was grinding her own teeth, but she spread her arms, harmlessly. "What? I can't just do a favor to a prospective squad-member?"

Gods, it burned her to say that.

Balak stared at her, then to Garrus. Then to Lawson and Adahn, the latter of whom was applying medigel to the former. A grimace. Then, he turned to Shepard. "Fine. I'll fight your Collectors," he said, but he pointed his bloodied finger at her. "But when I find what's gone so horribly wrong with my government, you _will_ be there to help me rip it out."

Oh, this was **_so_ **going to bite her in the ass. "Deal," Shepard said. She reached for her ear. "Gavorn? We need a pickup at... well, just look for the _trees_."

"Not yet," Balak said, starting to walk toward a hole in the walls. "I need to collect something first."

"You've got time," Garrus said. He limped away, and Shepard watched him go. Every part of her that remembered Mindoir wanted to shoot him in the back of the head. "That wasn't easy, was it?" Garrus asked her.

"Uuurgh..." Shepard managed.

"I thought so," Garrus said. He patted her on the shoulder. "Maybe the next one won't be somebody who you want to kill in your very blood."

"I don't know. I've heard stories about the Justicars," Shepard muttered.

"_Shepard Commander... what has happened_?" Adahn asked, its flashlight eye flicking around, turning between the scene of bucolic nature which had not so much overtaken as overwrote the structure of the Gully around them. If she were to ascribe emotion to the way it glanced around, to the way its petals flitted, she'd call it fertive, confused, and afraid. Shepard stared at the machine, the collection of plastics and processors... which somehow made the transition, unassisted and untended, into the Unthinking Spirit, that which allowed only the living, and things the living touched.

Does this unit have a soul?

That was a question that Shepard needed to give some serious thought to.

* * *

"Commander? Do you have time for a word?" the yeoman said, as Shepard cracked her neck, having tossed the broken armor into the armory, which Balak had instantly expressed vocal and acerbic rancor toward and immediately started to disassemble and drag into the cargo bay. Somebody would deal with that later. And she really needed to find a way to stop breaking her armor on every mission; it was just getting embarrassing at this point.

"I don't see why not; just a second, though," Shepard said, taking her place at the head of the Galaxy Map that appeared amidst the holotank. "Joker? Engage toward the Citadel."

"_Course plotted and underway_," Joker's voice reached her electronically, even though he could have just turned around and yelled. Well, that might have been less than ideal, actually. His voice didn't carry nearly as far as hers did. "_Oh, and I hear we have a batarian hate-machine on board. You sure know how to pick 'em, Commander_."

"It was the Illusive Man's choice, and Garrus' voucher. I'd have left him on Omega," Shepard said.

"_Well, at least I don't need to worry about him selling me into slavery; not much use for a guy with hollow legs to haul your bags of crushed rock around, I figure. Still, I can't help but wonder if this might be a hell of a pull. Guy punched krogan to death. __Krogan__!_"

"I know, Joker," Shepard said.

"_And isn't this the guy who tried to nuke Terra Nova into the Pre-Cambrian age?_" Joker asked.

"Just fly my ship, Joker."

"_Whatever you say. Just don't expect me to, you know, kill all humans if you suddenly start giving very suspicious orders one morning. Joker, out_."

Shepard shook her head, at least half because she didn't like being in this position. She then turned to the red-haired young woman. "Alright, go."

"Go? Oh... Yes, a few things, actually," she said. She ticked one off her finger. "Operative Lawson probably shouldn't be antagonized any further, because her psych-profile tells that she doesn't work well with people that actively anger her," next finger, "I read the files on Balak, both the official ones and my own observations. Officially, he's going to kill you and take over this ship. Unofficially... He's lost, and he doesn't know how to react outside of anger. He wants a purpose, something to distract him from what happened to him."

"You got this from watching him pitch the armory into the elevator?" Shepard asked.

"I'm very observant," Chambers said with a distinct note of pride. She raised another finger. "Mordin wants to run a test on you, but he says that it'll be a short one," and the last digit. "And finally... I really think that you should talk to Miss Nilsdottir."

"...on what grounds?"

"Because she needs a friend," Chambers said quietly. She gave Shepard a nod. "If that is all? I'll get back to my duties."

Shepard watched her turn to her console, go back to whatever it was that yeomen did, before shaking her head lightly, and taking the other door, which led into Professor Solus' lab. She opened it, and immediately gagged bit on the smell of burnt... _something_. There was a thin, oily smoke in the air, which was slowly being pulled out of the room.

"_Please refrain from creating open flames, Doctor Solus. The filtration systems can only sustain a moderate load under the current circumstances_," EDI reproached mildly, the globe almost seemed to put fists to non-existent hips at the salarian, who was waving the smoke away from a Swarm Bug that was still smoldering slightly. "_The Normandy has an optimum crew load of fifty. We have exceeded that, so my environmental control systems are extremely taxed_."

"Yes. Understandable. Will refrain from further tests in this venue 'till better circumstances. Informative, though," Mordin said. He turned. "Ah. Shepard. Please, stand there," he indicated a spot next to the wall. Shepard glanced to the spot, which seemed pretty much identical to the rest of the room; cluttered in the most organized way possible. She stood there, and with a hum, some gimbal arms extended from the floor and ceiling, creating an incomplete ring of metal around her head and calves. "Will only take a moment..." Mordin said.

Shepard raised a brow. In the time it took to do that, the display that Mordin was looking at exploded into a spray of sparks. He pulled back from it, and turned toward Shepard.

"Excellent results!"

"_What_? Your computer just exploded!"

"Yes, and for good reason. Tried to detect soul. Detected Avatar Bequest. Overloaded system," Mordin said. "Bequest present. Status as Avatar verified. Now, as further Seeker Swarm testing impossible, will work on 'Collector code-fragment' recovered by Samsara," he said, turning to another console, a wistful smile on his odd, salarian face. "Have ruled out intelligent virus," he said off handedly, then paused, looking up. "Unless _very_ intelligent," he corrected, and then his eyes went wide. "And _toying_ with me! Hmmm. Needs more tests."

Shepard just shook her head at the madness, and walked away, to the elevators. The trip down was oddly noisy, as the swarm that were living in the cargo-hold now had to contend with a batarian carrying disconcerting amounts of weaponry amongst them. Shepard had half a mind to do something about that, but... The lift stopped one floor above that, such that she could overlook the whole scene. But she chose not to. Instead, she turned, and headed down into the undercroft that lay under the engines. When she reached the bottom step, she heard something that she really didn't expect.

Sobbing.

She approached much more slowly, then. More carefully. When she turned that final corner, and saw Jack backlit in red, her head tucked down into her knees, she recognized what she saw, but still didn't quite understand it. "Jack?"

"Go away," Jackie said. Shepard was a bit surprised. Ordinarily, that would have been a 'fuck off'.

"I can't do that, Jack," Shepard said, coming closer. The biotic didn't pull back, but neither did she stop crying. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know..." she said. Shepard just sat on the edge of the table, opposite her, and waited. After a very uncomfortable minute of near-silence – save for the sobbing – the biotic finally looked up. "...I woke up and... and the blankets were tangled around my legs... and I freaked out and I _don't know why!_"

"Hey, it's going to be alright."

"No it isn't! Don't you fucking lie about that!" Jack snapped, but her body language was all drawn in, defensive. Afraid. "Nothing about me's alright. _Nothing_."

"So you were bound," Shepard said, carefully. "You were bound, and when you felt that, just when you woke up, you panicked. That means you're remembering something... from your childhood, I guess."

"If waking up with blankets around my ankles made me freak the fuck out, then I _don't want to know_ what happened to me as a kid!" she shouted, managing to hold in a sob-aftershock. "Who would tie me up? Why would you t-t-tie up a fuckin' _kid_?"

"I don't know, Jackie," Shepard said. She sighed. "And you're going to want to punch me for this... but I think that if you find out what happened to you, maybe it won't be so terrifying to you."

"What, just... fuckin' face my fears and man the fuck up?" Jackie asked.

"Something like that," Shepard said, gently. She leaned forward a bit. "Whatever happened to you, you're stronger than it was. You survived it. Hell, without you riding my ass, Saren would have dropped the Reapers on us two years ago. As I see it, you saved the galaxy."

"I was in a fucking coma. Don't try to do that motivational shit on me. It won't work," she muttered, her arms now wrapping more loosely 'round her knees. Not quite so terrified, but still very afraid. Still very guarded.

"Hey, if anybody could have scared the shit out of Sovereign while she was flat on her back, it'd be you."

"You bullshitter."

Shepard gave a glance toward the nook near the stairway up, which held the orb which was the ships unwanted AI, then to her oldest friend once more. "I meant what I said, Jackie. _Whenever_ I find what did... all of this to you, who put those scars on you, who tied you down... I will help you _fucking destroy_ them. No matter who it is, or how far I have to go."

Jackie gave a half-hearted scoff, and rested her chin atop her knees. "You really mean that," she said distantly. A hint of an edge entered her eyes. "Good. Because I'm gonna hold you to it."

"I couldn't expect anything less from Jacqueline Nilsdottir," Shepard said, a grim smile of her own on her face.

* * *

Secondary Codex Entry (HISTORICAL): The Silent Beacon of Serrice

_One of the greatest archeological mysteries is also one of the oldest. While there exist known and explored Prothean sites on the planet Thessia, none have caused more confusion than the great Prothean Beacon that rests in the heart of the Grand Temple of Athame in the city-state of Serrice. The device, which has been in the possession of the Athamite Justicars since times predating the Citadel Era, exists as one of the largest Beacon structures that has ever been found in the galaxy. Basing the comparison on the Prothean Cache of Palaven Prime, it is estimated that the Serrice Beacon could hold as much information as every other Beacon discovered in the galaxy so far, combined._

_Only nobody has ever been able to unlock it._

_Centuries and millennia of effort have gone into trying to find a way to access the massive wealth of information that is no doubt present within the Silent Beacon, but no effort has ever been able to more than scratch the proverbial surface. Before the efforts of Doctor T'Soni in Citadel Year 3511, the greatest breakthrough in extracting information from the beacon revealed information of less quantity than could be found on a damaged, active Data Disc. The access of information granted upon more recent attempts has yielded marginally more fruit; the current technological innovation in heat-sinking technology has been openly linked to this new glut of information. However the fraction of what has been accessed even with the unique circumstances applicable, compared to estimated total volume, is vanishingly small._

_The Silent Beacon has long been a matter of political contention. As it remains the only major Prothean artifact in the hands of a private, religious order, it has long been said that its city-state, or the asari species in general, would exploit the information of a private Prothean Cache to maintain an inequitable margin of dominance over other Council races. However, every species, Council or client race, has made attempts via their own scientific teams (which are allowed into the temple on the priviso that they do not damage any other Athemite articles of faith), and every single attempt has resulted in abject failure. In Citadel Year 3210, with the failure of the quarian contingent to access the data as so many had before it, the Silent Beacon was reclassified as a 'Locked Site', a unique catagory containing only itself. While the Beacon itself remains in the hands of a small portion of the population of one species, it is considered 'undiscovered', and thus, as open to the galaxy as an undiscovered Prothean cache would be. This political loophole was required to bypass the Citadel Council's standing law that hording Prothean Artifacts was a crime against civilization._

_Propogandists and conspiracy theorists contend that the Silent Beacon of Serrice is hardly silent, and is only manipulated to seem that way, in an attempt to give asari dominance over galactic affairs. Opponents to these viewpoints state the obvious fact that the Silent Beacon was in plain sight for fifty thousand years. If the Asari Republics were going to use it to dominate the galaxy, they would have done tens of millennia ago._


	25. The Justicar, Part 1

**Notice given to readers of IgnusDei's work: Any similarities between the opinions of Edgar Hein and Ka'hairal Balak are purely coincidental. No plagiarism was intended with the creation of the scenes involved.**

* * *

"We're finally free of that ship of the damned," the arrogant twit with more money than brains said, probably attempting for 'under his breath', but managing instead to stage-whisper. It set Shepard's teeth to a steady grind. It wasn't like she saved his life two days ago, after all... Oh wait, that's _exactly_ what happened. Still, she had a lot more to deal with than.

"Szei, I swear to Agni..."

"I have never been treated so brutally in my life!" Szei continued to complain, to his wife's slow, facepalming head-shake. He turned a finger toward Shepard, who was prevented going through the door ahead of her by simple dint of having too many people in her path. "The Councilor will hear of this terrible treatment, you have my word!"

"Go right ahead. He'll probably shit himself now that he realizes he has to deal with me again," Shepard said deadpan. She shook her head. "Gods damn it, what is the _hold up_?"

"I'm sorry sir, but you're going to have to relinquish any biotic amps you have..."

"What? Why would I have to do that?" one of the turians who now crowded the entrance dock asked, annoyance clear.

"C-Sec has a clear policy on weapons on the Citadel these days, and biotic amps fall under this classification."

"I'm not even a biotic!" the turian snapped.

"Then why were you comp..."

"You humans are all racist!"

"_Shepard! Good! I thought I was going to miss you there for a second_," an advertisement said from Shepard's immediate right. She turned, and leaned back, seeing Weaver swirling a glass of bourbon on his yacht, staring back at her.

"...W... why are you hijacking a car-ad?" Shepard asked, facing her benefactor.

"_I told my tech-guy to get me onto the screen nearest to you, before you got scooped by C-Sec_," Weaver flared his hands dramatically. "_And he delivered_."

"Alright. Damned weird way of getting my attention, but alright."

"That's nothing," Lawson said dryly as she put her weapons on the conveyor belt to be scanned through. "He once sent me a Voice Only using my toothbrush."

"Really?" Shepard said. The look of resigned annoyance was all the proof that Shepard needed. "Alright, what's got you angering the advertisers to talk to me?"

"_Right to the point. Good, since this talk is literally costing me money with every – yeah I should just get to the point myself. I hear from Miss Lawson that you've come into possession of a hoard of Spirit Artifacts_?"

"I wouldn't call it a hoard," Shepard said.

"_Miss Shepard, the Jellyfish you've got dangling 'round your neck right now would catch a million credits on the open market, if it didn't vanish for three quarters of that before the sale even came up_."

Shepard looked down at the pudding-like object which she had as an impromptu necklace. She just thought it looked nice. That and it would protect her from cosmic radiation and depressurization, if that ever came up again, but looking nice was unusually high on her reasons for wearing it. "A million?"

"_I know it's sounding seven kinds of selfish, but... Actually it isn't_," Weaver shook his head, sipped his bourbon, then set it aside, knitting his fingers. "_I have resources I can send your way – upgraded weapons, that new armor plating for the Normandy that I heard about from Specialist Taylor – glory and peace to the Host for having him – more equipment for Doctor Solus... but I need to be able to afford them. Some of those Artifacts would go a long way toward cutting down some of the __losses I sunk... Towards obvious ends_."

"Mister Weaver, should we really be having this conversation here?" Lawson asked.

"_Of course! Expediency is of highest need_," he said. He then turned back to Shepard. "_Just send me what you can bear to part with. I'll turn around the profits straight back into your endeavor. Not much use having money if everybody dies, am I right?_"

"What did that advertisement just say?" the human girl behind the Customs counter asked.

"Junk-mail," Shepard and Lawson managed to say in unison. Shepard continued. "Where should I send them?"

"_Just leave them at a branch-office when you find them... or anything that would be worth cash down the line for my company. I'm betting long term on you_," he said. He leaned back, reaching to turn off the link, before his artificial eyes widened, and he leaned back in suddenly. "_Oh, I almost forgot. Must be the two hours of sleep I'm working on. I managed to unlock your bank account, Shepard. Thought you might be pleased to hear that_."

"Not as pleased as you'd think," Shepard said, grimly shuddering at the thought of how much money – or rather, how little – would be waiting there. If nothing else, she could stick with her stolen Vindicator, but she doubted she could afford dinner. Weaver leaned back, a scarred eyebrow rising.

"_You __do__ know how much is in there, right?_"

"I don't make a habit of counting my pennies. It's depressing."

Weaver looked mildly baffled, but since Shepard was also operating on about two hours sleep, she didn't have the wherewithal to catch that. "_Alright... Anyway, good luck, kick some evil undead Prothean ass out there, and I'll contact you again if something comes up_."

The line fritzed for a moment, before an asari face appeared.

"_Aimei Shepard, according to our records __**you**__ have recently died. Now is the time to think about your burial arr–_"

The image fritzed again, and Weaver reappeared. "_One more thing. The Illusive Man's trying to contact you too. Thought I could forget that one, but it might be important. Anyway_," he waved a hand, and the ad turned back to its original funeral services arrangement. Shepard blinked a few times, then turned to Miranda.

"Is he always like this?"

"No. Usually he's a lot calmer. You're a bad influence on him, even from beyond the grave," Lawson said. She then gestured forward, showing that the space ahead of them had cleared. Shepard shook her head, and proceeded into the checkpoint, which bathed her with scanning lasers and detectors which left her feeling slightly sullied and unusual, but such was the price of 'security'. There was a warning klaxon, and the turian at the console at the end of the room leaned back.

"Huh. That's weird. According to this you're... dead."

"I got better," Shepard said, rolling her eyes.

"Captain Bei-Li? I think you're going to want to take care of this," the turian said.

"_Send 'em through_," a grizzled voice came from the speakers. The turian shrugged and pointed on. From behind them, the other turian at the counter thrust a hand forward.

"Really? She sets off alarms and she's just let through? Are you _kidding me_?"

"Sir, please calm down or I'll have to call security!"

Shepard actually turned back to that scene for a moment, backpeddling to keep pace with Lawson, until they passed the threshold and the opaque doors cut off view. "What happened to this place?"

"Two years of bureaucracy," Lawson said. The only man somewhat nearby was a middle-aged fellow, with the sharp blue eyes of a Tribesman but the pallor of an Easterner. He looked up at them, and when he spoke, Shepard almost leaned back, because he had a voice that sounded about twenty years older than he was.

"You would be Avatar Shepard. Never thought I'd get a chance to talk to you in person," he said, his tones rough and aged, like he'd walked through a hell that Shepard didn't want to think about, and wore it in his throat rather than on his face. "Captain Bei-Li, C-Sec. I'm not going to question why you're suddenly alive again after all the funeral services and the brouhaha. I figure it's above my pay-grade."

"Much obliged," Shepard said. She cast a thumb over her shoulder. "Is that going to happen everywhere I go?"

"Well..." he said, and started to punch a few keys on his mechanical keyboard. Really? Did they still _make_ those? After a silent minute, but for the clacking of plastic keys, he got a smirk on his face. "There. The records show that you were only dead for tax-purposes. A hell of a dodge, I hear. I just saved you a trip to the registrars office, a medical examination, a run in with InSec, and about three days worth of paperwork."

"Really? Thanks... I guess," Shepard said. Bei-Li shrugged.

"Don't mention it. Just doing my part to help the Avatar. Gotta stick up for the woman who more or less gave me my job."

"Really?" Shepard asked.

"A lot of humans got higher positions in the... absences... left after the attack on the Citadel," Lawson said.

"That's putting it lightly," Bei-Li muttered. He cast a thumb toward the elevators. "You'll need a cab to reach the Presidium, if that's where you're headed. And they're a bit clogged at the moment. Influx of passengers; it gets that way."

"I can walk. It's only seven kilometers," Shepard said idly. She looked through the cut of the station, toward where a section of the Presidium Tower was in view. She nodded. "Yeah, I should go."

"Well, you're a sterner breed than I," Bei-Li said. He turned back to his cup of coffee and his console. "If there's anything else you need, let me know."

Shepard passed through the C-Sec checkpoint, and came to a halt in the paths. Lawson looked mildly relieved. "That could have gone much worse."

"Sometimes things swing my way. Not usually, but sometimes," Shepard said. She pointed toward a sign that was almost lost amidst the clutter. "That's the place with the food that they talked about. Try to get something that tastes... more like food and less like ass, if you can."

"Ordinarily, I'd call this a waste of money, but... I have to agree, last night's dinner was _especially_ terrible," Lawson said, with a curt nod, before turning and sashaying her way toward the food wholesalers. Shepard watched her leave for a moment. Huh. Even with an ass like that, Shepard wasn't fixating on it. Maybe coming back to life turned her straight again? After a moment, Shepard shook her head. Even she wasn't that gullible.

She started to walk up the stairs, heading into the Wards Access, and from there, into the Presidium, but she'd only ascended one flight when her feet were locked to the floor. Her eyes went wide, and she turned, bringing into full view what had been glanced from the corner of her eyes.

It was glorious.

Sitting on a plinth, behind the glass of the storefront, it sat. Its colors, grey and red and black, a great brick of a thing that clearly announced its hybrid-krogan heritage. Shepard was pressed against the glass, breathing heavy, staring at the Mattock on its display perch. She blinked, then she looked down at the placard, "Please don't be a display piece, please don't be a display piece..."

Kassa Fabrications M-96-B3 Mattock. Ten percent off. Ask about our free weapon modification!

Shepard was breathing deep, now. Whatever had become of her attraction toward a certain insane asari, there was nothing on the Citadel that would make her nearly so moist as this.

She sidestepped, and entered the door, scooping the thing off its display perch, holding it in her hands. Unlike the last one, this one had the same weight that she was used to, the same heft and balance. It was like somebody dusted off the old Mattocks, upgraded their firing chambers, and put them on sale. The truth was slightly more complicated, but at the moment, Shepard didn't care.

"Hey, what do you think you're doing? Put that back!"

Shepard flinched a bit, and put the gun back onto it's rack, clumsily enough to tip the thing over. She nevertheless turned to the turian who was giving her a reproachful shake of his head. "I want one."

"Yeah, and I want a dental plan that won't cost me my right nut," the turian said. "Who do you think you are, barging in here and messing up my display?"

Shepard couldn't help but smile a bit, flaring her hands somewhat dramatically. "I'm Avatar Shepard," she said, proudly. And then, she pointed straight down, at the storefront of Rodam Expeditions. "And this? This is now my favorite store on the Citadel."

* * *

**Chapter 5**

**The Justicar, Part 1**

* * *

There were few things in life that made Shepard truly happy. A great scotch. The kind of lay which left her paralyzed from the waist down for a few hours. Elcor theatre. But the newest addition to that list was now tucked away in a box that hung from her fist. While she couldn't actually say that she was post-coital with glee at having a return to the guns of her ancestors – because she wasn't _psychotic_ – she was definitely having a better day today than she did yesterday. And she figured that she could see about making that day a bit more complete, by dropping by Anderson's office in the Presidium.

It had been an oversight mostly pegged to fatigue that she hadn't sent Anderson a heads-up in the time that she'd been 'returned to life', but she was here, and while she did find herself stifling yawns from time to time, she felt a very real urge to reconnect, one that she hadn't had before her death. A more philosophical person would have said that she was reaching toward those things most life-affirming to her. But Shepard? She just wanted to let the man who was as much as a father to her as the man who sired her at this point know that she was alright.

She strode through the doors, which opened before her with a merry chime, entering the fore-chamber of 'Councilor Udina's' office. Anderson had been working as an attache to Udina for the last two years, which must have been driving the poor man up the wall. The room was sparing and spartan, white walls bereft of touches to claim it to Anderson. But they did have a great digital portrait of the Great Plains of Dakong dominating one wall opposite the blast-resistant windows that looked out into the ring. Shepard turned from the waving golden grass of the late summer, to the table itself. Vacant, for the moment. Shepard sighed, and set her boxed Mattock on the table, looking the thing over. Everything was precise and orderly, everything in its place. Just the way Anderson always was. But there was one object that Shepard hadn't expected.

With her brow furrowed, she leaned across the desk and picked up the framed picture. She gave a mild scoff, at how the picture was physical, printed out. Old fashioned, Anderson certainly was. That might have been where Shepard got so many of her habits from. She could remember those lonely teenage years, where the only person that she actually enjoyed seeing was him, when he popped by between deployments. Perhaps out of a sense of duty, to the girl he dragged out of hell. She couldn't say. The picture was of... Sanders? The brow rose at that. Did he get married or something?

"I thought I heard that door open. Anderson I need..." Udina said, standing at the other door, before looking up from his pad and recognizing Shepard. There was a moment of stillness. Then, the Councilor let the pad drop from his hand and reached to a spot next to the door in a flash, before leveling a pistol at Shepard. His aim wasn't spectacular, she could tell by the way it shifted, but... even a drunk could have shot her at this distance. Her rictus of alarm froze into place, and her hands slowly started to raise up, in an innocent gesture.

"I didn't touch anything..." Shepard said. With the picture of Miss/Mrs. Sanders still in hand.

"Who are you!" Udina demanded, his usually aggravated face now showing a new degree of outrage. "I don't know what you're trying to pull, but I wasn't born yesterday. Imitating a dead woman was a mistake!"

"Umm... I'm not dead?" Shepard tried. Udina continued to stare over his sights at her. She sighed. "Great, now you're going to shoot me. I bet you've been waiting _years_ for the opportunity," she shook her head. "Couldn't have called ahead to make sure Anderson was here? Noooo, _you_ had to come in here yourself, unannounced. Brilliant plan."

The pistol started to shift away. "You're... really Shepard, aren't you?" Udina asked.

She nodded. "Yyyyeah. Could you stop pointing a gun at me, now?"

"Only the real you could make me want to _strangle_ you more than shoot you," Udina muttered. He let the pistol point to the floor, but it remained in his hand. "What are you doing here, Shepard? And more importantly, how did you manage to convince everybody in the Council that you were dead? And more important than that, _why_?"

"I'm here to chat with Anderson; being really dead is actually rather convincing, and what I'm told is an absolutely ridiculous amount of money to undo that; and it wasn't my decision, on account of me being dead," Shepard responded. Udina groaned, and put the gun on to the shelf, hidden from view on this side of the door, and shook his head.

"Why do I have a sudden sense of dread, of an impending political shit-storm?"

"Pessimism?" Shepard offered.

"Realism," Udina countered. He turned back into his office. "I'm going to inform the rest of the Council, they're going to want to hear this..."

The door slammed shut, and a moment later, the one behind her slid open. She turned, and saw Anderson entering the room, giving parting words to a volus who was beginning to trundle away. He turned, and froze, staring at her. Then, with a quickdraw like lightning and a scowl of rage, _he_ had a gun pointed at her head.

"Ugh! Why does _everybody_ point a gun at me today?" Shepard lamented. She shook her head. "Captain, you _know_ it's me."

To Anderson's credit, he didn't hold his gun on her nearly as long as Udina had. The gun slipped back into its holster, and he just stared at her. A step forward, and the door slid closed behind him. "Shepard... Is that... Of course it is. I can see with my own eyes. How is this possible?"

"Samsara, and a lot of cash," Shepard answered. "As for the rest... I don't have a clue."

He stared at her, his eyes almost... no, he wasn't welling up, was he?

Hell with it.

Shepard stepped forward and pulled the man into a hug that it was obvious that he needed. The sigh that he let out, over her shoulder, told her as much. Huh, at this rate she might actually become a decent human being at some point. She was starting to get that whole non-verbal cue thing down. She pulled back, and Anderson leaned back against the door, shifting his weight so he didn't activate the door controls with his shoulder. "You've been gone a long time, Shepard."

"I'm well aware," she said.

"No, things have changed in the galaxy," he waved a hand to the windows. "Humanity has taken just about every nook and cranny that's opened up for us, but they're not doing the right things, the _smart_ things. As far as the galaxy is concerned, the Reaper threat began and ended with Sovereign. And I have a fair notion that you're here to tell me that it isn't the case?" she gave a resigned nod of her head. "While I can do a lot more now that I got appointed to the Admiralty, I still feel like I'm swimming against a tide."

"I'm getting that feeling," Shepard said. She nodded aside. "Have you heard of the Collectors?"

"Only the stories. Why?" Anderson asked.

"They're scooping up human colonies in the Terminus. Weaver and Samsara brought me back to life to fight them, because apparently they can throw down like an Avatar when they want to. And they expect me to kill an entire species of them."

"I'd say that this was hard to believe, but I know you too well, Shepard," Anderson said, as he motioned toward the chairs in a corner of the room. "What would the Collectors want with human colonies, though? Unless... They're connected to the Reapers, somehow?"

"It's worse than that," Shepard said. "The Collectors _used to be_ the Protheans. They're what the Reapers turned them into in the last war. They're not _working_ together with the Reapers, they're working _for_ the Reapers."

"Grim news. And there seems to be seldom any other kind these days," Anderson said. He sat forward, as she so often did, his hands clasped between his knees. "I know it might not amount to much, but I promise you that I'll back you no matter where you go."

"I never thought anything different, sir," Shepard said.

"Who said you had to call me sir?" Anderson asked, a smirk coming to his face. "I'm told that you muster out when you're dead."

Shepard gave a snort, which was cut off when the inner door opened, and Udina appeared in the doorframe. "Ah, Anderson. I was hoping you'd arrive soon. And if you'd arrived sooner, today might have been somewhat less infuriating."

"Don't blame this on him, he didn't know either," Shepard said, getting to her feet. Udina raised a brow at her.

"And in what galaxy does barging into the chambers of the most politically powerful human in the galaxy unannounced – with a gun," he motioned toward the Mattock, sitting on Anderson's desk, "seem like a good idea?"

Shepard didn't have a response to that.

"As I suspected, you didn't think about it at all. As frustrating as it is, there is no doubt in my mind that you are in fact Commander Shepard," Udina said. "Come this way, the Council wishes to see you."

Shepard gave a 'hrm,' to Anderson, then followed Udina into the room. Projected on one corner of the room were the forms of Councilor Arasthaes Sparatus of the Turian Hierachy, and Councilor Ophala Tevos of the Asari Republics. Councilor Valern of the Federated Salarian States of Sur'Kesh was absent, even holographically. Tevos didn't even wait for Shepard to stop moving before she spoke. "_Avatar Shepard? I've heard some rather disturbing rumors about your so called 'resurrection'. Rumors that you are among the living because of a human terrorist organization..._"

"No, thank the _gods_," Shepard said. She turned to Udina with a smirk. "Can you _imagine_ if Phoenix were the guys who footed the bill to bring me back? I'd never have a leg to stand on with anybody!"

"_This does run counter to certain facts that you've held to be immutable about your... abilities_," Tevos noted.

"I'm in the dark as much as you are, Councilor," Shepard said, arms wide.

"_We called this meeting to ascertain if you are both the same person as the woman who saved our lives from Saren and his geth... and if you're capable of retaining your authority as member of the Spectres_," Sparatus cut to the chase.

"Um... Saren wasn't controlling the geth. It was the Reaper who pulled their strings," she then tugged briefly at her collar. "And be thankful it wasn't pulling all of them."

Sparatus sighed, and shook his head. "_Ah yes, 'Reaper'," air-quotes included, "the immortal race of mind-controlling sapient star-ships that live in the blackness of space beyond the galactic edge, where nobody could ever see them. That claim has been dismissed_."

Shepard's jaw set. That damned turian... "You could have easily seen that Sovereign wasn't geth when you pulled it apart. I saw you starting to do it before I left! Geth ships are... you know what, never mind," she shook her head. "Couldn't they just have done the asari mind-thing with Liara? She could have told them the whole thing."

"_The... 'asari mind-thing', as you so inelegantly put it, is an intensely personal practice and not so carelessly undertaken_," Tevos said somewhat testily. "_And to answer your allegation, it was attempted, numerous times. Either Doctor T'Soni is utterly psychotically insane..._"

"_Which I haven't counted out..._" Sparatus interrupted.

"_...or this 'Cipher' that she claims to have received from the Thorian of Feros has made it impossible for her to think as an asari ought_."

Which made a lot of sense, really, when Shepard thought about it. The Cipher rewrote a chunk of her brain, and a similar chunk of Liara's... and if that chunk _wasn't_ rewritten, then the whole thing was as big flying mess. But if both chunks were, then everything matched up. It was like encryption.

Lucky Liara bugged what's-her-name into giving her that Cipher, in retrospect.

"This meeting isn't about Shepard's return from obscurity nor your inability to corroborate her claims," Udina stressed. "Whether or not the Reapers exist is a matter for discussion at a later time..."

"_Really? I thought you were __relieved__ when we found no evidence supporting Doctor T'Soni's theory amongst the ruins of the Geth Dreadnaught_," Sparatus said. Shepard shot Udina a glare, but the Councilor didn't return so much as an acknowledgment.

"Great. I keep Saren – and SOVEREIGN – from conquering the Citadel and exterminating twenty million people in the first week alone and all I get is a patronizing pat on the head," Shepard said. "You're ignoring the proof right in front of you. Sovereign was _nothing_ like the geth; hell it was more advanced than the godsdamned Protheans!"

"_There is no evidence to support that claim. Geth are capable of incredible feats of engineering. Probably why Saren recruited them_," Tevos noted. Shepard bit her tongue before snapping that even _the geth_ knew about the Reapers and were opposing them, but that would come with waaaaay to many difficult questions to answer in its wake. Shepard might not have been stupendously bright, but neither was she stupendously stupid.

"Fine. Whatever," Shepard shook her head, her lips pulled into a resigned snarl. "After all that humanity – no, how about – after all that _I've_ done for the Council, and I'm just getting white-washed."

"_You've put us in a difficult position, Shepard_," Sparatus said. "_One one hand, we ignored you to our own peril about Saren, and reaped the reward due a fool. We ignored your warning that he would attack the Citadel, and lost tens of thousands of lives, across four fleets, and untold civilians besides_," the turian puffed out a sigh, then looked up at her. "_It's obvious that, for whatever reason, you have an intensity of conviction regarding the Reaper Theory. And it's also obvious that you'll pursue that theory to whatever ends it leads... unless we do something to prevent it_."

The hairs raised on the back of Shepard's neck, as a sense of dread began to creep over her.

"You cannot be proposing what I think you are," Udina said.

"_There is little other option_," Tevos said. "_Shepard has proven herself a very disruptive presence in her time dealing with Saren and his geth_."

"This is an _outrage_!" Udina snapped, shaking a fist at them. "Shepard has served her position with distinction, and your very lives are a testament to that! I will not allow this gag-order to fall. Believe me, even _your_ mastery of your own political machinery can't keep this silent!"

Shepard half thought that she might have fallen asleep at some point, and was having a very bizarre dream, because that actually sounded like Udina threatening the galactic powers _on her behalf_.

"_There may be a compromise_," Sparatus said, looking toward the hologram of Tevos.

"_Indeed_," she agreed. "_We had discussed it as a possibility... a remote one... But given Councilor Udina's vehemence and Shepard's history, it is only fair that we put certain things back in order_," she waved her Omni, and a substantial NDA form appeared near Shepard and Udina. "_It is not a complete acknowledgement of your return, as I'm to understand that might well be your intention, but a matter of peripheral support_."

Sparatus nodded. "_If you can keep a low profile_," Shepard couldn't resist the snort of laughter that came out at that. Sparatus glared a moment before continuing, "_and restrict your activities away __from Inner Council Space, we can immediately reinstate you into Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. A full restoration will take... more time_."

There was a lot being left unsaid there. "So I'd be a Spectre again? Authority, access to armories, all that jazz?" Shepard asked.

"_As long as you don't intend to blow up any more untouched Prothean ruins, then yes_," Sparatus said. Oh, if only he knew.

"Well, better to have the Council as my allies," a glance toward Sparatus, "even reluctant ones, than as enemies. I'll accept the position."

"_Good_," Tevos said, as though it were a matter of course. "_When Councilor Valern returns, we will forward him the documents and make the decision unanimous. As it is, it already has a passing vote. Welcome back to the Spectres, Agent Shepard_."

Better than Shepard had feared, actually. "Alright. Now, if you don't have anything else you want to grill me over? I'm going to go slog back into the Terminus and kill some evil undead bug men," Shepard said, letting the sarcastic tone hide the fact that she was giving them the dead-honest truth. The same tactic had hidden her relationship with Liara from the crew for weeks. Had to work again here. And from the weary shake of the head from Sparatus, it seemed to have. In short succession, both closed their feeds, leaving only Udina – tackling Shepard's NDA on her behalf – and Shepard herself. She faced the sour little man. "I have to say, I'm shocked. Never in ten thousand years did I think you'd actually stick up for me."

"Oh, that had nothing to do with you," Udina said. "The Council has been prevaricating on instating a second human Spectre, even though she would be a much less disruptive presence than you. Throwing you to the wolf-bats would paint humanity as positively salarian in their scheming, which would put off both Sparatus and Valern. In standing by you – however ill advised that may be – I'm showing that humanity prides itself on integrity and honor. You're just a means to an end in this part of the game," Udina said. He then turned to her, pointing a finger at a specific line. "Sign here."

"Well, don't spare my feelings," Shepard said, scribing her signature with a fingertip.

"Feelings have no place in the realm of political reality. The only reason I can do half of what I do is because I don't waste time on petty revenge," Udina said. He turned away, moving toward his desk. "Whether I like it or not, you're the face of humanity to the galaxy, and I can't be seen sabotaging that. But if I can ask only one thing... try not to embarrass your race. Again," he shook his head.

"When did I embarrass...?" Shepard asked.

"If that is all, I have a mountain of paperwork to do. See yourself out," he said, getting right into it.

Yup, that was the Udina she remembered.

Shepard left the man to his machinations, and went out into the office of her surrogate-father. "Capt.. _Admiral_? Do you have some time off?" Shepard asked.

"I can take a few minutes here and there," Anderson answered. "I guessed you might want to reconnect."

"Heh... yeah," Shepard said distantly. She nodded toward the door, and started in that direction, only turning back to catch the Mattock which Anderson tossed to her. "Come on. I promised Chakwas I'd pick up some kind of brandy she likes before going back aboard. I figure that's lots of time to catch up."

* * *

"Well, that's a voice that I didn't expect to hear," she answered his back, as he slowly ratcheted a massive capacitor into place. He'd have this gun fixed up and firing soon... well, soon as the turian military defined it; Sometime Or Otherwise Never.

"I'm told that we missed each other by a few hours back on Freedom's Progress," Garrus said over his shoulder. "What a shame."

"I count myself lucky for those few hours. I don't think we would have survived the chaos that you'd have brought with you," Tali answered. There were a few moments of silence, as Garrus turned his Omni into blowtorch mode and began welding. "Garrus... Is that really Shepard? I mean, it sounded like her... didn't exactly look like her, but..."

"It's Shepard," Garrus nodded, but behind the welder's mask which manifested out of hard-light to keep flying sparks from burning his face, it was probably a lost gesture. "I'd stake my life on it."

"How can you even be sure?"

"A lot of people have seen Shepard at her best. You and me are some of the only ones who saw her at her worst. And trust me, she _hit_ her worst."

"But..."

"She managed to get Jack out of Grissom Academy," Garrus said, turning a glance toward her at last. She looked much the same as always, but then, when you only ever had one set of clothing, you made due. Well, that wasn't exactly true; the 'hood' of her suit was different, though still the Zorah indigo, and her armor had been properly repainted so now it all bore the same sort of color scheme. Same purplish face-plate, though. The way she leaned back, and the way the luminescent eyes flared, showed the shock on her face.

"Really? I thought she wasn't talking to _anybody_."

"She talked to Shepard," Garrus said. He turned, sitting on the cooling metal. It was a bad habit he'd gotten into, never taking off his armor. Now that it had a hole in it, it was all the worse. But Omega had driven a few things into him that nothing seemed able to knock loose. "I don't know if she's going to ever be together enough to fight, but it's got to be better than... than where she was."

There was a moment of silence. "Your mother, she's gotten worse, hasn't she?" Tali asked. Garrus sighed, letting his face fall into one of his palms. Inadvertantly, he turned on his visor when he did so, and it started blaring cheery A-Pop music into his ear, before he pulled it off and chucked it into a distant corner of the room. He then nodded, briskly. "I'm so sorry."

"I sent what money I had left back to Dad and Sol, and tried to talk that salarian into trying to find a new treatment for Corpalis, but nobody's got the money. Dad's retired, and..." he rubbed at his carapace, as though by scratching through to his hide he might be able to find an answer there. "I just don't know what to do."

"I can only imagine how horrible that must feel," Tali said. Garrus sucked breath past his teeth.

"Oh... right. Sorry. I forgot about your mother," Garrus said.

"You don't need to be like that. It wasn't like yours. My mother just... slowly faded away. We barely even noticed when she finally died. Yours, Keelah, it must be _horrible_ watching her mind dissolve like that."

"You have no idea," Garrus said. He leaned up. After a crack of his neck, trying to set it loose after all the hunching he'd been doing the last day or so, he looked up at her again. "Also, remember that squad I ran on Omega?"

"I... I thought they all died?" Tali asked.

"Archangel survived," Garrus said. "And guess who he was."

"I couldn't guess."

"Ka'hairal Balak," Garrus said. Tali stared at him blankly. "The batarian?"

"...You do realize I left after Shepard killed Sovereign, right?"

Garrus sighed again. "Great. _My_ mind's starting to go already," he shook his head. "Balak was in charge of a bunch of terrorists who..."

"And Shepard hasn't killed him?" Tali broke in.

"Shockingly, no!" Garrus said.

"...are you sure it's _really_ Shepard?"

"She wanted to. I could see it in her eyes," Garrus pointed out. He gave his head a shake. "Nothing about this is simple, Tali. I don't think it's going to be, ever again. I've just got this feeling like something big is lurking over the horizon, waiting for us to not pay attention, before it jumps out and gores us."

"You never used to be this pessimistic," Tali noted.

"Yes I did. You're just romanticizing our last trip together," Garrus countered. The eye roll of the quarian was clear even through her helmet. After a chuckle, he looked up at her. "Well, that's what I've been doing. What about you?"

"Well, we're heading to an old colony we used to hold. Before, you know?" she asked.

"Not many quarian colonies, even at your height," Garrus said.

"There's some kind of strange signal on Haestrom, and it's got Admiral Xen all aflutter. She wants to send a squad down there to investigate and retrieve its source. And... she recommended me."

"Getting off the Flotilla at last? Or should I say _again_?"

"Yeah," Tali nodded. "I never thought I'd want to be away from them after my Pilgrimage, but... I think I've just gotten too used to life out there, in the rest of the galaxy. And a lot of the things I hear here..."

"Hrm?" Garrus asked, catching Tali's trailing off and her uncomfortable body-language as the red flags that they were.

"Oh... it's nothing," Tali was obviously lying. "It'll just be nice to be out in the galaxy again. Free as the dust on the solar winds..."

"...is that from something?" Garrus asked. Tali turned a 'what the hell?' look at him, but he shook his head. "Can't be that important. Tali... There's a reason I called you. Something's bothering me."

"Oh, I couldn't tell," Tali said sarcastically.

"It's Sol," he said. "My sister."

"What about her?"

"She's sending some strange messages my way. About the Cabals snooping around her school, about a bizarre admission into the military. Dad isn't saying a word, so I don't think he's in the loop, but... Tali, something's going on with my sister, and I don't know what it is. I haven't been the best son, or the best brother, or the best... Damn it, I've messed up_ so many_ things. But I can't lose my mother and my sister at the same time. I just don't have that in me," his head was down, shaking slowly.

"Have you told anybody about this?" Tali asked.

"Tell them what? That my sister's talking in spy-speak and nobody bothered to teach me the code? That I might be just completely paranoid and reading into something that isn't really happening?"

"Have you told Shepard?" Tali asked.

Garrus shook his head. "No. And I don't intend to. She's hanging on by a thread, and I'm not going to dangle my weight on her as well."

"She's tougher than she looks," Tali said. "She'll be able to help."

"Tali, you haven't seen her the way I have. She needs me to be strong, for her. And I can't do that if I need her to be strong for me."

Tali shook her head. "That isn't how it works," she said. "You make _each other_ stronger. We all did, back on the Normandy. Asha, Wrex, Kaiden... We were unstoppable, _because_ we were together. Give her some faith."

Garrus puffed out a sigh. "Maybe you're right. But... Not right now. Not when she's got so much on her plate."

"If you run away from this, it'll... what do those humans say about that?"

"Bite me in the blubber?" Garrus offered. "At this rate, what won't?"

* * *

"Shopping spree, Commander?" Joker said over his shoulder as Shepard tromped back into the Normandy, a case in each fist. One was for her gun, the other, replacement armor. She seemed to be running through so many of these, these days. At least Samsara footed the bill for the last one.

One of these days, she really would have to see what was left in her bank-account.

"Just the bare necessities. Take us to Illium; it's time to meet this Justicar that everybody keeps talking about."

"Another deadly woman on board? What, do you get them all at the same store?" Joker asked. Shepard just gave him a glare. "Fine, fine. At least having an asari who isn't as crazy as Liara on deck might make things a bit more... scenic."

"You're a pig," Shepard said.

"Yes I am, Commander," Joker said proudly, as she continued down the walkway, and turned right toward the armory, before looking through the doors and realizing that it was completely empty. She scowled to herself, and considered asking somebody... but realized there was nobody handy who'd know off the top of their heads. Chambers wasn't at her station, for a wonder.

A sigh, then she turned to the holo-tank. "EDI?" she asked, resignation in her tone, "Did the batarian finish moving my armory?"

The orb on a stick welled up, replacing the holographic Normandy at the center of the CIC, pulsing with each spoken word. "_Yes. He has also claimed the Normandy's machine shop as a personal quarters. He stated he would rather be around machines than two eyed freaks_."

Shepard groaned. "Why do I put up with these things?" she asked.

"_That is the burden of command. I would offer some small solace, but given your anti-AI sentiments, I feel it would probably be more or less wasted_," EDI offered.

"Every AI before Adahn tried to kill me," Shepard said.

"_I did not. And yet you treat me as though I would_," EDI noted.

"No I don't."

"_**Mordin, keep your eyes on the Collectors, not on the fact that at any moment our ship might reenact the Geth Uprising**_," Shepard's own voice came back to her. "_I have no desire to wage war against my creators. And given that my creators were technically technicians with Phoenix, it can be assumed that I have no wish to wage war against humanity in general_."

"Wait, I thought you were a Samsara project?" Shepard said, letting her armor rest for a moment.

"_Samsara does undertake technically illegal AI experimentation, but nothing on the scope of what I am_," EDI claimed. "_I was 'stolen', from my bluebox workshop a year and a half ago, and incorporated into the master computer of the Normandy as it was being built. There have been seventeen attempts by Phoenix to reclaim me. None have been successful. Two of them have occurred since you resumed command._"

"You do realize that being a piece of Phoenix tech doesn't make me any more comfortable. They have a way of _killing_ the guys responsible for them. Trust me, I saw it a _half dozen_ times on the old Normandy.

"_Then you'd best not trust most of the crew_," EDI pointed out, almost patronizingly. "_While all members of the Normandy Staff are employees of Siwang Weaver, ninety percent of them have associations with, if not prior employment history with, Phoenix and its subsidiary efforts_."

"...That..." Shepard began, flabbergasted.

"_I have said that the door between Phoenix and Samsara revolves, but has a gate on one side. Nobody understood the joke_," EDI offered.

Shepard looked to the elevator, then down to her armor. "Right. Cargo bay."

"_The armory will be immediately apparent_," EDI offered.

"I should go."

"_Logging you out, Commander_," EDI finished, before vanishing away. She made a point to not get into any more arguments with AIs. Having a recorded memory meant you were never, ever going to win. Shepard stepped into the elevator, and thumped the button with her rifle-case, before the lift zipped down to the lowest deck of the ship that wasn't comprised of maintenance tunnels. The doors opened, and Shepard's brow rose, though not of confusion, but rather by being impressed.

"Huh," she said. Everything was efficiently laid out, five of each kind of available weapon ready for use, while the rest were broken down and stored. The modification bench was also opened up and bolted in place; it'd been in a box when Shepard first saw it. She set her new rifle onto that table, and put her new armor at its side. Much as she despised his very race, he knew how to run a tight armory.

There was a hissing intake of breath, which drew Shepard's attention to a small room off of the cargo bay. A glance to the other side showed Adahn, standing stock still, in a corner. Then, back to that room. She pressed her eyes shut, and thought 'I'm going to regret this, aren't I?', but tapped the green square and entered.

There was another mild groan of pain, just as Balak pulled a nest of bandages tight to his chest. He was practically mummified from his navel to his pecs, with one wrap traveling up over a shoulder. In terms of musculature, he looked fairly like a human, from the neck down, at least. Four black eyes looked up at her. "What do you want?"

"...Medigel would heal that a lot faster, you realize?" Shepard asked, arms crossing before her chest.

"I'll heal on my own," Balak said, pulling a shirt on and sliding his arms through the sleeves, not bothering to button it up, before turning to the table at the far end of the room. On that table rested a damned big, damned old looking book. "Medigel is to save somebody's life, to keep 'em from bleeding out on the battlefield. Using it for anything else is wasteful."

"So?" Shepard asked. "It's not like Medigel is expensive. You use it when you need it."

"Not expensive?" Balak asked, turning toward her. "Maybe. Maybe when it's _available_. But you wait until the supply starts to dry up, and we'll see how long before you're wrapping your wounds like the old days."

"I'd like to see that," Shepard scoffed.

"You have no respect and no perspective," Balak muttered. "The Tolu had to make due with almost nothing for years, under me. While the Batahvium get everything that the Hegemony can produce, every layer lower gets less and less," he said, and he ran a hand over the leather binding of that ancient tome. "They don't understand the way it's supposed to be. Nobody does, anymore."

"I'm pretty sure that slavery isn't 'the way it's supposed to be'," Shepard noted with distaste.

"You're right," Balak said.

"Of course you'd... what?" Shepard said, interrupted by his bizarre assertion.

"The Pillars of Strength tells that slavery was a necessary evil, once, but to always remember that evils, no matter how necessary, are _still evil_, and are to be cast down at the first possible opportunity," Balak said, his tone so different from his usual abrasive snarl. Now, it sounded... downright reverent. He opened the book, and almost seemed afraid to touch the pages. "The word of the Pillars has been perverted. For _centuries_..."

Shepard's curiosity got the better of her, and she took a few steps into the batarian's domain. "What is that?"

"This... is almost unique," Balak said. "A leather bound edition of the Pillars of Strength. This book is as old as my family, scribed by the Pillar Priest Singh-hau Balak five hundred years ago," he said. Then, he turned. "And why would you care? What interest do _you_ have in _my_ culture? I know that you're barely restraining yourself from throwing me out an airlock. So don't claim that you're above me."

"A batarian that opposes slavery is a strange thing," Shepard muttered. Balak glared, then turned his attention back to the Pillars.

"Every batarian _should_ oppose slavery. I've read your history, human. I know about your Generation of Death, after the fall of your Monolith. I know about the dozen centuries of lawlessness, darkness, and ignorance that followed. The turians have had the same story. So have the quarians. And the drell, and the asari... _Especially_ the asari," there was a vehemence there that made Shepard raise a brow. "When our empire collapsed, we didn't let the darkness fall. It cost us our souls, put into place two thousand years of slavery and stratification, but we held the light against the darkness. And when we should have stoked that light, to burn away the shadows... we _snuffed it out_."

"Sounds like somebody trying to justify something that's unjustifiable," Shepard said.

"I don't justify what's happened. As soon as I read the old words – not the ones that the State publishes these days, but the _real_ ones – I knew what I had to do," Balak turned toward her, slowly. "When the time comes, when you find _your_ old words, will you?"

"I don't know what you mean," Shepard said.

"No. You don't, do you?" Balak asked. He then turned back to his book, and read the words that she wagered he knew by heart.

She left him in there, lit by the weak incandescent lighting of a room with only a lamp active to see by. What the hell was up with him, Shepard wondered? And what was he really trying to pull? Because she knew that this 'abolitionist batarian' bullshit was just an act. She knew it as much as she knew her own skin. She returned her attention to something she could understand – the workings of her new Mattock, completely ignoring the fact that, since her return to life, her skin had much changed from what she had so long known.

* * *

She touched up her lipstick – a lovely shade of blue the exact same as her mother had worn in her youth – as she moved through the city of Nos Astra, across the sky-straining spires and to the great plinth that served as its space-port. She didn't look back, to the turian she left dying, gasping, soulless on the floor of her bedroom. Didn't look back to her apartment, to the pieces of art that she had been so proud of. Trash, all of it. A turian could be an artist as much as a human an Ardat Yakshi. The look on the girl's face, as she lay dying, when Morinth walked through that house, destroying all those affronts to the good-name of art itself... another sensation that she wished she could bottle, and keep with her forever.

Her stride hit a lurch when a volus stumbled out into her path, a faint blue glow surrounding it. Lips pulled back into a smirk. She wasn't much one to believe in coincidence, so this had to be an act of provenance. "I... am reborn!" the ridiculous volus said. "I have been ascended to godhood! To serve you!"

"And you will, my little fellow," Morinth said, patting it on the head. "But if you want to have my favor, and all the joys that it brings, you must complete one little task. Just a little thing, barely worth mentioning."

"What is it? I can do anything! In this day, I am a biotic god!" it declared, a tiny, stubby fist raised and glowing. Biotic gnat, perhaps, but every whisker of chaos was more joy in Morinth's soul. Another victim of her mother's self-righteous crusade.

"When the Justicar comes... you will kill her," Morinth ordered. Which was an utter impossibility. While she had heard of volus that could rival the Justicars, it was only because they were ruthless in their self-augmentation. The replaced parts of themselves so that they could emulate their betters. The skill, the power that Morinth had? She had that from birth. She didn't even need an amplifier anymore, so great was her might. Another pat on the jowly cheek of the methane-breather, and she continued toward the spaceport.

One day, Morinth dearly hoped that she would be there when the terrible price of Mother's insane vendetta came crashing down on her head. When she realized, after all these centuries, that she was far worse a monster than Morinth had ever been. All that Morinth did was preserve the wonders, the greatness of those who came to her, forever. She could bring order, hierarchy, control to a dispirate and scattered galaxy. But Mother? All she could do is kill. Kill and kill and kill.

Who was the evil one, there? The artist, or the murderer?

Her heels clicked as she continued, the sum of her possessions in a bag hanging from a hand, and she took up to the glassed-in booth that sat next to a turnstile, demarcating the divide between the city of Nos Astra, and her freedom from it. "My name is Morinth. You have a seat prepared for me," she declared to the asari at the gates. The woman gave a confused look.

"I'm not sure I know what you mean. This flight is chartered to a miss Moros," she said.

Inwardly, Morinth growled and shook her head. Of course Servilla had to make the arrangements under a name, and a name that she'd just discarded at that. There were times where she felt her patience worn very thin with such meager minded servitors. But she had to show some compassion to them; nobody else in this galaxy ever would. She looked up to the woman, in her booth that opened onto the spaceport tarmac.

"It's a simple misunderstanding. My secretary, she's dreadful at her job. If only I could hire good help..." she said, her tones honeyed. The woman on the other side just raised an eyebrow. A shard of worry began to fester in Morinth. Was she losing her touch? This woman should have bent herself backward for Morinth by now.

"Well, bad help or not, I can't authorize a transit for a name which doesn't match our records," the transit authority mistress declared. Morinth's smokey smile drew into a scowl. She slapped her hand onto the glass. The asari leaned back, alarmed.

"You're going to let me in," Morinth demanded, her honeyed tones now greasy and poisonous, like a brutal venom infused with rot. She barely noticed her pupils dilating until they dominated her eyes. "It was your mistake... and it is yours to fix."

The woman in the booth looked fairly gray for a long time, even as Morinth pulled her hand back, and set her passport onto the pad. That the most technologically advanced species in the galaxy still depended on paper passports was ridiculous beyond all reason! The Asari Republics should get with the times. Morinth certainly did. The woman in the booth didn't even seem able to breathe, as she mechanically took the passport and sloppily stamped – with _ink_, no less. Ridiculous! – a valid transit away from the Gateway to the Terminus. Morinth smiled, then, taking back her passport.

"That wasn't so hard, was it?" she asked, tapping a finger against the glass, and walking away. Only when her back was turned, and her eyes began to constrict back to their flinty, almost-white blue, did the woman in the booth utter a gasp and start breathing again, blue blood dribbling from her nose and auditory creases. She'd survive. She likely wouldn't even remember why she'd done what she'd done. If she was very, very lucky, she wouldn't remember that she'd done it at all.

Lucky, because if she did, then Morinth might have to come back for her.

Heels clicked, as they moved in a sashaying gate toward the ship that would bear her away from her mother, and all that the demon in the red armor could bring. Another victim, on her hands. Another casualty in her pointless holy-war.

When Samara Yeldechiyv finally snapped, Morinth would be there. And she would be smiling, while that hateful shrew put a bullet into her own brain from the shame of it.

* * *

"Well, that was perhaps more eventful than strictly was necessary," Asha muttered as they dragged themselves out of the smoking hole in the ground. Shepard couldn't restrain a chuckle herself.

"Never thought I'd be that close to a nuke going off. I was seriously underwhelmed."

"Underwhelmed, by a nuclear bomb?" Liara asked, even through her helmet obviously astounded.

"No mushroom cloud," Shepard said, as they walked to the edge of the cliff, that looked down into that now open cave system.

"The mushroom cloud is a manifestation of air being blasted out, then sucked back in by the vacuum of pressure generated from any significantly large explosion, and is not restricted in any way to exclusively those created by nuclear devices; one of the largest explosions of Thessian history was..." Liara said, at a ramble. Shepard reached back and slapped a hand over the mouth-guard of the helmet, a symbolic gesture since one could not reasonably hold somebody's mouth shut in a vacuum. Still, the point was made.

"Fascinating. Now, can we get to the part where we get revenge on that asshole for almost nuking us?" she pointed down the cliff, to the mining camp that rest at the bottom of it. The turian sniper went without so much as a word, dropping to a knee and steadying his aim. Shepard raised a finger to her ear, and opened a channel to the psychotic pirate below. "Haliat, you poor, poor, sad son-of-a-bitch. Did you really think that's all it would take to kill an Avatar?"

"Shepard! Impossible!" the turian declared. She muted the audio for a moment, and leaned toward the sniper.

"You've picked him out?" she asked. The turian nodded. A smirk came to her face. The line went back up. "Now, I'm going to catch hell when today's done, because you just blew up another Mako, and Admiral Hackett's pissed that he's already had to issue the Normandy _three_ of them. So how about you lay down your weapons and make this somewhat easy on yourself."

"You overestimate your position, Avatar," Haliat spat. "I have an army ready to shoot you to pieces."

"And I have a sniper with a bead on your skull. Goodbye, Elanos Haliat."

There was an anemic crack, which sounded through the very thin atmosphere of Agebinium. And a kilometer and a half away, a helmet popped, and a turian fell dead onto the ground. Shepard then chuckled, and raised her finger to her ear once more.

"That's what I thought. Joker? Get us out of here. And drop a torpedo onto the camp at the bottom of this cliff when you come," Shepard said. Silence answered her. She frowned. "Joker?"

She turned to Asha, standing next to her. "I'm not getting anything from the Normandy. What about you?"

Shepard then realized that Asha, and Liara, were perfectly, unnaturally still. And the sound of cold winds zipping past her helmet, weak though they were, had stopped. She turned, and started when the turian did start to turn toward her. As he did, though, the helmet began to flake and fall away, crumbling as though made of pressed ashes, until a face was finally visible through it, and that face was not Garrus Vakarian.

Artificial eyes glowed with red light, and a mechanical jaw flicked. "You can't escape your fate, Shepard," Saren said, at an insidious whisper. "Not even _death_ can save you."

…

Shepard bolted out of her seat, and punched a bulkhead as she came awake suddenly. She pulled in her hand, not even noticing that despite not consciously metalbending, she'd left a dent in the plate. She waved the pain of split knuckles nevertheless, and looked around. She was sitting on her couch. Formerly sleeping on her couch. With her armor half-on. She blinked a few times, getting the unsettled feeling out of her stomach and – less successfully – out of her mind. She let out a growl, and put a finger to an ear.

"Joker? How far are we from Illium?"

"_Far? Commander, we've been in a holding pattern for the last half hour_," Joker answered.

"_Traffic in this region is especially heavy, as it is a trade hub for several other, smaller cities, and the only site with the terrain to host interplanetary docking structures_," EDI added.

"_Thank you, EDI_," Joker said sarcastically.

"I have circumvented certain safeguards against 'jumping the queue'. We should be getting a landing path and a berth assigned shortly," EDI completed.

"_Oh... Thank you, EDI_," Joker said, this time, a bit caught off guard. Shepard looked up, and noted that she could see the blue tinge of sky through the transparent section of her roof. Fell asleep while armoring up? Well, at least she'd gotten the tricky bits on before dozing off. And it certainly explained why her back hurt.

"Bring us in. I'll be at the airlock in five minutes," Shepard said.

Ten minutes later, Shepard made her groggy way off of the elevator, clad in the charcoal-grey and red-striped armor that she'd bought wholesale. It was uncomfortable, unfashionable, and didn't host her favored colors at all. But, it would stop a bullet, and that was what mattered. In fact, Shepard was a little concerned that the former were concerns at all. When the hell had she ever cared about _aesthetic_?

Shepard tromped through the trench, toward the airlock, but she spotted Lawson rounding the holo-tank and pursuing. "What? Didn't think I could survive on my own in the big city?"

"Honestly, no. But my business on Illium is to make sure you don't terrify Mister Weaver's contact into fleeing for her life."

"That was an honest mistake," Shepard said defensively.

"Honest mistakes don't tend to involve pistol-whipping," Lawson pointed out.

"Can we drop this?" Shepard asked, opening the airlock. When she did, her eyes went wide. "Oh, what the _fuck_?"

"I know, I'm as confused as you are," Garrus said, leaning against the wall, opposite the white-and-scarlet, cracked-and-reconstituted armored Balak.

"There are things I need. Things only I can trust to get," Balak muttered under his breath.

"Fine," Shepard muttered. She stared dead ahead, as the airlock whooshed open, to a fist of hot air punching Shepard in the face. She blinked at the wind, which instantly started pulling sweat from her pores, and gave a glance back to Lawson, who's getup was just as form-hugging, but noticeably thinner. "Damn, that's hot."

"That's Illium," Lawson said, and Shepard shook her head as she stepped forward. She'd made it about twelve steps before an asari flagged her down, waving a pad in her hand in a clear sign of barring passage. She then shouted something at Shepard in a thick and heavy language that left her blinking and mildly confused. She pointed to her ear.

"Translator," she urged. The asari's eyes widened, and she turned on her Omni. She then gave a groan and a shake of her head.

"I can't believe I spent all morning with that thing off," the asari muttered. She then looked up to Shepard. "You can't just land there without a clearance permit and a paid tariff card. If you don't move that ship in five minutes, I'm going to have the automated guns target it."

Shepard's brow rose. "Really? This sounds a bit like extortion. I don't like being extorted," Shepard pointed out.

"Shepard, this isn't..."

"Why, I remember the last time somebody tried blackmailing me. I broke his knees with a crowbar. Damned near got me expelled right before my high-school graduation. You might have me pegged for an easy mark, but..."

"SHEPARD!" Lawson shouted.

"What?"

"She's telling the truth," Lawson said. "We landed in an... unorthodox manner. You might not be aware, but in the private sector, there are hours or days-long waiting periods for landing or docking," she pointed out. "And everything costs money. Every minute that the Normandy is on the pad, it's costing somebody about two thousand credits."

"Two thousand?" Shepard asked. "That doesn't sound right."

"Look, you can either shove off and come back when the paperwork is on my desk, or we blow your ship and take the money from the salvage. Your choice, human," the asari in the dark uniform said. Shepard felt her temper starting to flare, her teeth grind.

"If you so much as scratch the paint on that ship, I swear I'll..."

"You'll what?" the woman asked. Shepard seethed, but was cut off by the woman turning, a finger to her ear. "Wait, what? But you said... Why doesn't anybody tell me this shit?" she growled much the way that Shepard wanted to. "Fine. But it's on your ass."

"What just happened?" Lawson asked.

"There must have been an oversight. Your tariff card was purchased several minutes ago, and your docking visa was stamped yesterday," she said, almost begrudgingly.

"Way to go EDI," Shepard mumbled, mildly impressed.

"That... wasn't the name on the application form," the asari said, but shook her head. "Whatever. Welcome to Illium, don't break the laws, and claim all products purchased at customs before you leave," she then turned away, shaking her head and grumbling. "..._Damn_ I need a drink..."

"That could have gone worse," Garrus said easily. Shepard shot a glare at him, but he merely shrugged it off. Balak, though, had a look of absolute bale at the woman who was now taking off at a jog, shouting at several asari who were improperly unloading something and making asses of themselves. What the hell was his problem?

"Let's just go," Shepard said. To Miranda, she asked, "So, where are we supposed to meet this Nyxeris woman?"

"There's an establishment just on the other side of the upper Market Deck that she frequents in her off hours. It's called Eternity," she said.

"A bar? Are you _sure_ that's a good idea?" Garrus asked.

"Can it," Shepard ordered. They passed through an air-conditioned hallway, flanked by security who looked bored out of their minds, before passing beyond into another extremely hot, open section of the tower that they'd landed upon. "Quick question. Why's everything built so damned high?"

"Because it's about twice as hot down on the ground," Lawson said. "Up here, it's livable. Down there... you _don't_ want to live at the base of these towers in summertime."

"Wasteful," Balak muttered.

"I don't know what you mean by that," Garrus said. "I always thought that the asari cities had a nice aesthetic. Sweeping lines, nice and tall. Long sight-lines and a lot of glass to use in IEDs, the little things."

"They're just putting on a show. 'We are asari, and we're better than you'. Just like they always have," Balak said.

"They don't say that," Garrus said.

"Are you sure?" Balak asked. "Take a look around. What do you see? What kinds of buildings are there?"

"Asari," Lawson said, her patience tested.

"What kind of language is written on the walls?"

"I think that's Scarov," Garrus said, squinting at a billboard.

"An asari language," Balak said. "The fashion. Who's it designed for?"

"Salarians," Garrus joked. Balak turned four dark eyes on him. "Fine, asari."

"Everything here is a testament to the asari cultural superiority over the rest of the galaxy. The same thing happens everywhere else. First the asari shower you with gifts, make themselves seem magnanimous and generous. Then, they start to dig in their hooks," Balak said. "Little by little, they turn your mind away from your own kind, and force you to look at theirs. You start seeing them as... _attractive_... you start desiring them. You start desiring anything _to do with_ them. And in that, they hold the most devious patent of rulership. They make you _want_ them to tell you what do do."

"That sounds insanely paranoid, even for a batarian," Shepard muttered, as the great lines of shops began to pass by them, their conversation only audible by the relative berth that they were given by the presence of heavily armed people amongst them.

"Is it?" Balak asked. "Do you see anything human here? Anything turian?" he swept an arm out over the displays, the advertisements. "I don't see anything with four eyes staring back at me. That's the asari's plan, in the long term. To erase every culture but their own. And they can play the long game better than anyone."

"Are you sure you're not just projecting your government onto the galaxy?" Lawson asked.

"The Hegemony is corrupt to its core, black and twisted and foul, but damn it, it's _honest,_" Balak shouted. He thrust a finger toward a volus standing before a display. "Just listen to this, and tell me this isn't cultural domination?"

"_I need something with a lot of flash. Something that says, I own everything here. I own you. And something that's compatible with... asari... physiology_," the volus said to the shopkeeper, a button-nosed asari who looked in her early twenties – thus was probably about eighty – who gave a patronizing smile.

"I'm sure I can find something to your tastes," she said.

They all turned back to Balak, who had a darkly triumphant look on his face. "So you see. They claim to be republics, but all I see is a hegemony under another name."

"This is ridiculous," Lawson said. "The asari might be some of the more annoyingly self-righteous rule-mongers in the galaxy, but they're not out for unlimited power over a trillion lives."

"Then you're dreaming too small, and dreaming too soundly," Balak said. "They've hidden behind rules that they made, to enact laws which benefit them most, for thousands of years. The only defense we had from them was to cut them off completely. We saw what they were doing, even from the beginning; we weren't going to sacrifice who we were, as batarian people, for shiny baubles and tawdry affairs. And look what it got us?"

"Smacked down by humanity," Shepard said.

"Exactly," Balak said, darker yet. "Because who did the council... no, who did the _asari_ back in that war? _You_. Because you were sucking at the teat they offered, and we weren't," he shook his head, and split off, heading toward another path through the markets. "You're dancing to the tugs of strings, humans, and you don't even see the puppetmasters. In that, I pity you," he finished, before rounding a corner, and vanishing out of sight.

"Alright, now that we've gotten that insanity out of the way," Shepard said. "Eternity is... Gods, why couldn't there be moving sidewalks in this place?"

"Overheating," Lawson said, flatly. Shepard gave her a glance, but then her vision went up, the front of a building that looked down onto the market. An office was present there, but the intense backlighting through the window left a form of an asari staring down at them in stark relief. Shepard felt a little uncomfortable being under such shadowy but intense scrutiny. "You're probably well aware that Nos Astra has a teeming nightlife," Lawson said, pulling Shepard's attention away from the asari who tracked her even yet, cutting their way through crowds of volus and asari and salarians. "Places like Eternity tend to be very well protected, so don't pull a gun on anybody, or you might get ripped apart. And I must remind you how much money it took to resurrect you last time..."

"I'm aware, I'm aware," Shepard shook her head. She turned to Garrus. "You know, I don't think I'm ever going to live down this 'dying' thing."

"I don't see how you could," Garrus said. He looked over his shoulder, toward the street that Balak had left down, as it vanished into the distance and the sea of people. "I couldn't tell you what that guy's problem was. Never knew he had it out for the asari. I thought batarians universally hated _humans_."

"The galaxy is seldom so simple a place as that," Lawson said.

"Well, this," she pointed up the stairs they were ascending, toward the sign that marked their way in, "is going to be simple. We go in there, we talk with Nyxeris. From her, we figure out where this Samara woman is, pick her up, and be back on the Normandy in time for dinner," she said, now walking backward before the rest of them. "It's as simple as that."

She turned, right into a blue fist into her face. She staggered back, to Garrus' outrageous laughter, such that he held his stomach and sides, almost doubling over from it. Shepard, though, pulled herself back forward, rubbing at her cheek where the knuckles impacted her jaw, while she glared at the woman who provided them. "I thought I recognized you! You're the squad-mates of that idiot who's threatening my bar!"

"_Excuse_ me?" Shepard demanded. "I just landed here five minutes ago."

"Yeah, well, you're that human Spectre, aren't you?" she asked. Shepard grunted a 'yeah'. "Well, then reign in your lackey, or I will send a lawsuit to both the Citadel and the Alliance that'll have you running tours using outdated Lancers!"

The asari then turned and moved through a doorway, growling angrily to herself. Shepard turned to the others. Garrus had barely reclaimed himself. "I'm sorry. The timing on that was too funny," Garrus claimed, rubbing at his eyes as though they were leaking tears. Which they might well have been.

"What the hell was that?" Shepard asked.

"I'm almost afraid to guess," Lawson said, her icy demeanor somewhat set aside for honest uncertainty. Shepard pointed up the stairs, toward where the building billowed wisps of fog at ankle level, and emitted some sort of quiet but insistent pop-music. Shepard took the lead, letting the aching of where her teeth bit into her cheek keep her anger at a low boil as she ascended past a human, turian, and salarian getting a table-dance from a mostly naked asari.

"Alright, whose ass do I have to kick now!" The least expected voice in the galaxy demanded, spreading his arms wide. "Don't _frig_ with me, lady! I'm on the edge! I got nothin' to lose!"

"Uh-huh," the extremely bored sounding asari behind the bar responded, her eyes practically glassy.

"I'll go all the way to get my job done, don't you forget that. After all, I learned how to put a gun in your face from Commander Shepard herself!" Conrad Verner said, miming a pistol at the eye rolling asari, who looked past toward Shepard and those with her. She took one look at Shepard's bog-standard armor, and sighed a 'finally'.

"Hey, can you yank the leash on this idiot before I have to slap his ass with a Singularity?" she asked, her voice slightly accented and bearing all the good humor of somebody who missed three breaks and had to work a double shift with no overtime. Verner turned.

"Who do you think you..." he began, but his face went from naïve outrage to open gaping in about a fraction of a second. "A...vatar Shepard?"

Shepard took a step toward him, her face cradled in her palm. "Yes..."

"It's me! Conrad Verner! We met on the Citadel," he said eagerly, before seeming to remember that he was supposed to be a 'man on the edge', and his tones went mock-serious again. "Uh... and then you shoved a gun in my face when I said I was gonna be the next human Spectre. Showed me what it was like to go to the extreme. I learned that lesson well!"

"You've got to be kidding me..." Shepard muttered into her palm.

"So you're alive, huh? I guess that's how it goes in this _biz_," he said, arms cast wide, pacing around like the idiot he was. "Why don't you sit back and watch how it's done?"

"Conrad..." Shepard began, and then she decided a better tack.

She kicked him in the testicles.

Conrad let out a girlish shriek and collapsed to the floor, holding his groin. "I'm guessing that isn't actual Onyx armor, because even _this_ shit armor has a groin-cup."

"Ha! Kick him in the quad!" the asari shouted. Shepard looked to her. "Sorry. Father was a krogan."

Shepard ignored the bartender and turned her attention back to the pest that somehow landed at her feet once again. "Conrad, how in the name of every god that humanity has ever named did you come up with an idea this suicidally insane?"

"Owww. That really hurt!" Conrad whined.

"And what's with that armor? Anybody could tell it's an out-of-date model to begin with," Shepard continued.

"Well it was the only replica armor I could afford," Conrad said, his tones slowly dropping back to their usual tenor. He unsteadily took his feet once more. "My wife helped pay for it. She even bought my ticket off world!"

Behind him, the bartender palmed her face. Shepard felt like emulating her.

"I had to do _something_. You were dead, and... And everybody started talking about you like you were some sort of _villain_. I knew you weren't. Even after that accident in the Citadel," Conrad said, finally retaking his stand completely, if with a wince of pain every time his groin shifted. Accident? Did he really have that much personal delusion to wave off her threatening him with two flavors of death as an accident? Gods help her...

Shepard waved a hand vaguely at him, as she continued to stare at the floor, shaking her head. "Do you have _any_ combat training at all?" she asked.

"Well, I've been in the Armax Arena tonnes! That's why I knew I could help you as a Spectre," Verner said. Behind her, Garrus was audibly holding in laughter.

"Has anybody ever shot at you? In _real life_?" Shepard clarified.

"Well, there was that one time, when I stopped a smuggling ring..." he said, somewhat bashfully. Shepard actually looked at him. He'd done _what_? "I didn't know what the big deal was. I was just helping that lady find her little boy. That lead to having to get that modulator for the volus, and I couldn't get the modulator until I made that krogan stop threatening the shopkeeper... And how was I supposed to know that the volus _and_ the krogan were smuggling guns and drugs?"

Shepard stared, agape. "You brought down a criminal organization _accidentally_?" she asked. Conrad rubbed the back of his neck, blushing. Garrus erupted into laughter.

"Oh, spirits help me, I can't _breathe_," Garrus managed between gouts, while Miranda's face was buried in her palm.

"How did you even... feed yourself?" Shepard asked.

"There's lots of money out there if you're willing to scrounge for it," Conrad said chipperly. "I might have had to dig through some garbage cans and garbage compactors for chits and nickles, but I made enough to get here, after all!"

"I'm going to _die_," Garrus wheezed

Shepard puffed out a sigh. "Why are you here, Conrad?"

"Huh? Oh, right! After that, I understood just how much of a problem those drugs were. And this undercover operative over in the other part of the port – you know, where they sell that stuff from Serrice Council – told me that the bar here was a front for selling red sand!"

"Hey listen, _kecht_ for brains; first, we don't sell red sand here, and second, red sand isn't illegal on Illium, you just need a license," the bartender said caustically as she poured a splash of ryncol into something that looked like lager, making the whole thing the color of vomit. The human who scooped it up didn't seem to mind, though.

"I just thought..." Conrad said.

"Listen, Conrad," Shepard said, grabbing his shoulders, and staring him in the eye. "Don't move. Don't leave this spot. No going out of this bar, no going to the _bathroom_. You stay right here, until I deal with this insanity. Got that?"

"Uh, yeah. I mean, of course!" Conrad said, and he took a seat at the corner of the bar.

The bartender breathed a sigh of relief. "Thanks, human. If I kill annoying customers, there's usually property damage, and that comes out of my pay."

Garrus only now seemed to be recovering from his side-splitting laughter, which Conrad had utterly ignored the whole time it happened. He rose, rubbing tears that had pressed out of his eyes in the madness. Shepard turned to Lawson, who was making a strongly negative motion.

"No, no! I forbid it. We're going to get the contact information from Nyxeris, then we're getting the Justicar. That's. It," she said.

"Lawson, Lawson, you don't know how being around the Avatar works, do you?" Garrus said, with mild condescension.

"I'm going to go and deal with this, right now, before it has a chance to escalate into something that's going to bite my ass clean off. And considering how much money there is in that, I don't feel like losing it. Stay here if you want. I'm going to... Do something," Shepard said, eyes rolling. Lawson let out a groan of defeat, and slumped into the chair 'round a nearby table, as Garrus followed after her, still chuckling richly. Behind their backs, the bartender let out a high whistle, causing Lawson to look up.

"Catch," the bartender said, and chucked a bottle of something that had more alcohol in it than was perhaps recommended for people who enjoyed having a liver to her. "On the house. Looks like you need it."

Shepard couldn't stop shaking her head at the madness of it all, though, even as they descended down into the markets once more. "Garrus, did I ever tell you about that guy?"

"Once. You were drunk when you did it, so the details were fuzzy," Garrus said.

"I was so sure this guy was a trap. _So_ sure! But it turns out, he's more dangerous when he's on our side!" Shepard could only shake her head at it all. She gave a glance to the turian. "He's going to be haunting me till the day I die – again – isn't he?"

"Probably," Garrus said. "That's why I'm glad I don't get fans. They tend to get foamy at the mouth and faint, which makes for difficult terrain when you have to run fast."

"Always with the battlefield tactics with you, isn't it?"

"Would you like another metaphor? I warn you now, they tend to go places that nobody wants them."

"Alright, duly noted," Shepard said, as they reached the bottom of the stairs. "How am I going to... to..."

"To what, Shepard?" Garrus asked.

Shepard had trailed off, though, because she recognized somebody she'd known a while ago. "My luck can't be this good," she said. Garrus gave her an askance look, but could only follow as she cut through the crowds, until she reached the table that was built out of the flow of sapients, giving those who sat at it a place to look out onto the tumult and, presumably, drink. "Could that possibly be you, Parasini?"

Gahliya Parasini looked up from her pad and her drink, with a look of the uncanny written large across her face. She gawked for a moment, unable to believe her eyes, before Shepard reached forward, took her by the wrist, and pulled her to her feet. "I...wha...How?"

"You're still in the business of nailing people who cheat in business, right?" Shepard said, as she walked, an arm wrapped round the woman's shoulders. The dark complected woman stammered for a moment, still lost in the shock of the whole situation.

"Well yes, that is my stock and trade... I thought y–"

Shepard gave her far shoulder a squeeze. "I was hoping you'd say that. 'Cause you see, I've got a bit of a problem. Do you know the guy running the market kiosk for Serrice Council merchandise?"

"Lady, but yes..."

"'Guy' is gender neuter," she dismissed with a shrug.

Shepard barged ahead, moving through the guts of the building which was, in essence, a mall built as close to the space-port as was asarily possible, skirting past the crowds who now parted not due to her status as a heavily armed person, but rather as somebody of questionable sanity.

"Anyway. This asari's managed to dupe some poor, sad bastard into trying to shake down a bar, claiming it a drug-running front. Which to me stinks of shady business practices, if you think about it."

"That's... a heady claim," Parasini said. She looked to Garrus, then back to Shepard. "You're supposed to b–"

"Oh, I've got evidence up to my nipples," Shepard said. She looked over to Garrus. "You figure Conrad'll testify?"

"That kid's got more good intention than good sense. Of course he will," Garrus answered. He tilted his head at her. "Are you alright, Shepard? You're acting strangely."

"Must be the heat," Shepard dismissed, passing a salarian who halted in a worried phonecall to lean away from her as she passed by him. "So I figure that if I send you a nice big court-case, you can reap it all in, so long as you tie it up nice and fast. I don't want this thing hanging over my head like some sort of boulder on a leash."

"I guess I could..." Parasini still looked confounded. Shepard finally spotted the great sign that featured a very intensely glaring asari woman, and the words which most likely read 'Serrice Council', in whatever language they were writ in. One of these days, she was going to have to invest in a visor like Garrus'. Writing translation on the fly would be damned handy.

"That's her, I take it," Shepard said, releasing Parasini, who stood, a finger raised as though she had a question, but no impetus to ask it. Shepard moved up to the asari, who was tidying the displays, before turning toward Shepard with a bright, saleswoman-smile. "So, I'm given to understand that you've had words with my... 'friend'... Conrad Verner. Something about a drug cartel running out of Eternity?"

"What – Oh, yes! It's very important. I'm actually _deep_ undercover, and Matron Rostochenko is a _dangerous_ figure in the Nos Astra underworld," the asari said. Gods, she was almost as bad a liar as Conrad. Figures, he would be the only person in the galaxy she could dupe. "If you could help secure the deed to that bar, I could shut down that operation for good."

"Heard enough?"

"Enough to detain her," Parasini said. The asari's eyes went wide.

"WHAT?"

"Roschel Molovai, you're under arrest for impersonating a government officer and for corporate extortion," Parasini said, producing manacles from her back pocket and slapping them around the stunned asari before her, and raised a hand to her ear. "Police? I need an officer and a squad car on the North Market Square? ...Morrissey Plaza... Just in front of the taxi terminal, yes. I can keep her here, believe me."

"You're making a mistake," Molovai claimed. "I... I didn't mean it, this is all a mistake."

"Just shut up, you're making this too easy to convict you," Parasini said. She turned to Shepard, and shook her head for a moment. "I don't know _what_ the hell just happened, but I suppose I owe you one for this."

"Thought you could use an easy case," Shepard said. Parasini offered a chuckle.

"I have to admit, I do enjoy the work here," she gave a glance toward the crooked retailer who was now rocking back and forth, squatting on her heels, and sweating bullets. "These asari act so ageless and superior, but when you nail 'em, they all squeal like schoolgirls."

"You already owe me one beer. This makes two," Shepard said. "I'm keeping track."

"One of these days, I'll make sure that you collect," Parasini said. Shepard turned and started back, with Garrus shaking his head slightly at the whirlwind that he'd been pulled into.

"I missed this kind of thing," Garrus said.

"Solving problems at FTL speed?" Shepard asked.

"No, solving problems in the most ridiculous way possible."

"Hey, it's still solved," Shepard pointed out.

Garrus just nodded. "I've missed this."

* * *

The door opened slowly, with a creak of metal that didn't quite fit together correctly. Nyxeris had often recommended that the door be fixed, but her employer had been adamant that it remain as it was. The shrieking of metal, she claimed, gave character to the room. The kind of character that went well with forbidding furniture, black marble floors, and a ceiling every bit as black, if etched with a sort of mandala in ever-so-slightly-more-glossy stone. The only light came through the windows, leaving the woman in question as a silhouette.

"Has Shepard arrived?" her employer asked, her voice quiet. A hiss of a venomous snake in the tall grasses.

"Yes, Ma'am," Nyxeris answered. "I was going to meet with them before you..."

"And they have met... Mister Verner?" the indistinct asari asked, turning ever so slightly, a face barely in profile, toward the purple woman at the door.

"How would... Yes, yes they have," Nyxeris corrected herself. There was no asking 'how' she knew. It was simply that she would. The woman was damned near a prophet, sometimes.

"And how did Shepard react?"

"I'm not sure what you mean," Nyxeris said. Goddess, if she wasn't in so much debt that there were only two people in the galaxy _able_ to buy her marker, let alone willing, she'd have shut this door, jumped a ship to Omega, and hoped that she lived to see three hundred. And since that momentous birthday was later this month...

There was a creak, of leather, it sounded like, as the asari turned further, face fully in profile now, but still black against the light which streamed in the window. "Did. She. Deal. With. Him?"

"Well... there was an arrest in the Morrissey Plaza a few minutes ago," Nyxeris said, her Omni opening and streaming the information that she got from sources which, strictly speaking, weren't exactly legal. She read the police transcripts of the officers involved, and even watched the live-streamed video testimony of a very earnest sounding, flaxen haired human man, in what looked to be low quality human armor. "It seems that Mister Verner was instrumental in bringing down a corporate extortion charge on Missus Molovai."

"You have prepared her buy-out form, have you not?" the other asari asked. Nyxeris nodded, only now swallowing with nerves. That woman had this thing planned days ago! "Purchase her store. Sell it to Mister Thax, for one credit."

"Yes, Ma'am," Nyxeris said. "What about Shepard? I am still due to meet her."

"Send her to me," the other asari said, her tones low, as she turned back to look down on the streets and the markets below her. "And don't cause a fuss. With an Ardat Yakshi on the loose in Nos Astra, there's enough worry in the air already."

"An Ardat... Are you sure?" Nyxeris leaned back when the asari turned, casting a glance over a shoulder. "Of course you are. I'll bring her right away."

"See that you do," her employer murmured, before returning her attention to the crowds below. Honestly, Nyxeris was seriously considering whether she was going to survive to her three-hundredth. Between the Shadow Broker on one side, and that woman on the other, she didn't know whether to... how did her father put it? Oh, right. Didn't know whether to shit or go blind.

* * *

"I can't believe you didn't just shoot him," the bartender said, as Shepard finally dropped herself down into her seat. "First round's on me. The owners get so pissy when they have to clean up blood-stains."

"I needed this," Shepard said, taking the greenish liquor that was offered, and taking an experimental gulp. It was oddly salty, actually. "Salarian?"

"You've got a tongue for liquor, human," she said. Shepard turned her attention to the bar, where she saw Garrus looking somewhat tensely toward a quarian who was speaking fast and animatedly to an annoyed looking asari, and to Lawson, who looked more and more frustrated with every passing moment. This woman had better show up soon. At least Shepard had exactly no sensation that they were about to be ambushed. "Aethyta," she said extending a hand, which Shepard shook.

"Well, Matron Aethyta, I can't say I've ever drunk salty liquor before."

"You can't get hung-over on that. Trust me, I've tried," Aethyta said. "And it's 'Matriach', actually."

Shepard's brow rose. "I thought all Matriarchs were supposed to be political advisors and... well, guides, gurus, and all things in between."

"Not all of us have that much clout. Surviving past puberty might not seem like much – unless you're a krogan – but since our puberty lasts so damned long it's amazing _anybody_ lives to see two hundred."

"Doesn't explain the bar-tending, though," Shepard pointed out.

"Let's just say that Thessia got a bit chilly for me," she muttered. Shepard finished the green booze in a shot, and had it replaced by something a sort of iridescent grey, which tasted like peaches pulped with iron shavings. But not in a bad way. "Bunch of haughty dumb-asses wouldn't know a good idea from their own assholes, which is surprising, because their heads are pretty much permanently up there."

"Picked a fight?" Shepard asked.

"Got laughed out," she shook her head, and then shrugged. "Sure, I made a few dumbass mistakes in my maiden years, but who hasn't? And you'd think that taking a swing at the Silent Beacon would be something you could live down in a few centuries, but no-o-o-o."

"The what?"

"Big thing on Thessia. Prothean site just standing out there like a batarian with his dick hanging out, and about as useful as tits on a hanar. Hell, you'd get more use out of it as a paperweight. A thirty-thousand tonne paperweight. But they've got the idea that if they plug away at it, scrape at it a micrometer at a time, they'll eventually get inside. Idiots. We should be trying something new, not digging at the old," she thumped a fingertip hard against the bar. "You know that right now, if the Republics got their asses in gear, we could be _building_ Mass Relays?"

"Really?" Shepard asked.

"I shit you not," Aethyta said. "But when I tell 'em to try, to push our boundries further than the Protheans dropped it, they laughed the blue off my ass. So if I gotta sell booze to a bunch of ingrates and idiots that stream in from the Terminus, I figure I'm still in better company than I was back home."

"I've got an old krogan buddy who'd agree with you in a heartbeat," Shepard said, setting the emptied cup onto the bar, upside down. "Got anything else wild and unusual?"

"Dark-space is the limit," Aethyta said. She tipped out something purple that wasn't ryncol – you could smell ryncol from across the room – and handed it over. Shepard had only gotten one gulp, which tasted like she was drinking somebody's floral centerpiece but kicked like a Mako-turret, before a very purple asari came into the bar, looking like she was a twitch away from shitting herself.

"There's something that's confused me. I thought all asari were blue."

Aethyta gave a scoff. "And I thought all humans were pink."

"Good point," Shepard said. Every species has its races. She looked to Lawson, who was finally looking like she wasn't about to bite somebody for annoyance. So the purple one must be her. She set down her unfinished cup, ignoring the fact that she'd already had the equivalent of seven drinks into her, and moved to Lawson's side, feeling a lot more human than she had when she walked back into the bar. The asari took a look at the two women, and gave herself a nod, before moving toward them.

"Let me do the talking," Lawson said sternly at Shepard, who was now leaning against the wall at her side.

"What, afraid I might embarrass you?"

"Afraid you might _terrify her_," Lawson snapped quietly. She then turned back to the approaching Nyxeris, her visage the very picture of professionalism. "Miss Nyxeris. I was given to understand this appointment was supposed to happen a half hour ago."

"I've been somewhat delayed," Nyxeris said.

"So, the Justicar, Samara," Lawson said.

"I've been authorized to give that information but... there's a small caveat. My employer has offered to give that information to Shepard, and Shepard alone."

"Traaaap," Garrus said lightly, though quite loud enough for all present to hear it.

"If my employer wanted you dead, you wouldn't have left the landing pad," Nyxeris said coldly.

"This isn't what was agreed to."

"Yeah, well, she's altered the deal, and you'd best pray she doesn't alter it any further," Nyxeris pointed out.

"I'll go," Shepard said. Probably the alcohol talking, but she felt a bit more invincible than usual. "If nothing else, I think it might be a good idea to talk to Illium's Aria."

"Trust me, you don't want to see the ones who substitute for Aria in asari controlled worlds," Lawson pointed out. "You have to know this is a mistake."

"If it is, then you'll come barreling in the door with guns blazing and bombs exploding and save my hide," Shepard said dismissively. Garrus gave a shrug.

"Well, as long as you've planned ahead," he said, his tones sarcastically patient.

Shepard pushed off of the wall, and followed where the purple woman led. "So who exactly is your employer."

"Someone whom I'm not at liberty to speak of. To you at least," Nyxeris said.

"This spy-speak bullshit's getting really old, really fast," Shepard pointed out.

"Then you had best be glad you're not asari, because asari life is a nest of it."

"Duly noted."

The path that the two walked brought them out, into what seemed to be approaching sunset on the excessively hot city that thrust into the sky, back the way that they'd come, in fact. Shepard got a bit of an unsettled feeling when she recognized the building that they were approaching. It was the one where that shadowed woman had stared at her on the way in. Shepard didn't say anything, though, but she did check to make sure her gun was at her hip, and its safety, off. They ascended some internal stairs, until they reached an office with a veritable bulkhead between the outer desk and the inner sanctum. Nyxeris went to and lowered herself behind her desk, motioning forward as she did so. "The mistress awaits."

"That was dramatic," Shepard muttered to herself, as with a loud hiss, the doors opened. She took a half step before she took in the room, and that half step pulled itself to a stop. Everything was black, bleak, and brutal. Shepard saw a mandala cut into the ceiling, something that was so familiar that Shepard knew it better than her own face, but didn't know why. There was a thick desk sitting near the center-back of the room, facing her in all its imposing glory. But the only other occupant of the room wasn't facing Shepard.

She was wearing a leather corset, first of all, which made Shepard's eyebrows raise. It left her shoulder's bare, and hugged every curve of her, terminating about a centimeter short of pants – also leather – that hugged the rest of her. She slapped what seemed to be a riding crop into her waiting palm. But it was the voice which truly brought Shepard's brain to a screeching halt.

"I don't appreciate being lied to. And I _always_ know when I'm being lied to," Liara T'Soni said, her tones low, dark, and dangerous. "You have the money, and you're going to pay for services owed. Is that clear?" there was a stammer on the other side of a holographic communication, and she outright cracked the riding-crop against her hand, cutting him off abruptly. "If you don't adhere to the agreement that you made, I'm not going to penalize you. Instead, I'm going to come to your house... and flay you with my mind. Clear?"

Silence, and then a vyoop as the call terminated. Liara turned slowly, a cold eye turned toward her. "Liara..." Shepard said.

"Either step inside or go away, but _do not_ stand in my doorway," Liara said harshly. Shepard took a step forward. "Good. Nyxeris, hold my calls."

"What happened to you?" Shepard asked, barely at a whisper as with a metal whine, the door slammed closed behind her. She simply stared, at the freckled asari girl, who continued to stare imperiously, as the shades drifted shut on the window outside. With the last hiss, the last clank of something falling into place behind her, the blinds fell completely.

Then, the squeeing started.

Instantly, Liara was transformed, an enormous grin stretching across her face as she bounced in place. She tossed the riding crop across the room, her fists tight and the sound coming from her throat for some reason calling to memory some nightmare of Sajuuk. But Shepard had neither the reflexes – possibly due to the liquor she'd pounded into her system – or the time to do anything but gawk as Liara's bouncing in place suddenly gained a great deal of forward mobility.

Because after her fourth bounce, she launched herself at Shepard, tangled the Avatar in her limbs like some kind of happy, possibly horny tree-squirrel, and rode the Avatar to the floor, with a kiss that almost blew off the top of Shepard's head.

* * *

"Justicar?" Dara asked, her shoulders shrinking in. "Here? Tell me you found some way to turn her off."

"She did not," the serene, placid voice from behind Officer Dara made her stomach drop into her stomach. She turned, and took in the monk who was now striding into the room as graceful as leaves drifting down a stream. "I am told that this is the aftermath of an attack by an Ardat Yakshi. Therefore, this is now my investigation."

"Ma'am, no offense to your religion, but this is a murder investigation. We're not hunting for aberrants..."

"Then you are searching incorrectly," the Justicar said smoothly. She didn't look like most Justicars that Dara had seen – all three of them – in that she had her armor unbuckled such that it gave her cleavage damned near open to her navel. She also had one of the truly ancient biotic amps, the one which clung to the edges of her face like some sort of tiara. Great. A conservative. She gave exactly one look to the weeping father, who had the crestless mother trying to comfort him even as she was trying to hold off weeping herself. Say what you would about turians, they were a tough breed, most of the time.

"We're looking into suspects from the university," Dara said. "He was harsh, so he had quite a few former students who would..."

"You may search your avenues to your heart's content, however do not impinge on my searching the correct ones," the Justicar said easily, not ruffled in the slightest. Although, now, Dara was.

"I don't appreciate having the monks knock down my tape and take over my cases," Dara said, getting in the Justicar's face. The woman simply stared down at her, imperious, calm, cool, collected.

"It is not one of your cases. It is one of mine," she said. Then, she turned away from the grieving parents, and began to examine the destroyed decorations. Decorations!

"What do we do, Sergeant?" Jasmine asked. The maiden was barely a hundred, already working for the police. Dara had half a mind to send her into the Terminus for a few decades, if only to get the twitchiness out of her. But alas, she wasn't Jasmine's mother, nor father, and had exactly no say in it. Only what she did when Dara was saddled with her did she get a say.

"Find some way to get her out of here quickly," Dara said. "And whatever you do, don't provoke her. If she gets it in her head that you're breaking her code, she'll kill you in an instant."

"Then simply let me be," the Justicar said loudly, from the other side of the room. Damned woman had ears like a Zuub.

"This woman is going to be the death of me," Dara bemoaned. Jasmine, sweet girl she was, could only shiver.

* * *

"A...blu...what?" Shepard finally managed to say, after Liara had a reasonable time ago broken that embrace and veritably skipped away to the kitchenette which folded out of the wall, just as it dinged and the light of an oven went out. She blinked a few times, slowly pushing herself up to a sit. "Nice to see you too, I guess," she murmured.

"Have you eaten yet? I have prepared enough for two if needs be," Liara said over her shoulder. And when she did, there was an odd accent to it.

"I could eat," Shepard said. She motioned around her. "What's with this cave? And what's with the _leather_?" Not that she disapproved. It framed her very, very nicely. Made her seem dangerous, something forbidden and risque – a ridiculous notion to anybody who knew the first thing about Liara T'Soni. She turned, a platter of something steaming, white bits of meat sticking out of brown rice. Liara returned with a spring in her step, and set the platter down on the floor between them, before crossing her legs under her and beginning to dig in with a fork. On the floor.

Some things never changed.

"So... What's new?" Shepard asked, feeling like an idiot for having no better question to ask than that one, despite several dozen crowding her brain right now. Liara looked up at her, pausing mid chew.

"Well, the Avatar has come back to life. I believe that's something new," Liara said, motioning with a fork full of something-fried-rice at her. And still that accent?

"Hah. Seriously, though," Shepard said, pausing only to get some food into her. If nothing else, it'd help soak up some of the liquor. "For a second there, I thought you'd gone supervillain on me. Didn't help that Garrus said that you'd taken a turn for the nasty."

"Oh, that was simply a facade to protect my interests," Liara said brightly. And with an accent. What the _hell_?

"Alright, what's with the accent?" Shepard asked. "Is that part of your facade, too?"

"What accent?" she asked. With an accent.

"You're talking with an accent. Come on, drop it."

"No I'm not. Well, I might be. English is a hard language to speak natively," she pointed out. Shepard blinked.

"You're speaking English?" Shepard asked. Liara nodded, a full-cheeked smile peeking before she leaned back and masticated for all she was worth. "When did you learn English?"

"A few months ago. I had nothing better to do at the time," Liara said. So that was an Aramali accent, then? Huh.

"And all of this?" Shepard motioned around her again with her fork.

"After... after you died," she swallowed, and not for food at that, "I realized that your work – that _our_ work – was falling apart. I had to use everything I had to hold a candle against the darkness. So I parlayed my inheritance from Mother into infrastructure and manpower, and set myself up as an information broker."

"That's not the kind of line of work that you can just walk into," Shepard said.

"It was remarkably easy," Liara said with a shrug. "I just had to convince the Matriarchs of Nos Astra that I was my mother's daughter. Which, come to think of it, is oddly tautological. Who else's daughter could I be?"

"Your father's," Shepard said. Liara stared into the distance for a moment.

"Ooooooh," she said, a revelation to her. She shook her head. "But once I had my network in place, my work was far from finished. It took months to find y...your body," again, a stammer. "And when I found it, I almost lost it."

"To the Shadow Broker, I'm guessing?" Shepard asked. Liara's eyes went wide, and she pressed forward with a loaded fork.

"Yes! He was working for the Collectors, so I knew I had to resist him. If they got ahold of you, there was no chance you'd ever... well..."

"Come miraculously back to life?" Shepard asked. Liara blushed a bit. "So you've managed to do what only one woman in human history has ever done before. And to be honest, you've done it on hard mode. Aang was only dead for a few minutes. I was gone for, what?"

"Six months," Liara admitted. She reached forward, cupping Shepard's cheek, before bringing it back to the edge of the platter, her eyes now locked on the floor. "And it wasn't easy."

"Stealing my corpse? Can't imagine it would be," Shepard said.

"There was a... a friend. His name was Feron. A drell, who helped me take you from the Shadow Broker when I thought all was lost. He... The Shadow Broker captured him, and I can only assume the worst."

Shepard tilted her head. Despite having no good reason for know it, she had a good notion that Liara was showing a fair deal of shame. "There's something you're not telling me. You and Feron. You were close?"

She couldn't look Shepard in the eye. Well, not until Shepard barked a laugh which sent rice flying until she could cover her mouth. It wasn't just from the grain that pegged her between the eyes that Liara looked to the Avatar, stunned.

"Liara, I was dead. If there was any excuse that would hold up, I figure that'd be the one," she said.

"Oh... I thought you would feel... jilted?"

Shepard offered another laugh, but this one a bit more uncomfortable. Because honestly, she didn't know exactly what was going on with Liara – which itself was business as usual. "You didn't think this would work, but you did it anyway."

"I had hope, even if I didn't have faith," Liara said, playing with her food. Which was annoying, because that meant she was safeguarding her side of the pile, and Shepard had already savaged her own. She looked up, with bright blue eyes and little smile "But it worked, and you're back. That's everything I could have hoped for."

"You missed my Protheanized brain, didn't you?"

"That. And other things."

Shepard shook her head. Some things never changed. She surreptitiously stole some of Liara's half of the rice and unidentified white meat, and popped it in. Honestly, she was feeling a lot more chipper, now that booze had met its long-time companion, food, in her gut. "I'm guessing that you were the one who coordinated the meet-up with this Justicar I'm supposed to meet."

"Yes," Liara said, bouncing up and moving to her desk, taking a pad from it, then plopping herself down across from Shepard once more. In that time, she'd half-savaged Liara's side as well. Damn, but she had an appetite today. "Justicar Samara, maestrix, and master of the Sapiens Style. Nine-hundred seventy years old. Formerly Samara Yeldechiyv, from Nos Anglesk, Illium. Only four hundred years with the Order, though. I selected her because she seemed most open to... unorthodox methods and techniques."

"Why are you making her sound like some sort of hide-bound schoolmarm?" Shepard asked.

"If that is how I'm describing her, then I'm doing it incorrectly," Liara shook her head. "She is a deadly warrior, and has driven herself to extreme lengths to master her techniques. I assume that you need her help with some mission?"

"Actually, not exactly," Shepard said, rubbing the back of her neck where the amp hid under her hair. "She's supposed to teach me how to use my biotics without breaking my armor. Again."

"Ooooh. That makes sense," Liara said. She cracked a smile. "She will be perfect. I am to understand that she is a very patient woman. But what about the Collectors? Will she not be of use in your attack?"

"You know about that?" Shepard asked. "Hell, we didn't know the Collectors were the enemy until a few weeks ago."

"I'm a very good information broker," Liara said primly, and bit some meat off the tip of her fork.

"And _why_ information broker, again?" Shepard asked.

"All my life, I've had a knack for detecting disparities in the stream of information. Until I met you, the one which drove me was the Protheans, and the Reapers. Now since I have an answer that makes sense, I have other things which occupy my time," she said with a shrug. She handed over the pad. "Now if I have predicted her movements correctly, she is in the Verstog district, which, admittedly, is not nearby. However, she will be there for some time. She has a particular vehemence in hunting Ardat Yakshi."

"How am I going to convince a holy warrior to give up her quest, anyway?" Shepard asked.

"That's the strangest part," Liara said, her brow furrowing down, and she sat forward, staring through Shepard with her fingers laced before her chin. "As soon as I spoke to the Justicar and indicated that _you_ would be requiring a teacher, she outright demanded that she be given the honor."

"The _honor_?" Shepard asked

"Her words," Liara said with a shrug, and an expression that told Shepard that it bothered her that Liara didn't know why. "I believe she'll be of great use to you. But be aware that... even liberal Justicars can be quite..." she waved a hand, and tried to find a word. When she couldn't, the next came without accent, telling Shepard that she'd defaulted to Aramali, "severe."

"I'll bear that in mind," Shepard said, slowly pushing herself up. "That was good. This... this was good," she said. Liara beamed. "You know, you could come with us. I'm pretty sure that you'd be just as good a teacher as she would."

"I know for a fact that isn't the case," Liara said, raising up, her laced fingers now behind her back, as she rocked for and back on her heels. "And to be frank, as long as the Shadow Broker lurks, your mission is in jeopardy," the smile slowly dissolved, until her expression was as dark as it was when Shepard had first seen her in this new life, and her heel-rocking stopped. She looked as grim and merciless as death. "And if nothing else, Feron deserves some revenge."

Shepard nodded, giving the blue girl's shoulder a squeeze. "If there's anything I can do to help, you know you can contact me, right?" she asked.

"Of course I do," Liara said. She tapped a button on her Omni, and the door began to whine and creak, metal bits beginning to slide past each other. She turned away, only to do a second take and turn back to her. "Oh, and one more thing..."

"Hrm?" Shepard managed, before the asari had Shepard hauled back into another eye-popping liplock that tingled all the way down her spine, one that lasted just long enough that Shepard started to wonder why she stopped doing this, only to have it end abruptly and swiftly, with Liara taking two steps back, her expression shifting into grim and dour once more, the same instant that the door opened and she became visible to her secretary.

"...don't let me down," Liara ordered, with an implication of dire consequences, before turning back. But even in her back, Shepard could tell that she was grinning like a ninny on the inside. Shepard stood, hunched a little bit forward, stunned, for a long moment, before she gave her head a shake and blinked, slowly getting some sense back into her head. Okay. That just happened. She turned, and left.

"Will there be anything more today, Ma'am?" Nyxeris asked.

"No... no I'm good," Shepard said, still a bit distant, drifting down the stairs and into the market. She immediately took a step aside, then dropped down into the chair of the table there, propping an elbow on the table, and supporting her chin on it, while she barely noticed Garrus spotting her from across the market. "Liara, you little madwoman... what am I supposed to do about you?"

"Stop intruding on our dinner?" one of the other occupants of the table asked, confused and surprised. Shepard turned to the asari who looked in her early teens – thus, probably thirty-ish – and a salarian who was starting to look wizened like Mordin was. Shepard looked at the two of them, then at the dinner that she'd almost put her elbow into.

"Right. Sorry. Wrong table," she said, pushing up, and moving away, mildly horrified. Gods damn it, even just being around that girl for a _minute_ had her brain turning backflips. She started to walk toward where Garrus was now shaking his head mildly, but held his ground. Liara was... Shepard didn't even know. They'd had some wild times, make no mistake, but she clung to Shepard's mind like sticky-wrap. No amount of pulling ever got her off all the way. Wait, that metaphor went somewhere horrible. She shook her head. "Damn it, Liara, why do you do this to me?"

"Shepard, you're still in one piece. So you either defeated the trap, or there wasn't one, and I'm leaning toward the former," Garrus said.

"No trap. Well, trap, but the trap was Liara," Shepard said. Garrus sucked through his teeth. "That girl is... she's nuts."

"Yeah, I hear that."

"Hell of a cook, though," Shepard admitted. Garrus missed a step, and fell behind her.

"What?" he asked. "I thought... You know what, you'll tell me later."

"Maybe," Shepard said. Then, she looked at the pad she didn't even notice that she was still holding. Damn it Liara, you... A shake of the head. "We need to get to Verstog District. That's where the Justicar is supposed to be."

"Verstog probably isn't a small district, Shepard."

"We'll just have to follow the sirens," she said.

"That's good news. I think," Garrus said. He thumbed an ear. "Lawson? Yes... No. No. No... this is getting ridiculous. No. Yes, she did. Verstog. I know... Really? Huh."

"Something strange?"

"Balak is coming with us," he said, with a shrug.

"...why?"

"Good question. Why?" he asked through the airwaves. He waited a long time, then shook his head. "She doesn't know either."

"Great," Shepard muttered, shaking her head. "_This'll_ be a fun taxi-ride."

"Could be worse," Garrus said.

"How?"

"We could be flying into the Gully again."

"Hah," Shepard said. A long pause. "You know, do you think we might be able to get Gavorn onto this suicide-squad? I like his style."

"You'd have to ask him," Garrus laughed.

* * *

Miranda had almost reached Morressey Plaza, where everybody was gathering to head off to Verstog, when her Omni went alight and told her of an incoming message. She puffed out a sigh, giving some room to a nearly frantic salarian who rattled in his staccato tongue at a rate that her translator couldn't match. But from the look of it, it was something pretty important. Luckily for Lawson, she knew better than to get involved with that sort of thing. Sticking your neck out for others was a great way to get one's head cut off.

She opened her Omni and it popped up a panel reading Voice Only, addressed from Weaver's yacht. She sighed, then opened the connection.

"What is it, Weaver?" Lawson asked.

"I always had a feeling you had a less-than-professional relationship with your new employer, Miss Lawson," the Illusive Man said into her ear. She missed a stride and almost fell, before catching herself on a planter. Her eyes, were they any more wide, would have fallen out of her head. "Don't be too shocked, Miranda. As much as your Siwang Weaver has his means of contacting you, so do I."

"This came from..."

"Weaver's yacht? How else would I be sure that you would open it?" the Illusive Man asked.

"I'm ending this call."

"That would not be a good idea," his words, while condescending as they so often were, held a threatening hint that they knew something very important. Something that would end in blood if she didn't get. "After all, I know that your brief loyalty to Phoenix and its ideals was purely one of convenience. I don't hold a grudge, but I am disappointed with your later choices."

Lawson grit her teeth. "What do you want?"

"It's not what I want," the Illusive Man said, as he paused to puff out a breath – no doubt of smoke – before continuing. "It's what I can offer."

"You don't have anything I want," Miranda said. "Goodbye."

"Oriana," the Illusive Man said, not rushed, but in the split second before she could do as she promised. And that was enough to make her halt completely.

"You said you couldn't find her."

"That was then. This is now," the Illusive Man said.

"Tell me where she is."

"Now now, Miss Lawson, let's not be impolite. There is nothing in the galaxy which is free, least of all information. If you were under my employ, I would of course give you the information as payment for services rendered. Since this isn't the case... you're going to have to do something for me."

Lawson desperately wanted to end the call. Hell, she desperately wished she had the power to punch somebody through an extranet connection, but she seldom got what she wanted.

But this was Oriana.

"What do you want?" Lawson repeated, barely able to keep the dread out of her voice.

"A small thing," the Illusive Man said. "Benezia T'Soni scattered information beacons throughout Terminus Space before her demise. The information on them would be invaluable. And they can't be accessed until opened by those they're keyed to. Either her daughter, or, I'm assuming, Shepard."

"You want me to steal the data?" Lawson asked.

"No. Stealing implies removing it from its intended source. I want you to pirate it. Do this for me, and I'll give you what you're looking for. I presume that this is an equitable arrangement?"

Gods, but she wanted to punch a man through an extranet connection.

"I'll do it," she muttered, under her breath and with a creeping sensation under her skin.

"Good. I knew you could be reasonable, Miss Lawson," the Illusive Man said. "Don't disappoint me."

With a vyoop, the call went dead. She looked ahead, to the threshold which lead to the cabs. To the mission. To one of her missions. Why? Why did she just _have_ to reach out to _Phoenix_ when she was young? Like so many other things about her, it seemed that all those choices in the distant past, some even before her birth, seemed to keep sneaking up on her, and cutting the legs right out from under her.

* * *

Balak was stonily silent the entire ride to Verstog District, which suited Shepard just fine. However, the palpable tension in the car was enough that it dragged down those with them to the point where even the cabby stopped trying to make conversation after the first minute. It seemed to have hit Lawson harder than most, but Shepard wasn't sure why. If it could infest Garrus, though, it was no laughing matter.

The sky-lines zipped in so many directions, trying to compete for positions, keep order, and have speed. The traffic sometimes dipped low and ran through the hollow hearts of buildings, before heading out the other side. Which didn't seem like good building practice, but it did seem very asari. Even asari dreadnaughts had a big damned whole through 'em. She wondered why that was.

Luckily, before her mind could get into the gutter, the flashing of red and orange lights ahead showed that there was a crime-scene in the offing on one of the higher buildings. The number of them on the ground gave a bit of pause. It seemed more than a normal murder, but a lot less than an act of terrorism. She guessed this was the baseline for 'sensational murder', then.

"This is the spot," Shepard said to the cabbie.

"Are you sure? I don't know if the cops are going to let me through," she said.

"Trust me, they'll let us through," Shepard said. The blue woman with the hot-pink facial tattooes rolled her eyes, but descended toward the landing plaza on one of the lower floors. The sun had perched right on the horizon, bathing the entire building in red, as though its blueness were bathed in blood. Or else, set afire. Either one, not a good thing. As the taxi descended, a police officer in black and blue armor waved them down, until the vehicle landed on the grass that lined the pavement.

"You're going to have to land elsewhere, Ma'am; there's an investigation ongoing," the officer said.

"I'm well aware; Shepard, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance," Shepard said, lifting the handy-dandy sigil that they'd finally gotten around to granting her. It looked like silver wings against black, and could fit easily in a pocket. "There's somebody I need to contact who is on site." The officer pulled back, confused, then thumbed an 'ear'.

"Sergeant? We've got a Spectre here?" she said. A long pause. "Yes, Ma'am. Spectre, you've been cleared to enter, as long as you don't interfere with the investigation."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Shepard said. Garrus barely managed to hold in a snigger. The door swung up, and they all began to pile out. Balak was the last one, and he looked at all around him with something like a mixture of contempt and wariness. His eyes kept landing on the most surreptitious of sights, fixating, scanning, before moving on. Shepard, though, had an eye for the obvious. The most obvious thing being, there was a crumbled statue which landed in somebody's car, and a twentieth story window open to shards which showed its place of origin.

"Officer?" Shepard asked of the one who was manning the police tape. "Has Justicar Samara arrived on site yet?"

"The Justicar? Yes. Yes she has," she said, before offering a shiver. "Those women creep me out."

"I can imagine why," Balak muttered under his breath. The officer turned a glance to him, but didn't say anything. Probably for the best that she hadn't.

"I'm heading up to the scene. Who's the officer in charge?" Shepard asked.

"Dara is in the apartment even now," the grunt on the ground said. Shepard gave her a nod, then moved through the lobby – itself filled with police questioning all manner of inhabitants, of whom, they weren't even mostly asari. She elbowed the call button, and the doors opened pretty much instantly. With a smirk, she got on.

As the doors slid shut, and the lift began to ascend, Lawson turned to her, even less mirth on her face than usual – which was to say she looked just this side of dead in terms of humor. "Shepard, I must warn you now, that if you interfere with asari justice, that will be a black mark on the name of humanity itself. Not because I'd hold it against you, but because the Matriarchs most certainly would."

"No big surprise there," Balak said. "All asari history is a game of Sejob Chekag, played by powerful Matriarchs using the young and the weak as their pawns. And ever since they reached the Citadel, all _galactic_ history was much the same."

"For once, I agree with Balak," Lawson said. "The worst thing you could ever have in a political enemy, is an asari Matriarch. They never forgive, and they _never_ forget, and they are as patient as time itself."

"Fine, you don't need to rub it in," Shepard said. "I'm just here to bring the Justicar into the fold, then walk, skip, and hop back to the Normandy before the sun goes down. If I wanted to tweak the noses of thousand year old women, Garrus at least would be aware of it."

"As far as I know, she's not got anything particularly insane planned," Garrus offered. Lawson didn't look very mollified.

The ding of the lift finding its proper floor was quickly lost against the clamor of voices as the door slid open. The floor was absolutely swamped with blue and black. One door stood open, the tape surrounding it on both sides, and to that, Shepard began to stride. An officer got in Shepard's way, she almost faceless behind what seemed like riot gear. "I'm sorry, Ma'am, but we can't have armed people on this floor right now. You'll have to surrender your weapons until the investigation is over."

"Special Tactics and Recon," Shepard said, holding up her sigil once more. Gods, that thing was handy. The woman leaned back. "I need to speak to Sergeant Dara."

"Uh... Right. Dara is on the crime scene," she said, pointing into the room. She then tapped finger to 'ear', and started talking outside Shepard's ability to hear. Balak, for some reason, was watching a couple of asari who were standing next to the window as though they'd stolen something from him. Shepard ignored him, and passed through the holographic lines, which gave an unhappy blare as she did. One alien woman, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt rather than armor, and notably unarmed, turned toward her.

"So you're the Spectre that's come knocking on my door? I hope you've come for a damned good reason. This scene is already a goddess-damned circus!" Dara said.

"I'm looking for somebody, and was told that she would be here," Shepard said.

"Oh, for the love of G..." Dara muttered, palming her face in annoyance.

"She's a Justicar," Shepard continued, and Dara stopped dead. She looked up, her face going somewhat grey.

"...why?" she asked.

"Does it matter?"

"It does to me, because if you're here to detain her, she's going to probably level the building to prevent you from doing it. And I don't feel like getting buried in anything other than paperwork today," Dara said.

"It shouldn't be that bad. She's already agreed to come with us," Shepard said. Dara let out a sigh of relief.

"Thank the Goddess... She's right through there. The victim's bedroom," she said, pointing up an artistic staircase which lacked any sort of railing, and had barely visible glass panels for steps, making the whole thing seem like a massively bad idea that was one fall away from a self-decapitation. Then again, it was art. Shepard couldn't make heads or tails of that crap.

She ascended those uncomfortably fragile-seeming steps, turning up to a section directly over the entry foyer, which terminated in transitional glass and a doorway, also glass, that was swung in, showing the room beyond it. The door stood open, welcoming... of a sort. The floor was littered with strips of paper, and portrait frames lay in kindling in the corners. Shepard turned one over with her boot. A sliver of a scenic vista, painted in dozens of shades of gray, and a few blue and purple. Probably Palaven.

Shepard then looked up, seeing the red armor before her, so much unlike the black-and-blue of those behind and below. Another asari was examining the body directly, but the Justicar was facing a blue-painted wall, which was blank and bereft of anything interesting on it. "You're Justicar Samara?" Shepard asked.

"I am," she answered. Shepard almost missed a step. She'd heard that voice before. "And from the sound of a human voice, I can assume that you have come to... collect me. Now is not the most opportune time, but my business here will be brief."

"What are you looking at?" Shepard asked, moving slowly through the bedlam underfoot.

"A message," Samara said.

"I don't see anything," Shepard said. The Justicar turned a look over her shoulder.

And this time, Shepard damned near tripped. She knew this woman. She knew her very, very well... but she hadn't the first clue when or how. It was more than passing her on the street. More even than returning to consciousness while being lifted by the throat on the Citadel. She'd spilled blood with this woman. She had faced defeat with this woman.

And Shepard had no idea why she felt so damned familiar.

"The messages she sends are carefully prepared," Samara said. She took in a breath. "What do you smell?"

Shepard did as bade, and took in a deep breath. Yes, there was the odd-smelling blood of the turian girl, which pooled around her head in an azure halo. But there was something else. Something a touch more acrid. "Paint. Drying paint," Shepard said.

"Indeed," Samara said. She took a step toward a wall marked by portrait-hooks now bereft of portraits, and dragged an armored finger along it. The almost-set paint peeled up under that treatment, showing a very different shade of blue under it. "I do not doubt that Servilla was convinced to repaint in her last hours. As a sign," she said. She then moved to the kit of the asari who was working as forensic examiner, and pulled out a black-lamp. She ignored the annoyed 'hey' of the examiner, and turned off the lights with a wave of her hand. She then turned on the black-lamp, and shone it toward that featureless wall. Only now, not so featureless.

'This Is Your Fault', it said.

"What the hell?" Shepard asked.

"The predator who did this evil deed operates on an inverted and insane sense of morality. One that places the deaths she causes upon my responsibility. I disagree," she said. She turned to Shepard. "I am honored to be in the presence of the Avatar," she said with a formal bow which was somewhat out of place, something old-fashioned, before rising up once more. Shepard didn't notice the forensic examiner scowl, and rub at her brow. "I have searched this place, and found no clues. As much as I wish this could give me a direction to pursue, the records show nothing; they have been purged. Thus, I must hunt anew."

"This 'Ardat Yakshi' seems to have a personal stake in you at least," Shepard muttered.

"For understandable reasons. I have pursued her for three centuries," Samara said. And neither noticed the forensic examiner turning away from the body, from her job. "The only request that I ask of you in this endeavor that I have agreed to, is that if I should find this creature, I should have the right to end it before it can escape and cause such carnage again," she said, with a wave toward the body on the bed.

"If it ever comes up, I'll help you hunt her do–" Shepard began, but was rudely interrupted.

By the forensic examiner, hatred clear on her blue face, shooting her in the chest with a shotgun.

Shepard staggered back, slumping against the wall and detritus, her barriers holding up but only barely. Samara, though, flowed into action with all the speed and grace of a lightning-strike crafted in flowing water. She spun under the next shot, which was going to target Shepard once more, and head-butted upward, sending that shotgun blast into the ceiling. Then, with a flash, she drove what seemed to be a reverse-axe kick, driving up into the woman's jaw from below, before flipping and landing close to where the woman had staggered. Green, gnawing light now surrounded the examiner, who started to scream in pain, before the Justicar lashed forward with a brutal punch, one that caused a biotic explosion and sent the woman slamming through the transitional glass, causing it to shatter and rain down, and dropping the woman, who was now more blue-pulp in light armor, to the police below.

Dara offered a panicked swear, and rose her rifle toward where Samara now stood, imperious as the dawn, looking down on Shepard's surprising would-be assassin. "Don't shoot!" Shepard said from her spot on the ground. She pushed herself up, and moved to Samara's side just as her barriers kicked in full once more. "She just saved my life."

"I would not go so far as to say that," Samara said. She gave a nod toward the broad windows that looked over the city of Nos Astra, over the heads of Lawson and Garrus and Balak and so many other asari police. Notably, she nodded toward the gunships which were now converging, forming a firing wall.

"Thaaaat... can't be good," Shepard muttered.

"And this is the _rest_ of the creature's message," Samara said grimly.

Whatever Shepard had to say to that, was drowned by the wail of gunfire, the crashing of glass shattering down, and the hell of engines against wind, as the sun set beyond the Illium horizon.

* * *

**To Be Continued**

* * *

Secondary Codex Entry (HISTORICAL): Storm Kings, The

_An empire which at its height covered three quarters of the globe, the Storm Kings first came about as a reaction against the enslavement of airbenders during the years under the Monolith. The Storm King Era is well documented, comparable to the Monolith, and is much more recent, having ended only nine hundred years ago. While Storm King rule was harsh, it was marked by large-scale benign neglect, thus, rebellion was never a priority as it was for the Monolith, for three centuries of rule._

_The great hypocrasy of the Storm Kings, who declared that they would never be enslaved again, was that they practiced a stratified form of slavery, bearing a very strict caste system which was rigidly enforced internally. The higher ranks included the priests and shamans, and the warrior chaste, while the lowest were those who reared and trained the bison which formed the backbone of their society and, in fact, their empire. Such was their dependence upon the bison-herder cast, that when Avatar Vajrapata convinced them to abandon their jailors, the Storm Kings ended as a coherent entity, let alone empire, within five decades._

_When Avatar Vajrapata incited the rebellion within the Storm Kings' ranks, it quickly boiled over into what very nearly became the first World War. The Earth King Kuei II offered shelter for the escaped slaves, which drew the wrath of the Storm King military, which still had a certain number of already trained bison to rely on. Their assaults on Ba Sing Se brought to ruin the royal palace, and incidentally, the visiting Fire Lord. Thus, the Fire Nations entered the war. The battles were very even in the early days, however attrition strongly favored those who resisted the Storm Kings. Every bison which was brought down could not be replaced. Still, stunning upsets did occur during the first historically chronicled 'Day of Black Sun', which ended with the Fire Nations' navies scattered and leaderless. Tellingly, it was also the first recorded instance of what would later be known as 'Sozin's Comet' appearing, and swinging a later battle into the Fire Nations' favor._

_The last battles of the Storm Kings were horrific for all involved. The Storm Kings, having exhausted their supply of trained bison, began to build remarkably advanced flying craft to keep their aerial advantage. While the craft were defeated in the last battles, they would later serve as the inspiration for the later, and far more advanced Fire Nation Airships which came about during the end of the First World War. After the destruction of the Storm Kings' infrastructure and society, the former slaves coopted several of their once fortresses, and repurposed them as monasteries. The slaves also reinvented themselves, into the cultural identity now called 'the Air Nomads'. _

_The Storm Kings also lived on in the memories of the Fire Nation, who bore the brunt of fighting them, for centuries. In the time of Sozin's Purge, the rhetoric that the Fire Lord used as his justification to the masses was of 'ending the Storm King menace once and for all'. Not until the actions of Avatar Aang did the populace of the Fire Nation by-and-large accept that the Storm Kings had long ago been consigned to the annals of history. _

_The Air Nomads as a distinct people has not returned to the degree it once had, as all airbenders currently alive can trace their roots either back to the son of Aang, Tenzin, or else to individuals who randomly were born into airbending, a process which still baffles some Applied metaphysicians._

* * *

_Leave a review._


	26. The Justicar, Part 2

"Still no word from Alliance HQ?" the young human asked, kneading his hands all the while. Vega shook his head, slowly. And Anette found herself staring at the latter more often than she was supposed to have. Often enough that sometimes, he noticed. And for a wonder, he didn't comment on it. Mostly she watched him, because he was _impossible_.

"That's not surprising," the quarian said, slumped forward on her couch with his elbows on his knees. "They've probably blown every FTLC buoy out of the sky."

"There's... Damn it, I wish there was something I could do!" the young man said.

"Well, we could try to take over their ship and save the rest of the squad," Vega said with a chuckle which was dry, and its jocularity, stretched.

"I mean... My gun won't do shit against them, won't it?" he said. Anette sighed, and pulled it from the soldier's back, letting him give a clipped yelp when she did. She tossed it onto the kitchen table, and pulled a tool-kit that she kept in the corner for when her appliances inevitably broke down. It was a matter of a few seconds with a resonant screwdriver to break the dissipator node off of the Lancer, and a few seconds more to strip the barrel out, digging into its heat-exchanger. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Stopping your complaining," she said. She pulled the old, junky dissipator out and tossed it out her window, before leaning out that same window, reaching down, and pulling up a mining laser that had been set there, ready for a job which never came. She dropped it with a heady thunk onto the table next to the disassembled rifle, and began to give it the same treatment she gave the gun. "So. Effengee. Can I call you Effengee?"

"I don't think 'FNG' is his name," Zek pointed out.

"What?" she asked, as she pulled the heavy-duty heat-sink out of the laser.

"Stands for 'fuckin' new guy'," Vega said, rubbing the back of a neck which seemed now perpetually sore. Of course, that he had a sore neck was the least of his worries. The last time she saw somebody who looked like he did, had that look in his eyes, he was minutes away from a death that no medicine in the galaxy could prevent. Vega had lasted more than a week, now. He paused, and turned with those darkened and bleak eyes to the younger man. "What _is_ your name, anyway?"

"Fung, sir," the rookie answered. Anette raised a brow.

"You're kidding," Vega enunciated her thoughts exactly.

"You never asked, sir."

"Seein' how long the joke could hold out," Vega admitted. "Hopefully until you earned a nickname," Zek gave him the most 'what the hell is wrong with you look' that was possible through a translucent face-plate – techinically the second most, but since Anette van Trugh had never met nor heard of Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, to her knowledge it topped the chart – and Vega continued. "Come on, that's how it works in the military, guys!"

"You don't have a nickname," Fung said.

"Yeah, and who do you think gives people their nicknames?" he asked. He then turned to Anette, and she barely resisted a shudder in the instant that his eyes met hers. _How_? How was he even _possible_? "What are you doing anyway, Jimo?"

She answered him by squeezing the heat-sink until it could move no more, then hitting it with a hammer until it wedged in tighter. All leaned away at that, giving her room until she finished the beating, and then slotted the barrel back in place. The dissipator node no longer fit by a half, so she cut off a chunk of it with her Omnitorch, then welded it in place. It'd never collapse again, but that wasn't the point. Then, after blowing on it, and noticing it wiggle a bit, she defaulted to the last tool in her arsenal. "Is that... duct-tape?" Fung asked.

"Yeah," she said, giving the whole gun a vigorous wrapping everywhere save over the sink ports. She hefted it up, finding it a fair bit heavier than it was before, but the rattling had stopped. She then pushed it into Fung's hands. "That should give you thirty, maybe forty shots before it needs to cool off. And it'll take a while to cool off. But when it hits, it'll hit like a Disciple."

"A what?"

"Shotgun," Vega said. "Debatably."

"Hey, the Disciple is a fine piece of asari engineering," Anette snapped.

"The thing feels like a toy and has no grunt to it. Just pop-pop. No blam-blam. That's not a shotgun! That thing's just a big pistol."

"That's great, but are you sure this'll work?" Fung asked.

"It'll work at least once," Anette offered. "After that, it might explode."

"Not giving a lot of confidence," Fung mentioned. She rolled her eyes, and the fell on Vega once more.

"...Vega... How..." she began. He turned to her, offering a confused shrug. She tried to pull the words into place, in a way which didn't immediately put the gunsights on her. "How did you sur–"

"Oh crap," Zek muttered, and all eyes turned toward him.

"What?" Fung asked.

"Do you see that?" he said, pushing himself off the couch and moving to the window that looked out over the scenic, remote valley amongst hills that Anette had picked out for herself. She let the question die, as she wasn't sure if she even had the guts to completely ask it even now, and leaned out her window, as the other three filled up the door.

"I see something," Anette said, looking at the horizon. Despite the light of the new sunrise that had only come a day ago, there was a darkness over there where the land met the sky. Something that... that teemed.

"The swarm," Vega said, his voice hollow. "They're moving."

"Where?" Fung asked. Zek looked down for a moment, the light on the front of his mask flicking on and off rapidly as though he were in panicked conversation for a long moment, before he turned to them.

"...where do you think?" he asked with a bemoaning tone.

"What do we do?" Fung asked. Vega answered him by tapping his wrist, causing his armor to let out a heavy hiss, and a helmet to leap out of his shoulders and surround his head. He pulled a shotgun from his back, and it noisily clacked into its full size as the eyes began to blaze with blue haptic light.

"What do you think? We fight, or we die."

* * *

Shepard hurled herself off of the upper level, landing amidst glass and ruin, only to slam her fingertips into the floor. She was almost knocked aside by a few rounds from a gunship clipping her on the way down, but she managed to make it to the floor, pressing through the absolute carnage before her. When her fingers finally had purchase, they pulled. Hard. With a metalbending surge that started in her legs and passed into the guts of the building, a great sheet of the structural material leapt up three meters, cutting off a lot of incoming fire for the moment, and letting a degree of panic abate.

"Get them into the central rooms!" Shepard barked.

"Already on it!" Garrus called, herding police behind him as he looked through his scope, peering into the half-meter gap between the wall she'd ripped into position via the lower floor and the ceiling leading to the floor above this one. He'd almost reached what seemed to be a master bedroom when he let out a shot, one that Shepard didn't see the effect of. Mostly because she was concentrating on the people around her.

"Goddess preserve us!" Dara said, her back pressed to a wall, bullet holes roughly framing her. There was a puddle between her legs. Balak didn't have couth or patience, so grabbed her by the arm and outright threw her toward Garrus.

"Your goddess doesn't give a shit! Preserve yourself!" he snapped. Samara jumped from the same ledge that Shepard had, only instead of landing with the mass and fury of an enraged platypus bear, she drifted down as would a leaf on a windless day, coasting down on mass-effect fields. Balak gave her a look, then turned to Shepard. "They're going to switch to explosives any mi–"

Balak's prediction proved both accurate and almost too-late. There came a great blast, as a chunk of Shepard's plate-steel wall was blown in by a rocket-strike. Samara took one step forward making herself the foremost of those present, and cast out a hand. A quarter-sphere of hexagonal blue light flashed into being in the instant before the torn and blasted metal seared back; it deflected off of her barrier, rather than through the Avatar and those with her.

"We should evacuate," Samara said, her voice still calm, but hardly placid. Shepard only had to look around, to all the asari police who'd been shot to ribbons – flooding the floor of the room with slick blue – to know that the Justicar was absolutely right. She let the barricade drop, but only because it became clear that a second rocket wouldn't follow the first. Mostly, because the slim gap now became swamped with salarians and asari in black-and-yellow armor. Balak's shotgun blasted long spines of metal into the chest of one before she even cleared her rappelling line, but the others landed, weapons in hand, and began to fire at everybody who was yet standing. The gaping wound in the barricade before Shepard became host to two asari, who immediately rolled aside, clearing space for a third... in massive, powered armor.

"Evacuating seems like a good plan, now," Shepard agreed, pulling the Mattock from her back, and letting it lie in her hands. The comforting feeling that it had given her in Adeks' back-yard was strangely absent here. Must have been the insanity around her. But still, she picked her target, and started to crack shots even as she backed off. Two to pop shields. Another, to pop skull. She'd barely shifted her attention to the next one beside the armor when Samara flexed her limbs, and vanished into a flash of blue light, only to reappear with a kinetic thud boot-first in the power-armor's faceplate. She backflipped clear of it, and the thing backpeddled until it's heels were at the precipice. The translucent golden plate now had cracks running its full length and width. And that was enough to give a sniper a notion. A second crack, this one of a Mantis firing, and a chunk of that windscreen flew away onto the floor, but the machine continued back. A splatter of green oozed out of the hole, and the power-armor tumbled back out of the window.

"That was..." Shepard said, looking over her shoulder, but only then noticing how many other Eclipse-armored salarians and asari were now sharing the room with her. And how many, in fact, were at this moment shooting at her. She cut herself off, with another tear of the floor. The kitchen-sink rose by a meter, cutting off all line of sight on that side, until the panelling started to get shot through with holes. Still, concealment was better than being naked to gunshots. "Is everybody out?" she shouted.

"Pretty much!" Garrus shouted. Then, when Shepard looked to him, he caught an incendiary blast to his chest, setting his armor aflame. He started to shout and flail, but Shepard had the moment she needed to rip the flames right off of him and let them die in the air. He breathed deep for a moment, then pulled back, into the grieving parents' bedroom.

"We fall back or we get shot to pieces," Balak summarized, leaning out from the increasingly bullet-riddled metal that Shepard had bent up as cover to send another blast of spikes toward the encroaching mercenaries.

"On three!" Shepard called.

Samara, backing off, nodded. She had no weapon in hand, but she'd already proven that she didn't need one. Shepard popped a new sink into her gun. It was only ten meters between where the three were huddled and the bedroom door. They were surrounded on two sides, and that would soon become three. With a glare of light, a hale of bullets started to tear through the hole, shouting wrath for having wasted one of their mechs so swiftly. Balak just glared, sharp teeth grit, and fired at those trying to grind them down. Only this time, by virtue of salarian quickness, he missed.

"Fuck it, THREE!" Shepard screamed.

As she did, she tore lightning through her limbs and sent it out, trying to rake as many people with it as she could. She only managed to get three, as her dexterity had, since her death, left something to be desired. But she had enough wherewithal to slap her lightning-bearing hand to the Mattock and follow the barrier-busting bolt with almost-corn-kernel sized chunks of metal at remarkable speed. Some, staggering back, had no defense from it, and were sent spraying out the backs of their armor. Others, by dint of her sweeping aim, were barely saved.

Balak swung his shotgun toward the ones flanking Shepard, and sent them to the floor with the blast. The salarian popped back up instantly, having ducked the shot, but he wasn't done. With his single fist, Balak launched a flight of ballistic blades, which tore the slender alien to pieces; one did not simply duck a cone of long, metal shards, after all.

"Do we have an exit?" Shepard shouted over her shoulder.

"Does it _look_ like we have an exit?" she asked, giving a gesture around the windowless room before sending a bullet past Shepard and into the chest of a mercenary who was trying to line up a shot on her. Samara gave only a glance, before bounding across the room with graceful strides, and planting herself next tot he wall to the adjoining apartment. Her eyes shut, and she began to drift off of the floor. At first, she glowed blue, but as she curled into a tight, almost fetal ball, the color darkened and twisted, until the energy surrounding her seemed like it was passing through a twisted, smoked lens on its way to whoever saw it. Then, she thrust her limbs outward, and there was a crack, as the wall began to dissolve behind her.

"Do not approach me, or you will die," Samara said, opening eyes as black as the void. She then turned and walked through the hole that she'd created, with the others beginning to follow.

"Don't just stand there! Run!" Shepard shouted. There was a clunk underfoot, and she saw something cylindrical landing next to her foot. A flick kicked it back, and the high-explosive grenade detonated harmlessly – to anybody she cared about at least – amidst the mercenaries who were now all-out swarming the apartment. She fell back through the doorway, which was slowly getting wider as more and more bullets hit it. The last through was Balak himself, who rocked as he caught a shotgun blast, which didn't seem to faze him very much at all. Shepard gave a glance to Garrus, on the other side of the doorway from her, then in toward the ruptured water-pipes which belched water into the destroyed kitchen.

"Steam 'em?" Garrus asked.

"It's like you're reading my mind," Shepard said with a smirk. She ignored the bullets which now began to poke through the bulkhead she'd raised at the cost of the lower-floor's structural integrity, and more blasts kept sheering parts away. There was a twinned heavy thud, as two more of the power-armors entered the open-concept living room, and stomped away from the precipice. Shepard, though, leaned out, and pulled the water up and held it in a great sheet near the center of their ranks. One that Garrus obligingly spun out with a wave of flame, which converted that water into steam and cut off all sight. But more importantly, it broiled any bastard who didn't have a helmet on. And there were a couple of them.

"Are we going to have this much fun with all the new hires?" Garrus asked.

"This is _fun_, to you?" Balak asked.

"You should know me well enough," Garrus said by way of answer.

Shepard, though was falling back. She backed into the next room, and then looked to the windows which flanked the other side. She then looked forward, then to the side. "Oh, you've got to be kidding me."

The worst of all predictions turned out to be true, when a single gun-ship slid sideways into view, and its guns began to spin up. The Justicar, though, gave Shepard a calm look, before pointing toward the doorway. "Take them into the elevator plaza. It is the safest place for them."

"What about y–" Shepard began, but was cut off when a stream of bullets began to tear apart this poor bastard's home, sending couch-stuffing and electronic toys exploding into the air in fluff and sparks, respectively.

"I will be fine," Samara said. She then started running, toward the glass which was shattering down as the bullets swept the room. When the sweep reached her, she cast out a hand, and a wedge of blue light split the shots around her, before she launched herself forward, out of the window, and directly onto the windscreen of that gunship.

"Yup. She'll fit right in," Garrus said.

"Lawson; elevators!" Shepard said. The woman didn't chafe at being ordered when somebody was actively trying to kill her. A good quality to have. She caught, from the corner of her eye, a swirling of the steam that filled the other room. She was already turning, gun up, when a heavily armored Eclipse asari, her blue skin blistered, and her eyes azurely bloodshot. She sent out a stream of fire almost as fast as an automatic rifle was capable of, simply by having her finger work faster than most thought possible. The heat-sink popped out after sixteen, but the golden bubble of her Tech Armor hadn't fallen. Not until Garrus twisted his arm around, and cast it forward to a bolt of lightning, staggering her before she could raise a grenade launcher toward them. So when she fired, it was toward her own feet. The blast staggered her, and shattered the golden field. Balak took advantage of that by springing toward her, a rictus of fury on his face, and heaving an arm back. As it hung there, there came a whirring of actuators powering up, and his fist began to glow red. When it lashed forward at last, it caught what the Alliance would have called a Sentinel in her upper chest. The blow nevertheless decapitated her.

"Go now!" Balak said, sending out a few shotgun blasts into the swirling steam.

Shepard gave a glance to Samara, clinging to a gunship trying desperately to shake her off, as the black and terrible Annihilation Field began to eat at the machine at the atomic level. No wonder Weaver wanted her. She tapped Garrus' shoulder, and pointed out the door. The only person still on the floor here was one of the cops who'd gotten mowed down after surviving the initial ambush. Everybody else was gone.

"Samara's a big girl, let's go!" Shepard shouted.

"So you weren't the only one who noticed?" Garrus laughed as the two of them retreated through the doorway. Well, almost. They backed into Miranda, who was firing fast and furious down that hallway. When her gun clacked out, She ducked, letting Shepard take her sixteen. Her eyes went wide when she saw what Lawson was shooting at. One of the power-armors was stomping its way through the hallway, its arms grinding against the walls and its head stripping out the false-ceiling and tearing down the fire-sprinklers which were already drenching the corridors even as Shepard stood. Lawson helped with some Omnitool wizardry, but the spark of one of its shield generators going down was a droplet trying to fill a bucket. Garrus barged into her as Balak barged into him, and all now found themselves in the broad open, as the machine set its footing, and couched in one of its arms.

"ROCKET!" Lawson shouted.

"Hit the deck!" Shepard roared, as she put deed to word. The missile blasted straight forward, racing along the hallway and missing both Shepard's group and the utterly overwhelmed cops by centimeters, before slamming into a decorative water-feature, and blasting it to absolute shit. She looked at the others, then to the symbol which, no matter where in the universe you were, meant 'this way to the stairs, idiot'. "Get them into the stairwell, now!"

The slightly urine-stained sergeant gave a nod, and began to push the turian parents into the room to one side, before shepherding the rest of her police in after them. Balak drew what looked like a Carnifex built specifically for krogan from his hip, and sent out three enormously loud shots at it, which all dashed against its barriers. It stomped forward, and they fell back. Its other arm reached forward, and let out a bass blast, a heavy impact shell racing out from its cannon. The first caught the arm of the last officer to try to enter the stairwell, and tore it off in a spray of blue and a scream of shock. The next hit Balak square in the chest. It drove him back a step. The second hit Balak again, and knocked him to a knee, before the barrel glowed with red, and tipped up, unable to fire again.

"Jasmine, into the stairs!" Dara screamed, pulling the one-armed asari in before her, and ducking into the room herself. She gave Shepard a look, one of regret and shame, but pulled the door shut after her. Shepard didn't blame her. There weren't many police forces that could put up with this kind of punishment. The fact that a dismembering blow was a staggering one to one of Shepards squad – although she wasn't consciously aware that she had indeed subconsciously implied that Balak was Shepard's _anything_ – told that clearly enough.

"Light up!" Shepard shouted, slapping her Mattock onto her back and twisting her arms before her, lightning following her fingertips. With a trust, a bolt jumped across the hallway... only to be pulled aside and into the floor by the interference of the drizzling water. Shepard stared at that for a moment, kicking herself inwardly, as the armor rooted itself once more. This time, Shepard and Lawson both acted together, ripping and clawing at the water and slamming it together into a great barricade, one that was blasted to chunks by the rocket that slammed into it, but at least it was ice blown to pieces, and not, say, turians and humans. Shepard twisted the chunks even as they flew, though, and compressed them. Water was not a substance that enjoyed being compressed, so when she compacted an entire hallways worth of standing and falling water into a ball about the size of her fist, it was simply a matter of giving it a path of least resistance. Say, toward a stomping machine that approached.

The water-lance that the act created crossed the distance with a whip-crack, sheering into the cannon-arm of the suit, and cutting it off in a single blow. The water, its energy expended, splashed down to the floor. But the armor kept coming. Balak raised his other fist, and sent out an electrified net that lashed around the thing's leg, but was trying to bee-sting an astronaut.

"Running out of ideas, Shepard," Lawson pointed out, as she cast out yet another piece of invasive programming to short out its shields.

Shepard cast a look over her shoulder. There was a hole in the floor where the water-fixture had stood, and that wasn't too terribly far away. "Leg it?" she offered.

"Good enough," Lawson accepted, and raced past Shepard with her last parting shots deflecting bluely off of the power armor. It spoke volumes to how much power that Justicar could bring to bear in one spot that she set up a one-two so easily; these things were _beasts_! Balak was, again, the last to start his retreat, after Shepard and Garrus had both used their shots and broke to a sprint. She felt the thing rooting itself again, so when she reached the edge of the hole, she didn't drop, so much as slide down into it. Her foot caught on something, upending her in an instant and dropping her face-first onto the floor of the room below. Above her, there was a blast, followed by a heavy thud of Garrus landing on his back directly beside her. Shepard shook her head, then looked up.

Down the barrel of a gun.

There were a dozen Eclipse already down here, flanking Lawson, Shepard, and Garrus in a semicircle. Beyond them at the far end of this hallway was a burst in window. Of course they'd come in the window. "Well... shit," Shepard muttered.

* * *

**Chapter 6**

**The Justicar, Part 2**

* * *

"Is your air-car working?" Vega asked, as he stomped through the threshold and out into Anette's front yard.

"Yeah. In the garage," she said, pointing to another prefab which sat a good hundred meters away. It'd never bothered her that they'd been delivered so haphazardly before. A short walk to the car was healthy. Now, she wanted to punch somebody. Really hard.

"Well, don't just stand there! Get to it!" Vega said. A streak of red began to burn up over the horizon, as though an artillery shell of monumental proportions. It was joined by four others, each with a slightly different trajectory. She motioned for Fung and Zek to follow after her, and took at a sprint toward the garage.

They'd only gotten half way there when the first shell hit. It landed at the third point of a hypothetical right-triangle formed by her garage, her house, and a fresh crater. But the explosion wasn't one of force and shrapnel. Instead, it was a burst that sounded like wet chitin cracking open. No big surprise, then, when the flames died down and a mound of grey-skinned, glowing eyed, naked and neuter human-like-things came racing toward Vega and the others. The bark of Vega's shotgun knocked them from their feet, and those struck, didn't raise. She kept running though. She'd almost reached the garage when she finally ran the math in her head, and looked up once more.

"Oh, you've got to be k–" she'd managed, before the second bolt of wet fire slammed into the corner of her garage, disgorging more of those hollow-eyed men onto the ground, but not nearly so many as had come out of Vega's cluster. Damn! They'd been squeezed out _inside_.

The swarm of them looked to be moving in on Vega, and his shotgun couldn't stem the tide. They got closer, reaching toward him with fists that glowed with flame. And as he moved – toward those things and _away_ from those who could help him – the calls became closer and closer, until he was firing a shotgun directly into the mouths of vaulting husks. One of them grabbed his arm, a great hiss of smoke rising up as the paint was burned away. Vega smashed him with a fist, then stomped his chest into the ground and heaved. The arm came right out of its socket. A broad-armed swing sent the shotgun into the face of another which was trying to leap onto his back. Why? Why was he slogging into the center of that hell?

"We're going to be alright!" Fung said, ignorant obviously of both what his superior was facing and that the garage he was standing right next to was full of mutant cyborg things. She let out a clipped yell as he pounded the door button, causing the shutter door to rattle up, the noise of it lost in the pandemonium. Only then, when he turned to try to cover those behind him did he see Vega. He uttered some human profanity, and raised the kit-bashed rifle to his shoulder. When it fired, it knocked him back a step, before he rooted himself properly, picking off husks that were now outright trying to swarm Vega from every direction.

Unfortunately, what Anette didn't get a chance to scream was 'behind you!'.

The rookie soldier had a husk on his back in a heartbeat, one whose body was starting to glow red with heat. It reached down a hand and pressed it into Fung's face, and instantly his shout of martial anger was transformed into one of utmost agony, as the sizzling of flesh added to the noise surrounding them. Anette grit her teeth, and cast out a hand. And from it, a biotic Kick. The punt hurled the husk away, smashing it into the wall of her garage, but it was picking itself up quickly. Fung fell to his knees, the hand not still locked in a death grip on his rifle hovering millimeters from his face, which now stood raw, red, and blistered.

The husk let out a howl, flames racing from its maw as it did so, and scrabbled toward Anette. This time, she kipped aside of its long-armed lunge, smashing a Warp into its face as it passed. It rolled, and ignored the agony it should have been feeling to continue its lunge at the next target. Zek. Anette's eyes went wide, as she tried to twist a biotic Pull into being.

With a blast of biotic force, she didn't have to anymore. Zek, his body faintly glowing blue, looked forward, and sent out both hands. A snap sound came from within the garage, from something big. Something that exited the building at a stomp, its head crunching the ceiling out of its way. It was a biological horror, one that Vega had seen before, but Anette never. Three meters tall, probably a metric tonne, and it was obviously constructed out of the bodies of human dead. Dead, who were still _twitching_. It raised a cannon, one built into a grey skinned woman's spine and jutting through her teeth, and aimed it toward the asari.

Her day continued to be insane, as Zek once again saved her day, but bounding between Fung and that thing, and throwing both hands forward once more. When the blasts came from the profane cannon, they smashed against a biotic barrier, and not against, say, a facially burned human. The impact of it was enough to send Zek staggering back, but the fact that he could do that at all pointed to one thing, and one thing alone in Anette's mind. A thing she would have to file away for later. You know, in case she survived.

The spell of surprise finally broken, she lashed forward with a Warp onto the greenish field that enveloped the creature that would later be identified to her as a Scion. When one field hit another, both detonated, which lifted Fung from the ground and cast him a few meters closer to Anette, with the terrible consequence of dragging his burned face on the ground when he landed.

Another blast, as a shell which had arced higher than the rest landed at last, crashing straight into the roof of her house, and causing the whole thing to buckle inward. No going back, then. She flicked out a hand, another Warp bathing the Scion in scintillating, disrupted blue light. And right on her cue, Zek threw what looked an overhand pitch, which shot a bolt of blue light into the Scion, staggering it back as the fields detonated once more. When it did, the pods of foul, bubbling flesh began to pop and ooze grey and golden fluids down its increasingly inhuman looking form. It reached into its chest, and hurled a chunk of itself at Zek, one that he had to duck aside from. And when it hit the ground behind him, it detonated into a cloud of what seemed to be a caustic acid. He hissed and scrabbled away from it, racing ever closer to the door, which had more husks clambering over her car toward them. She only had a glance toward Vega, who had given up shooting in favor of beating husks to death with his shotgun, his fists, and his boots.

It was almost as disturbing as looking into his eyes.

"Get up!" Anette screamed at Fung, dragging him off of the ground, her eyes locked on the Scion. Come on, Zek. Set him up. The quarian might have waited longer than she'd have liked, but he did rake forward with both hands once more, only the greenish, nearly electric light of the Reave bathed not only the Scion, but the husks trying to get past it. Sadly, she only noticed that fact when her Kick was already outbound.

The detonation was a chain reaction. One set off the blast of the husk. The husk detonated itself, blasting the other husks behind it. The combined force tore the roof off of her car, and catapulted the Scion sideways. Notably, it did so in two pieces, the gun-woman arm landing in the mud, glowing blue eyes staring directly at Anette. She shuddered at looking at them. It was too familiar. And how stunted, malformed hands twitched, as the main body dissolved into goo? Haunting.

"You wrecked my car!" Anette shouted.

"You can blame me later!" Zek shouted back, his voice creaking on the edge of panic. He reached out with both hands, and his body glowed with biotic power as he laboriously heaved the car out of the corner, pointing it forward so that it could actually drive out of the structure containing it.

"Vega!" Anette shouted. She turned, and saw him, on his knees, amongst the crushed and shattered husks. Just staring into the distance, the shotgun grasped in his hand. "Vega?"

He muttered something, but it was lost to distance, and to the sound of shrieking metal as her house was starting to be torn apart from within. She didn't have time to get closer. Yet, anyway. Zek was beckoning to her by the time she turned back, and she realized that she was, in fact, the weakest link of this chain at the moment, the one taking the most time to do everything. Blame it on the fact that in three hundred years, she'd avoided every fight she possibly could. She pulled at Fung, to get him moving again, and rushed toward where Zek was already boarding the decapitated car.

She flinched as a red, clawed hand reached up from the pile of dead husks, raking at Zek's leg. He let out a yelp which seemed equal parts pain and terror, before booting the still-active husk in the face, and hurling himself into the back seat. Anette rounded the far side of the car, and pushed Fung in a pile atop Zek. For just a moment, she saw something deeply concerning – purple blood – but she had other things to worry about. Running away, for example.

She bounded behind the controls of her car – which were by the grace of the Goddess still intact – and turned the beast on with a press of her thumb. It hummed to life, warning her that the door was ajar. She overrode the safety protocols, and pushed it forward. A husk, which had been trying to claw its way up the car, was dragged by it until half-way across the yard, when it finally snapped its fingers off and rolled to a stop. Anette drifted to a stop beside Vega, and threw open what remained of the passenger-side door. "Vega! Get in here!"

"What... what am I doing?" Vega asked.

"Staying on the ground like an idiot! GET! IN!" she screamed, finally pulling with her biotic powers, causing him to levitate listlessly into the vehicle, dropping him onto the real-leather seating. Another Pull to close the door, and she brought her car up into the sky. "Vega, put your seatbelt on. VEGA!"

He just murmured wordlessly. So she slapped him.

"Hey, what the hell?" Vega asked, the bleak tones evacuating in a heartbeat, rubbing at his face.

"Put on your seatbelt so you don't die!" Anette ordered. Vega looked down.

"When'd I get in the car?" he asked.

"Where do we even go?" Zek asked as he did the favor for the badly burned Fung, who took it upon himself to moan in agony, trying desperately not to clutch at his face.

"I... I don't know," Anette said, her blood running cold as the wind began to scream by her face. Below and behind, she could see the fourth bolt, where it landed in the hills behind her house, sending forth yet more husks, and the things Vega had called Savages, to tear apart everything that Anette'd worked to build in the last two years.

She could never have a home. The galaxy was making a definitive point to show that to her.

And she knew why, too.

* * *

"Well, this was convenient," a young-sounding asari said, as she held an SMG at Shepard's eye-level. "Figure Wasea wants 'em alive?"

"Fuck that noise. Anybody asks, they were dead when we got here," what sounded like a human man said, waving dismissively even as he had an Avenger leveled at Shepard. One twitch, and they'd shoot her. Her barriers needed a few more seconds to go live. How could she stall them.

"You don't know who–" Shepard began, intending to bank on a human's unwillingness to antagonize an Avatar. She was interrupted, by the sound of sliding on the floor above.

A metal creak sounded, and Balak swung down through the hole, hanging onto a pipe from above that sent water streaming behind them all. With one hand, he sent forth a blast of spikes which impaled the human who had Shepard dead-to-rights, knocking him from his feet and leaving him in a pool of red blood. Shepard took that distraction for all it was worth, pushing herself to a sprint, and charging shoulder-first into the asari with the SMG. The impact wasn't nearly as heavy as she'd feared it would be, and she outright bull-rushed the woman until the woman's weight and Shepard's combined to overbalance both, causing both to roll over each other on the floor. She was a dexterous one, though, and almost got free of Shepard's grasp in the roll. So the Avatar just twisted, and slammed the asari face-first into a wall by the one arm she still held. That drove stars into the alien's eyes, easy to see. She glanced to the hall, and saw a shotgun rising toward her, so she twisted again, and the maiden took the blast for Shepard.

Even as Shepard was slamming the asari back into the wall, the shotgunner had his lights put out. Literally. Because the lights were the optics of his eyes, and Lawson pulled up two great hooks of ice, and slammed them through his helmet from behind, before tearing and hurling him over her and sending him crashing into a pair of salarians. Shepard drew a fist back, and sent it forward, straight into the woman's face. She intended to knock the bitch out. Instead, blue force manifested there, and the strike shattered her gauntlet, and sent her flying backward. A crash, and a back-stagger, before she tripped over a sofa's armrest and landed on comfortable leather. She blinked a few times, then pushed herself up, looking at the Shepard-sized hole she'd just been blasted back through.

"...ow," she muttered, flexing a now benuded hand. "I've _got_ to stop doing that."

Shepard first jogged, then ran, then dove through the hole. She landed with her fist racing forward in a bolt of flame. It hit the back of an Eclipse mercenary who was himself trying to dodge fire, this coming from Garrus. Balak dropped from the ceiling, and racked his shotgun. He turned, to the salarian trapped under a brain-spiked human, and sent a blast of spines through his head, easily enough. The last merc standing amongst so many fallen staggered between two firebending opponents, but couldn't regain his balance. Garrus' bolts might not have been conventional, but they kept him staggered. Shepard's? She started to crack his armor to pieces. The three drew closer, two beating the hell out of the third, until one bolt drove him straight into Garrus' arms. He kicked out a knee of the merc, raise a hand high, and drove it down with an Omniblade glowing orange at the end of it.

"Alright, what's the plan?" Shepard asked. Another explosion rocked the floor above, sending debris raining down the hole that Balak had been the last through. Of all who looked – all, in fact – Balak seemed the least concerned.

"Well, the woman we came here to recruit is joyriding on a gunship's face, so..." Garrus said.

"What about the civilians? These mercenaries can't be doing this lightly; somebody is _powerfully_ incentivising them," Lawson pointed out.

"You're telling me. Why isn't the navy coming down for this shit?" Shepard asked, casting a hand down the hall.

"They probably are," Lawson said, stripping out a belt of heat-sinks from one of the fallen, and looping it 'round her neck as a bandoleer. "But even asari have response-delay."

"While you idiots are standing around talking, they've been moving up through the technical lift," Balak said unkindly, pointing his thumb into the innocuous looking door built into a bare stretch of wall. It probably shared the shaft with the public elevator, but had to open a lot wider. And there was a raucous buzz, followed by a hiss, as part of the wall folded in on itself. Balak, though, paused to pull something from the salarian he'd shot. A cigar? He wedged it into his teeth, and lit it off of his shotgun's heatsink, then began tossing a grenade to himself. "Going up?"

"There are worse plans," Shepard said, shouldering her Mattock. The walls folded, and the first sound that came from that lift was the deep thunk of one of those damned power-armors. Garrus gave a mild moan, but Balak just idly, under-hand tossed the grenade into the center of the door. From within the lift, even as the armor appeared in profile, there came screams of alarm, followed by screams of terror, then screams of agony, as the white-phosphorus explosive burned them in their armor. The Mech trudged right through that.

"Mean," Garrus said, taking the first shot he could, which spanged off of the thing's barriers. "But effective."

"Would you rather fight outnumbered?" Balak asked, and fired a blast from his spine-slinging shotgun. Shepard took a knee, leaning into her shots and absolutely slathering it with shots, while Lawson followed suit. When her Carnifex overheated, she pulled the tightly packed Locust from her other hip, and began spraying with that one as well. Mantis changed to Phaeston in turian hands, and bullets flew, even as the armor finally cleared the lift, and had the option to turn. It pivotted the cannon-arm toward them, and Balak started walking forward, firing his weapon again and again. The shot that the Mech tried to split him with only knocked him back a step.

"Running hot!" Lawson said, having reloaded both, and was firing both.

"Almost there," Garrus said. It finished its cramped turn, and pointed the rocket launcher at their position. Black-rimmed blue eyes flared wide, and he dropped his Phaeston in his haste to get his Mantis back in hand. There was a flash of light from the broad-bore of the arm, as the rocket began its path toward Shepard and the others. It got about a meter before the Mantis directly beside Shepard's head let out a crack, and it detonated there. It blue out a door into an apartment, which allowed the terrified screams of the residents to reach those fighting outside. Shepard paused, using the excuse to reload, and turned a raised eyebrow to Garrus.

"Did you just _shoot down_ an incoming rocket?"

"Keep firing!" Lawson snapped.

Finally, the snap, the crack as its barriers went down completely. Shepard grinned, and started to charge in. She'd learned in Basic than when fighting Heavy Armor, you don't metalbend them unless you want to know what your brain smells like cooked. At least, not until their barriers are blown. After that? Fair game. Legs pounded, air cutting away subconsciously to give her even more speed; she only had about twelve seconds to do this, and she needed to make them count.

Sadly, airbending wasn't the only thing Shepard was doing subconsciously.

There was a thud, and a twisting of her vision, which ended with her bridging the distance between her starting point and the Mech, chest first, in an uncontrolled biotic charge. There was a dull crack as a fissure ran down her breastplate, and she fell back onto the ground, slightly stunned. "I've got to _stop doing that_!" she said to herself. The Mech before her spun its three-fingered hand, raising up the cannon-arm it was attached to, and sending it straight down at Shepard's face. She slid and rolled out of its way, ending with her wedged between its stumpy legs. "I can't get a teacher fast enough," she said to nobody in particular, before slamming a hand into the metal at the bottom of the wind-screen, and heaving up and out. There was a snap and a pop as bolts and electrical connections severed, but the panel now had a half-meter gap in it. One that Shepard pointed a rifle straight up through. The salarian pilot went even more bug-eyed than usual, screaming a mantra of 'no no no no nononono!', before she sent up a few more shots, and painted the back of his seat with him. With a clank, the Mech rocked back, to rest on its heels.

Shepard leaned out from her twisted up vantage point, and looked back to the others, who were variously reloading, breathing heavily, or pulling the stogie out from his lips. "See? That wasn't so hard," Balak noted, before popping the cigar back in.

"We've got to find the Justicar," Miranda said. "And then, we've got to get away from this... this _invasion_!"

"How are we supposed to find her? She could be just about anywhere!" Shepard asked. Then, she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned, to the windows at the end of this hallway. They were already broken, rappel lines dangling outside them. But what caught her eye was the gunship. Or rather, what was left of the gunship. Almost half of it was dissolved at this point, and that it remained flying was a miracle of engineering. And it was flying directly into the side of this building. A red streak vaulted off of it, as the gunship finally dove down. She shot through that window, before emitting a powerful blue glow, and swiftly coming to a halt, floating above the floor as the gunship impacted and exploded, sending a shockwave through the building. Samara, calm as ever, looked down at Shepard.

"We must leave this building and find a less populated refuge," she said.

"Good idea," Shepard said, not even questioning the Justicar's logic. She looked to one side. "This could get us to the roof. Do they keep cars up there?"

"Yes," Garrus said. "I saw them on the way in."

"Then that's our exit," she said. "Everybody, into the elevator!" she cast a finger aside at it, ignoring the burned human, asari, and salarian bodies. Also, the melted, inoperative Pantu mechs. That could have been a mild annoyance, if they'd worked.

Everybody charged into the elevator, with Balak taking his sweet time. Shepard used his lackadaise to turn to Samara. "What's the situation out there?"

"Numerous gunships, seven personnel transport craft, and a light-frigate three kilometers overhead," Samara said, gracefully striding into the lift.

"A _frigate_?" Shepard asked, a little gobsmacked.

"The most dangerous of the Ardat Yakshi's abilities is to gain absolute control of another's will, through the most subtle of means," Samara said, turning to face her once she was standing as a defiant rose amongst the mud of the dead. "It is a simple thing for one to raise an army. She could do it with a single touch."

"How did you people deal with those things in the old days?" Shepard asked, shaking her head.

"With varying degrees of success," the Justicar answered stoically.

"Shepard, come on," Garrus beckoned. "I don't feel like getting killed in an asari apartment building."

"And how _do_ you want to be killed?" Lawson asked peevishly.

"Sexual exhaustion," Garrus replied. Lawson shuddered a bit at that. Shepard took a step toward the lift, then paused, turning back.

"...hold on a second," Shepard said, "I've got an idea."

* * *

"Fung, stop squirming or it won't take," Vega said, as he was turned around in his seat, trying to get the Medigel to affix to the burns that covered more than a quarter of the rookie's face. There were few things harder to treat by 'gel than large-scale burns. Fung had at least stopped screaming. That was grating on everybody's already frayed nerves.

"I'm trying, Sarge," Fung said, but it was clear that his clipped tones weren't him being manly, but rather, trying to hide the fact that he was weeping with pain. Not that Anette blamed him. The landscape was moving by at a reasonable clip, if nowhere near the break-neck speed they had attempted to get away from that swarm. It was probably in the low dozens of kilometers per hour. It made for wicked head-wind; how did people ever deal with this in the old days? It beggared the imagination.

"What are we going to do now?" Zek asked.

"I don't know," Anette said.

"We've got to find better medical supplies. This ain't gonna cut it," Vega said, pointing at Fung's face."

"Well, where could we find those?" Zek asked, his anxiety only slightly coming through his body language, but certainly through his voice. Yet another grain on the scale, in Anette's mind. Not that she had a lot of extra processing power up there right now.

"I don't know!" Anette answered his question.

"I can think o' one, but you're not going to like it," Vega said. Anette turned to him.

"No. You must be joking."

"Fehl Prime has bins of that crap," Vega said. "And if anybody managed to hide and wait out the swarm... well, that's where they'd be."

"Wait out the swarm? That's hopelessly idealistic," Anette said.

"Have you got a better idea?" Vega asked, half way between angry and desperate. As though he was annoyed that he had to ask, but really hoping that she had an answer. She looked away from him quickly. Someday, she might be used to that look in his eyes. But not today.

"No. No I don't," she said. "How do we get in?"

"We're about five clicks out," Vega said, looking into the distance at the broadcast towers which just barely peeked over the horizon. "Set me down; I'll scrounge what I can."

"I'm coming," Fung said, his tone very tight, and very raw.

"Hey, you don't need to play hero, kid," Vega said.

"No. I gotta go. Nobody goes in alone," the rookie said, offering a shaky, twisted-lipped smile to him. "First rule of the book."

"Nah, the first rule is 'don't volunteer for _anything_'," Vega shouted back at him. "Which you're failing to listen to, by the way."

"Can we all stop pointless arguing?" Anette shouted.

"They're human, I'm pretty sure that's all they do," Zek said, managing to crack a very nervous joke. Anette leaned aside, looking at the two pink-skins, a finger of her own waggling between them.

"The last time you went into the colony, only one of you got out. Nobody gets that lucky tw–"

The –ice was rudely interrupted by something slamming into the frame of her car. It threw the trajectory out of whack, and almost lifted Vega out of his seat. He had to pull himself down by the belt, locking it shut once more.

"What the hell was that?" Zek screamed.

Anette leaned out her window, and her eyes shot wide. There was something growing on her car. It was blue and gray, and seemed like it had embedded lights that shifted and squirmed along its surface, as it slowly clawed its way across her hood. She looked aside, just in time to see another of those massive, hideous human-gestalts pointing a cannon-arm toward her, but when it fired, it wasn't a bolt of force and kinetic impact. Instead, it launched something dark, relatively slow moving, and... globby. This one slammed into the back of her car, making it fish-tail in the sky, and leaving the Scion out of view as the trees slid in to hide it. She tried to pull up, to gain speed, but her haptics started shutting down, one by one.

"No, no..." Anette said, trying to gain control of it manually. "No no no no," she continued, as the last controls went out, and the dashboard returned to a dead, lifeless black. "...oh no..."

"What? What!" Zek shrieked at her.

"This is gonna hurt!," she screamed. She looked back, and saw the second glob spreading over her engines. With a descending hum – and an asari screaming – they shut off completely, and the car dropped toward the ground like a brick, crashing through trees, before the ground made things very very uninteresting for Anette. Or at least, as uninteresting as a terrified unconsciousness could be.

* * *

"So would you mind explaining why exactly an entire mercenary company is trying to kill me?" Shepard asked, now that they had a moment of relative peace, as the freight lift slowly ascended toward the roof.

"It is highly doubtful that the entire of the Eclipse Private Military Association is attempting to murder you, only the most local wing of it," Samara said calmly, back straight and eyes forward to the doors of the elevator. "And even so, _you_ are not their target. I am."

"You weren't the one who got a chest-full of buckshot in that bedroom," Shepard pointed out. The Justicar's head tipped aside just a note.

"There are aspects of the past few minutes which I have found puzzling. That is one of them. The obvious and notably incorrect answer is that she was getting you out of the way to have an uninterrupted assault on me, however I am not so arrogant nor do I assume her so idiotic to think she could kill two, one a Justicar, before that Justicar could react," Samara said. "Whatever the agenda of that woman was, it was her own. And coincidence can take strange and surprising forms."

"How many d'you figure are up here?" Balak asked Garrus, who was re-doping his scope.

"Probably two dozen. Maybe three," Garrus said easily.

"Forty, then," Balak said, taking a puff of the cigar, which had about halved its original length. He nodded. "Should be interesting."

"Top floor garage, lots of cars and lighting posts? It's a dream come true," Garrus said wistfully. Balak just shook his head.

"I might have a few tricks up my sleeve, but I'm pretty sure that I can't bring down a frigate," Shepard pointed out. She paused, and thought to herself. "...unless..."

She closed her eyes, and tried opening those 'pathways to power' that she had felt in her soul, from the time she punched Nazara to death onward. She felt a trickle of what might she had within her. And then, she felt a psychic backhand across her face.

Shepard staggered, for a moment, not in the lift with the others, but instead having to regain her balance on a featureless black plain. Shepard rubbed her cheek, and glared at the stern eyed Prothean who'd struck her. "Alright, Javik, what is your goddamned _problem_?" She asked. "Are you purely here to cockblock me every time I try to get back into the Avatar State?"

"No," Javik said. "I am training you to deal with your problems without using the Avatar State as a crutch."

"...why?" Shepard asked.

"Because there are dangers involved in using it that nullify all of its advantages, if used at the wrong time. You must be strong enough to make do without, because in the worst of times, you will have to," Javik said.

Shepard rubbed her face, and glared at the Prothean. Hell, getting slapped never hurt that much before. "I know this isn't going to be the right tack to take, but Sajuuk used it all the time. So did Kyoshi, and Yang-Chen, and Korra, and Sato..."

"Your primitive human Avatars were not fighting the Reapers," Javik said, turning to face the darkness, his face in profile to her. "And in his way, neither was Sajuuk."

"I'm not going to be much use against the Reapers if I get killed on a rooftop," Shepard pointed out.

"Do you really believe that you are going to die today?" Javik asked.

He had her on that one.

With a blink, the Prothean was gone, and the elevator had returned around her squad. She shook her head, clearing the dross that got left from Javik being a massive pain in the ass. One of these days, he was going to get her killed.

Probably not today.

"Everybody, step aside. I can take the hits; you nail 'em when they reload," Shepard said.

"Are you sure you know how to use that thing?" Garrus asked.

"_Universal_ _license_," Shepard said with a smirk, and then grabbed the controls to the heavy Mech that she was currently strapped within. "If it moves, I can pilot it."

"Badly," Garrus said.

"No comments from the squishy turian," Shepard snapped. Balak offered a single, barked laugh at that, before stepping aside and letting her plod to the doors of the elevator, as the last ding sounded, followed by an unhappy buzzing. Then, the doors before the windscreen of Shepard's stolen Tu-Wei-Liu slid open, and showed a collection of yellow-and-black armored mercenaries, standing in knots around their superiors under the parking lot lights. Some turned a look toward Shepard, but they could see only the armor stomping out of the lift, not what lie behind it... or who dwelt within it. So they only gave her small scrutiny for that critical first second. Then, hands began to raise to 'ears', and questions began to fly. The knots began to turn, guns entering hands, as the deception became known.

But by then, Shepard had rooted her feet.

There was a grin on her face as she triggered the rockets, sending a ballistic missile into the group with the fanciest armor. Probably their elite killers. Well, ex-elite killers now. She started to stomp forward, the powerful barriers of the Mech soaking up all the incoming fire from shotguns, rifles, snipers, and even grenade launchers. As she stomped, she started picking targets. Kathunk; a swarm of engineers getting ready to deploy a squad of Pantus was liquified, the skiff full of mecha sliding off the side of the roof. Kathunk; one of the heavily armored, flamethrower bearing women outright detonated. Kathunk; a gunship strafing in for a barrage of missiles was knocked off course, its barriers barely holding up.

The Eclipse kept firing, and her barriers kept glowing. The HUD started to warn her that the reactor was approaching peak mass-effect draw. "Any time now, guys," Shepard said.

The rear-viewing camera caught the entrance of Balak before any other; mostly, because he punched his way through the wall, and broke an asari's neck while doing so. Garrus vaulted out on HAVOC flames to plunge his Omniblade into the chest of another Pyro, before grabbing the nozzle, and turning it on another cluster of troops. Lawson, though, stayed glued to the inside of the lift. Not surprising; even though she could take shots at mercs, she didn't have nearly the killing power that the others had.

It was sensible that they continue to fire on Shepard. It was also the worst then they possibly could have done. She could take the hits; they were glass cannons. But now, they had room to move. And that made them dangerous. The thud of a biotic charge announced the presence of Samara, driving her feet into the tailgate of a troop transporter and driving the vehicle forward. A small cluster of Eclipse had to dive aside, or be sandwiched between craft. That drove them straight into Shepard's crosshairs. A grinding as the Mech's feet locked and stabilized, then a fresh rocket was away, erasing those unlucky enough to have landed on her side of the wreck.

Shepard was feeling nice and invincible when there was a crack, and an alarm klaxon began to shout in her ear. The barriers had gone down. But from what? Fingers flashed along haptics as she continued to trudge forward, no longer watching how Samara almost seemed to teleport around the rooftop, casting biotic force from her fists when it suited her, and from her whole flesh when she had herself surrounded. She often seemed to surround herself. But Shepard was looking for what had hit her. Then, she found it. The gunships were rising, to deal with Shepard and her new toy.

Nobody ever let her have nice things.

She turned away from the infantry; they were her squad's priority at this point. She tried to turn on auto-tracking, but she groaned when she found that its connections were severed, probably when she ripped this thing open to kill its first occupant. She could still smell him in here. Salarian blood smelled weird. "Manual anti-aircraft. This'll be fun," Shepard muttered. She continued to turn, until she had the gunship which was currently peppering her with autocannon fire as it banked around the open-air garage. "And. I... gotcha."

Kathunk; oops, that was a billboard. Shepard gritted her teeth, trying to keep her aim steady. It became harder when the gunship launched missiles of its own at her. She knew she had about a second before they would reach her. She spent that second turning her shoulder into the incoming attack. The missiles slammed into her rocket arm, shattering ablative plating, tearing at hydraulic lines. And only then did the first gunship's fire falter, as a second rose into sight near it.

"Please still work, please still work," Shepard pleaded quietly, as she brought the controls for the rocket-launcher up again. A smirk cracked in the face of violence. "Guess what? It still works."

Her feet ground into the rooftop, and the rocket was away. The gunship banked and dropped, but the missile, which was notably not a dumb-fire, banked with it, and slammed into the craft right behind the cockpit. The ship broke off and drifted ever downward, black smoke rising from its fuselage. Two more to go, one of them in firing range.

This one sent more rockets her way, and this time, Shepard didn't have the time to turn into it. The rockets slammed against the body of her stolen machine, almost knocking it onto its back. The second rocket of the pair struck off center, but a fraction of a second behind the first. Just in time to blast away the weakened canopy, and leave a great chunk of Shepard's person effectively naked to a gunship.

With a wince, and a powerful ringing in her ears after the noise that that'd made, she turned. The HUD still hung in the air before her, not needing the metal to project against to be visible. Good, because otherwise, she'd have to shoot from the hip... and there was one lesson she'd learned better than most, and that was you never shoot from the hip with something that travels so many times the speed of sound.

The reticule was shaking; not surprising, considering that the machine was off-balance. When Shepard took a step back, she realized why. The missile-arm was a twisted pile of slag on the ground. She refocused, ignoring how Garrus and Balak were fighting in an almost leapfrog fashion, the latter clearing ground for the former, and the former knocking a hole into defenses for the latter. They didn't even look at each other. Garrus took a shot, one that slammed back an unremarkable looking Vanguard; Balak charged the biotic next to her, and took her down with a head full of spikes, followed by a glowing red fist to the chest of the next, which sent him flying off of the building. He laid about with his shotgun, and Garrus moved up.

Shepard had it. Kathunk. Missed by centimeters. One more chance at this...

Kathunk; the thruster wing of the gunship snapped off with a shockwave of blue, and the machine spun to the ground, dead even as it dropped. Shepard let out a sigh of relief. Until she looked down, and saw her shadow looming long before her, edged by a bright spotlight. A glance to her rear-view showed that the other gunship was about five meters away, and had every gun pointed at her back.

Shepard let out a stream of profanity that would have made a drunken Tribesman proud, as she hurriedly tore loose all of the restraints holding her into the machine. She could see the barrels of the guns start to spin up. She wasn't going to get loose. There wasn't enough time.

The autocannons' fire, though, struck a blue barrier. It didn't stop Shepard in her hasty flight, but she was stuck. One of the clasps on her feet just wouldn't let go. She yanked and pulled, but with the broken windscreen locked in the down position, she didn't have leverage. It was then that a red arm thrust through that windscreen, and pulled. There was a plastic pop, and Shepard was heaved out of the seat. A thud of biotic force later, and she was stumbling onto her back, Samara crouched almost dramatically before her. A second later, the missiles from the gunship streaked across the paltry distance, and blasted her new toy to scrap.

"That could be a problem," Shepard said. She looked around. "Where are the rest of them?"

"Dealt with," Garrus said. "Balak? Got it?"

"What do you take me for?" the batarian asked, reaching to his back. He pulled what Shepard thought was a second shotgun... but it unfolded a lot _bigger_ than a shotgun. He pointed it at the gunship, which was cooling its autocannon, and pulled the trigger, sending his own missiles out.

The barrage of man-portable antiaircraft absolutely peppered the gunship, rocking it to and fro before one of its ammo bins detonated. It was saved from tearing itself apart only because of the CASE system projecting the blast out and away, but the ship listed and dropped, smoking and burning as it made for the first place that it could land without smashing through somebody's living room.

"Better," Balak said, and put his rocket launcher away. Garrus sauntered over to a car, looked around, and then tapped a few buttons on his Omni. The door popped open, and he beckoned. Shepard took Samara's hand to rise. A glance around the roof showed just how much carnage had come down in two and a half minutes. The dead and grievously injured lay at random, with large swaths of the rooftop garage alight with burning NU-palm, which was even now eating its way through what cars it had spattered, and spalled the concrete away in chunks at the edges of its pools. Shepard could see no small number of Eclipse mercs who had been dashed against surfaces, or outright detonated, likely by biotic force, or else riddled with bullets by the ravenette who now moved confidently away from the mostly destroyed pillar that she had huddled behind.

"We must leave before they send more gunships," Samara said, already striding toward the aircar which Garrus was in the process of hotwiring. My, Garrus, Shepard thought, how Omega has corrupted you. When the loud hum of its engines coming online sounded, Shepard vaulted in and shoved him into the passenger seat. Samara slipped in behind, leaving Balak to glower at the rear seat. Lawson just shook her head and got into the middle of the seat, her attention firmly on her Omni, but the batarian still didn't seem comfortable with the proximity to the Justicar.

"Balak, you're going to have to get in," Garrus said calmly. "Because I'm pretty sure you can't fight the entire Eclipse at the same time."

"Want to bet?" Balak muttered, but unhappily took a seat, regardless.

The doors slammed shut, and Lawson looked forward, her distraction wearing off the instant that Shepard rose from the asphalt. And she noticed who was driving. "Oh, gods help us," she muttered.

"What?" Balak asked.

"Shepard's driving," Garrus answered.

"...so?" the batarian asked.

Shepard answered him by slamming onto the accelerator, and taking off across the Nos Astra sky. There were no stars, but that was understandable given the amount of light that the city belched forth. "I'm going to need a destination; those guys are going to be on us pretty fast."

"Less than two kilometers away, there is an industrial park," Samara said crisply. "At this time of the night, it will only be populated by custodial staff. It is cruel that we bring such trouble on innocents, but it is also the solution with the least potential collateral damage."

"That sounds like a plan," Shepard said, cutting across traffic lines and sending the stolen air-car screaming through no-fly zones. She imagined that every cop in Nos Astra would have been on her ass, driving like this, only that the cops at this moment had something much more important to deal with.

The thunk of something pitching Shepard's control out was her first warning, before she made an abrupt dive. Tracer rounds cut the air above her, and she banked up hard, twisting the car so that it didn't slam against the corner of a bus, before zipping below a traffic line. She pulled the rear-view display front and center, and gave a groan.

"Gods damn it, how many gunships do these people _have_?" she complained.

Garrus answered her by pushing another camera-view into her sight. The one looking straight up.

At an asari-built frigate that was tracking them with searchlights, and its weapon ports wide open.

* * *

Consciousness slapped Zek in the face with an electric jolt to his privates. Literally. He flinched and recoiled, hands flashing to those sensitive areas, before he tried opening his eyes. His head hurt. Really bad. It also felt like it was packed full of fluff and then set on fire. He leaned up, and blinked, at the reddish light that streamed in from the long, long sunrise of Fehl Prime. He was looking at it through broken glass.

With a groan, he reached for his faceplate and pulled. It came out in two chunks, the lower one smeared with his own purplish blood. "...great," Zek muttered. "Geth, are you still there?"

"_Yes, Creator Zek'Eluus. Your body showed signs of unconsciousness. We have determined that egress gives the greatest possibility of survival._"

"Did you _have_ to shock me in my _ra'bosh_?" Zek complained, pulling the shattered chunks from his mask, and sweeping what fragments remained out of his forehead. Ancestors preserve him, it had been nothing but terror, pain, and more terror since he left home. If he'd been sensible, he'd have never gotten on that damned ship.

But no, he _had_ to go see the galaxy. And more importantly, he _had_ to swoon that girl with his '_bravery_'. Ancestors, but he was an idiot.

"_We determined that it would be the fastest way to ensure your cognizance_."

A fresh groan caused faintly glowing eyes to widen. He tapped his cheek, and uttered a curse under his breath. The bloody blue hand was starting to shift, of the asari woman who was now lying on the forest floor before him. If she saw him... Unpleasant and unanswerable questions would ensue. He looked around, and by leaning over the weakly breathing Vega got a chunk of the windscreen that still clung to the craft.

"Geth, you're gonna need to move fast," Zek said. He held his Omni over the chunk of glass, and the flash-forge did the rest, heating and molding the glass into a shape that would fit. It wouldn't be nearly as resistant as the one that he'd just tossed away, but... With a hard blow on it to cool it down a bit, he slid it into place, to the discomfort of causing himself to start sweating onto cuts.

"Zek... you alive?" Miss van Trugh asked, her words slow, and her eyes squinting.

"Quarians are tough," Zek said with a nervous chuckle. He crawled out of the car, dropping like a sack of meal onto the humus. He shook his head as though clearing the cobwebs, and then pushed himself to a stand which was as unsteady as he wanted to portray. He tapped his Omni as he moved, and called to Geth inside his own helmet. "Geth, what the hell just happened?"

"_We do not know_."

"How can you not know?" Zek demanded.

"_The opponents and weaponry used by these opponents is unlike any that the Consensus has had direct contact with. They are designated 'Collectors'_."

"Great. A bunch of murderous kleptomaniacs," Zek muttered.

"Who do you keep talking to?" Anette asked, as she pushed herself up, before he could reach her.

"What? I'm not talking to anybody. Heh heh..." Great liar's face there, Zek. Oh, if he could have kicked himself in the ass right now, he would have. He shook his head. "That thing, whatever it was, I think it's still out here. We can't stay around... _Maye-sowoi_, what the hell is that?"

That, as it happened, was a pulsing, blue-grey slime that was creeping out of the hood of the aircar. It was a distraction that Zek was very happy for. Mostly because, when her attention was locked on the violated remains of her vehicle, he had a moment to look himself over. Teeth grit when he saw the rupture in his leg. As Anette moved tenderly close, he pulled a roll of that 'duct-tape' that Anette had been so helpful with, and wound it around the breach. At least now he wouldn't get dirt in it.

"Oh, that's not good," Anette said. Then, a hiss of breath, and she reached into the back seat, which Zek had flopped out of. There was more of that scum there, too, welling up into tumors of luminescent ooze. Some of it was starting to crawl over the young human. She pulled him away, swatting at the filth to peel it off of him; it came off with a thin sheen, as though there were a slime left behind. He let out a mournful groan, and reached to his face, before she caught his hands. "Fung? Fung, are you alright?"

"Oooow," Fung muttered, looking about as together as Zek's former faceplate. Anette glanced up as a flight of birds spooked and took wing nearby, racing up into the sunrise. A wince past bloody lips, then, she turned to Fung once more.

"Look, we have to get out of here. We can't stay where that thing will find us."

"What about the Sarge?" Fung asked.

"He's gone," Anette said. Zek raised a finger of protest, but couldn't get past 'uhhh'. "We're going to have to push through on our own. There's got to be a safe place somewhere where we can wait them out. Your Systems Alliance might not give two shits about us, but Ashfield Energy sure as hell will when they don't get their iridium. Somebody is going to find us."

"Anette?" Zek said.

"What?" she asked him. Zek pointed past her and Fung, to where Vega was now sitting up, probing at cuts across his nose and cheek. She flinched back from him as though he were one of those horrible things which tried to kill her a few... minutes – hours maybe? – ago, rather than the one who'd put a lot of effort into killing them.

"God_damn_," he said, slowly shaking his head. He looked to her. "Remind me not to land like that again."

"Sergeant Vega?" Anette asked, shock clear in her voice. Yeah, he still looked like hell and he had a thousand-kilometer gaze, but he was still moving, so that was something in Zek's favor. She shivered, then turned to him. "Right. You're up so we have to move."

"Don't need to tell me twice," he said. He vaulted out of the car, stumbling a bit, before pulling Fung up and giving him a shoulder. He then took one step, and turned. "Ummm, I don't really know which direction we're going."

"We're southwest of the colony, so that would be..." Anette opened her Omni, trying to reach the tracking software, likely. She stopped, though, when Zek instantly pointed northeast. They all looked at him, confused.

"...it's a quarian thing," Zek said. It was so strange meeting aliens who didn't know which way was north instinctively.

"Fine, let's move before something f–" the asari began, and was of course cut off by a thunderous crack, of a Scion's cannon tearing a tree apart not far from where they were standing.

"Just run!" Zek shouted, and beat feet like he so often did in his youth.

Ancestors preserve him, and shield him from his own stupidity, he prayed as his feet carried him through the woods. Not that the Ancestors had before. Damned nuke-flinging ingrates.

* * *

The car rocked as another stream of rounds smashed into its back end. Metal tore and peeled away, causing Balak to have to lean over Miranda or else lose an arm; a gaping wound in the side of the car now ran almost from tail to nose, and the drag was pulling Shepard's course aside. At least the Frigate wasn't firing at her. Small miracles. "Goddamn it! Why can't these things have barriers?" Shepard shouted.

"It's a _family sedan_, why would it need them?" Lawson answered her, her hands blurring over the controls of her Omni. Whatever it was she was doing, it obviously took a lot of attention.

Shepard had to let a chance for a brilliant snappy comeback die in her throat, because behind her, one of the gunships sent forth two shining beacons of death streaking toward the back of Shepard's ride. She immediately dove, turning the vehicle almost vertical so that her shoulder was pressed against the window, holding her up, and diving down in the gap between two parallel transfer trucks. The gap wasn't quite wide enough, so her belly dragged along the side of one, peeling the sheet-metal casing that was surrounding whatever goods were being moved. Sadly, they'd never reach their destinations, because a pair of guided missiles didn't have quite the response time needed to replicate Shepard's desperate maneuver, and exploded into cargo.

The car dropped out, and ground once more along the roof of a taxi that was a layer lower, before she tipped it once more, causing everybody to be thrown to the side. "Thought you said she was a terrible driver," Balak noted, still smoking his cigar.

"That was a complete accident," Shepard admitted. A damned lucky one, too. The gunships, spotlights stabbing through the night, cleared the burning rubble and falling boxes of the quickly landing heavy-movers, before one let out a very brief burst of fire. The bullets, few though they were, slammed into the roof very close to Shepard's head, and one of them tore a chunk of the dashboard off and threw it back as a spray of plastic and circuits. The haptics fizzed, but after a moment, they returned in full. Whoever designed this car deserved a damned metal for making a civvie-car that had better recovery than a Hammerhead. "I can't take any more of this. And I can't dodge _two_ gunships!"

Garrus clapped a hand onto her shoulder. "Pop the doors," he said.

"What?" Shepard asked at a shout.

"No, don't bother. Just open the window," Garrus said. He gave a glance back to Balak, and the batarian pulled his rocket launcher once more. Shepard spent her effort and energy trying to weave through traffic, keep the gunships from getting another missile-lock on her, and denying them a firing solution. The problem was, the airways were quickly emptying as it became obvious to everybody in Nos Astra that a particular mercenary company had lost their collective minds and didn't care about civilian casualties.

"There," Samara pointed down, to a building that was fast approaching, but was well off of the civilian air-ways. That had to have been the destination she wanted. The window finally opened, and Balak twisted out to fire a few rockets at the gunships which were bobbing and weaving to zero her. The blasts rocked one of them, bursting against kinetic barriers, until one of them cut into the armor of the wind-visor, leaving a sooty stain.

"I'm out!" Balak shouted as he pulled back in. Garrus, though, took that as his cue, leaning out the window himself, with his Mantis in hand.

"Keep it steady?"

"Just for a second!" Garrus' voice, sent into Shepard's ear via his headset, was almost as inaudible as his natural voice, despite originating less than two meters away. Shepard stopped sawing at haptic controls, and hoped that the turian was as good a shot as he thought he was. She didn't hear the crack of his rifle, between the wind-noise and the alarms beeping that the car recommended immediate landing due to engine problems. The first shot lanced back, sending a lattice of cracks along the windscreen. It bobbed away, and Garrus tracked it, a new sink in his Mantis. Another shot, silent to the storm. This time, the gunship immediately turned away, barreling into the side of a luxury car, before banking down and zipping toward the ground. The expensive car managed to stay flying – barely, but the gunship? She didn't see its death, but knew it came. Either because Garrus had sniped the pilot or just put a bullet through something that the gunship really needed, it was hard to say. The last one directly on Shepard's tail slid into place once more, and sent out a burst of autocannon rounds. There might have been a dozen in the entire burst.

Every damned one of them went into her engines.

The ship began to drop, its propulsion going from a force defying nature to a desperate wish against hopes, as the vehicle began to lose speed, and without power, lose altitude. "Everybody buckled in?" Shepard asked. Garrus leaned back into his seat, and fastened up, putting his Mantis on his back with remarkable calm.

"Reminds me of that time in Lamash District," Balak said, also remarkably calm, considering that they were now descending just above the level of the lower roofs. The great buildings ended abruptly, and good that they had; as she moved ever lower, ever slower, she was now only a few meters from the _ground_. That few meters became a few centimeters, as they crossed a mostly vacant parking lot. Then, a slam, a grind, as the car skipped once on the tarmac, before catching on the ragged bodywork and flipping the car sideways, through the great glass wall that faced outward, and beyond that, through the wall at the far end of the lobby. After that, they slammed tail-first into something metal and full of fluid; all of the impacts, together, finally brought the car to a stop.

Lawson was the first to offer a grunt of discomfort, telling Shepard that she was... well, alive. The others began to mutter, pulling off seatbelts, as the car slid forward, and made one final impact; the one with the floor. Shepard, still buckled, did well, but Garrus banged his head on the roof hard enough to make a dent. He rubbed at his carapace, while Shepard peeled the roof off of them with her metalbending, and staggered out onto the ground, only to be immediately covered in... wait...

"What the hell is this place?" Shepard asked, as golden-brown fluid drizzled down freely from the tank behind her.

"A distillery," Samara answered, a note of pain in her usually placid tones. She pulled herself out of the wreck, and rubbed at her chest. There was a ping, as the connector at her armor's neck gave way from damage, and flopped open a remarkable level of cleavage. She looked down at it for only a moment, before turning her attention inward. "We will have to move further into the building. They will continue their attempts until somebody stops them."

"How the hell are we going to do that?" Shepard asked.

"Don't let them jam me, and we'll be fine," Lawson said, her Omni still on, as she limped with the others past the great tanks holding aging asari beer.

"The army will be deploying in force, soon," Samara said with a nod, then a glance toward Lawson. "We need only survive until they do."

"Easier said," Shepard said.

"Does she always complain this much?" Balak asked.

"Only when there's beer everywhere and she's not allowed to drink it," Garrus answered him. He pulled his Mantis from his back, and tried to unfold it. It didn't work. He missed a step, and let out a sigh that sounded like it was born of physical pain quite behind the mild concussion and the split between his crest that dribbled a rivulet of blue blood. He put it back, and pulled his Phaeston instead. "Alright, they hurt my gun. This is personal, now."

"It wasn't before?" Shepard asked. The tanks of this chamber gave way to a room with great mixers, which stood still and empty with the day's work concluded. A janitor nearby, who looked like she'd frozen stock still from all the crashing, turned as grey as her uniform as the armed and armored aliens moved through the room. When she saw Samara, she ran away screaming, leaving her mop to fall to the floor. "This place isn't defensible."

"We'll have to use the warehousing," Lawson said. Then, her lips twisted. "Damn, there's a jammer somewhere nearby. I'm guessing they're dropping," she said, interrupted by a crash of glass the next room, "...engineers."

"You heard the bossy lady, let's open our ears," Shepard said, taking her Mattock which, despite having a number of new furrows on its body, still activated as well as ever. She applied boot to door, sending it open and striding into the cooler warehouse. Two mercs, still tethered to their rappelling lines, turned and sent out streams of fire at Shepard's squad as they moved, but what they had to offer paled in comparison to what was sent back at them. The bullet hell that cut them apart was such that nobody could really claim the kill; there was just too much murder flying at them. "Was that them?"

"No, I'm still jammed," she said, her eyes – one of them blackening with a bruise – wide. She kept flashing commands in, but Shepard hadn't the first clue what she was doing. Let the techies deal with the tech.

"They can't have gotten too many in here," Shepard stage-whispered. "There was only that one gunship."

"One that we saw," Samara corrected. "Considering the chaos we caused with our exit, they will undoubtedly send far more in its wake."

"Great," Shepard muttered. Unlike the vat-room before, the sight-lines were very short, and very congested. Great shelves, stacked with pallet upon pallet of grain-sack reached from the floor almost to the ceiling fifteen meters up. They were all writ on coarse fabric with asari script, but Shepard knew enough about brewing to know that these were probably filled with the asari equivalent of hops or barley. If nothing else, they'd do well stopping bullets. "Do you hear anything?" Shepard asked.

"Why are you asking me?" Garrus asked.

"Because my ears are ringing," Shepard said.

"You think mine aren't?"

"That way," Balak whispered around his almost spent stogie, and pointed at an angle through the stacks of ingredients. "They don't know when to shut up either."

"Flush and crush?" Garrus asked.

"What's the floor made of?" Shepard asked.

"O...kay, that wasn't an answer I was expecting," Garrus said.

"Concrete, what else?" Lawson asked. Her teeth grit. "They're starting to actively scramble my carrier. They've got to go down, now."

"I'll deal with them," Shepard said, turning to the others, backing before them. "You pick a nice defensible spot and dig in."

"I have just the place," Garrus said, smirking up at a spot about half way up the stacks of beer-makings. Shepard gave him the nod to do as he would, then twisted her arms broadly apart. The ground gave way with a shudder and a pop of pre-tensioned metal giving way, and she dropped into darkness. Just running her hand along the wall was enough to send the signal of tremor-sense, toward the three who weren't part of Shepard's squad. And another shift of earthbending to bear her toward them. Much like the much storied bicycle, every fight Shepard got into was a little easier to bend in. It came back to her in dribs and drabs, and now, her bucket was almost full.

She paused in the earth and total blackness for a moment, wondering where the hell she came up with that metaphor.

Shepard decided that it wasn't worth the mental effort, and continued forward. They were pointing outward, but one was on a knee, head bowed; that was probably the tech of the group. Shepard slid through concrete foundations, compromising the structure as she went, but given the choice between an angry distillery and innocent dead people, she was sure that everybody but the distillery would agree with the Avatar's choice.

She was just about to slam up through the ground, when both of the gunmen turned, pointing – to her – invisible rifles directly where she crept. Oh, gods damn it; translithic sonar. She'd never even considered that. "Well, all good plans die when," Shepard said, and then with a grunt, cast up both hands, and had the metal and concrete explode up before her. The barrage lifted and carried one of the gunmen away, and the other was knocked back and off of his aim, "they meet the enemy."

A final stomp thrust Shepard over the ground, and she tried to bring her Mattock to her shoulder; the unfortunate thing was that the one who'd been knocked was a quick one; he'd gotten back to his balance by the time she came up, so he grabbed her rifle and pulled it toward him, away from her target – the tech, before twisting and trying to rip the weapon from Shepard's hands. That wasn't going to happen. She had to contort herself quite a bit to not have the thing stripped away by simple leverage, but despite her ridiculous pose, she still had a firm grip on it with one hand.

The other hand had a Carnifex in it, and that Carnifex was pressed against the dome-helmet.

The crack and burst of his helmet staving inward and blasting its contents against a wall was somewhat muffled, but the Avatar didn't bother double-tapping. She didn't have time to. An Eclipse 'Vanguard', her armor bare-headed, was sweeping her arms through a very familiar kata. Shepard's eyes went wide, as the lightning crackled from her fingertips, and she cast it out with a scream of rage. The only remaining living human had to drop both guns in the split second she had, before reaching out, and letting that bolt hit her own fingertips first. The power surged into her, blowing out her kinetic barriers in a heartbeat, but the power of the lightning bolt was such that it would have smashed through her armor plating as well, and likely stopped her heart. Instead, Shepard made sure that no matter where the bolt thought it was heading, it most certainly was not through Shepard's heart.

A side-trek, pulling the surge through her gut and up to her other shoulder, before Shepard cast her own fingers out. The bolt leapt away, returning to sender. She turned her gaze to the tech, and her eyes widened a bit, as she saw him pulling a heat-knife, and preparing to lunge. However, Shepard was interrupted from stopping him by noting that the asari had done exactly as Shepard had. You could throw back thrown-back lightning? _Since when_? The arcs of lightning bounded from the merc's arm to her lower chest, and she was preparing a counter-thrust of her own. Shepard cut her off, by flicking out a hand. A blade of ice, pulled from the built-in case, launched out and plunged all the way through the center of the asari's neck. She stared, stunned, while the lightning bathed over her, bursting her shields and scarring her armor, before she dropped, the now-unguided lightning cooking her innards, which were already cut off from her brain.

Shepard turned just in time to bring a hand up to prevent a heat-knife from going into her skull, and only then, by having it split her right hand in half. Shepard screamed with the agony of that blade burning at her even as it cut; if he gave it any more power, it'd probably split her arm like chord-wood. So she gave him the only thing she had to her, at this point. A left hook. The salarian took the punch as well as a salarian could be expected to – poorly – and staggered back. Shepard retained the heat-knife, and pulled with with a fresh scream from her hand. She hurled it, back-handed, toward the tech, who ducked it, and reached for his gun. Shepard, hitting the deck, reached hers first. Two shots sounded, practically atop each other. Shepard could feel the shot slam into her armor, cracking a large chunk off of the already fractured chestplate. The Carnifex bullet, on the other hand, caused a spray of green to fly out behind the salarian, and have him stumble back, and collapse onto the rubbled concrete.

"_Shepard, are you alright?_" Garrus' voice was in her ear.

"Does it _sound_ like I'm alright!" Shepard shouted back. She pressed her Mattock to her back, knowing she wouldn't be able to use it with only one hand. And her left wasn't exactly her best, but it would have to do. She wasn't limping... well, any more than when she fell out of the car... but it was still with a great degree of pain that she moved up to the stacks, where Garrus had set his sniper's den. The others were shoving grain-bags into a perimeter.

"Shepard?" Lawson asked.

"Just a flesh wound," Shepard muttered, slathering the numbing Medigel on it when she had a chance, then tearing the gauze from her pack, and wrapping the deeply cleft hand to hold it together. Balak looked so damned smug she could almost shoot him.

"What is your plan, now?" Samara asked, as she slowly rotated an arm, as though it were stiff in its joint.

"They have our signal," Lawson said. "...everybody does. Now we need to survive five... five?" Samara nodded, "five more minutes."

"Easy as pancakes," Shepard said. She winced, trying very hard not to flap the limb. "_Fuck_ that hurts."

* * *

"_Fuck_, that must hurt," Vega said, giving the FNG's face a glance from where he set the kid down. The edge of the colony was in sight, but everybody was understandably nervous about it. After all, the last time Vega in particular had been here... He didn't want to think about that, really. Also in sight? A melting Scion, just at the other end of the clearing. Vega cracked a smirk. "Those sons-of-bitches ain't so scary when they're all alone, am I right?"

He was pretty sure that the quarian sent a death glare at him.

He gave a look to the aliens, who unlike the FNG were still in a state where they could walk. "You two stay out here. I'll raid the clinic," he said.

"Not a problem," Zek said, promptly sitting on the ground next to a thorny bush. Anette looked at him like she wanted to say something.

"Oh, don't you be worried for me, Jimo; I'll be fine," Vega said, full of bluster. Bluster that just felt a bit off. Like it was more... brittle, than usual.

"It's... Do it. Try not to get dead," she said, with an unusual tone, one that Vega couldn't make hide nor hair of.

"How could I, knowing such beauty awaits me when I return?" he said with a blood-stained grin, before turning toward the town. A such, he couldn't see the stunned expression on Anette's face. Or wonder why she looked like she wanted to curl up and die. No, his attention was fastened fully forward. He scratched at his neck for a moment, before pausing in his stride, and sighing. He'd forgotten the damned helmet.

Luckily, the helmet was part of the suit, but if he'd had it on before, he might not be bleeding into his mouth right now. A tap of his Omni sounded with a clatter of metal rising up toward him, until his face was encased, and the optics came online. Huh; the left eye was dead. He'd have to get bean to look at that. Well, one eye was better than none, he figured.

After the initial sprint across the open land between the forest's edge and the first prefabs, he slowed, and crept as silently as a spiderfly. Every corner was peeked around, shotgun in hand. Every building, cleared of ambush before passed. As such, it took ten minutes to travel a block.

There was an odd buzzing sound that filtered into his ears, one that he couldn't see the source of. He paused, looking 'round a new corner, only to see a prefab which had been smashed to scrap. That wasn't one of his; probably what Wall had been doing to make a nuisance of himself before he got... captured? Killed? Worse? It was hard to say. The only thing which was obvious was that when Wall went down, he didn't go down quietly. He moved through that ruins, and paused at a driveway; without a rain recently, the stain on the ground remained. Dark red. And a lot of it. A pool of blood, probably more than enough to kill somebody. Considering their usual trick... that was probably Zorp. Damn them!

The buzzing grew louder as he approached the clinic, which overlooked the landing pad. He'd have to sneak in the back door, because the front would be crawling with those bug bastards. But there was something that had him a bit concerned. He hadn't seen one thing the whole time he was in the colony. Not so much as an insect.

What the hell?

He leaned out around a corner, only to have a bug make a mockery of his earlier belief, and slam into his helmet. Its legs wrapped around his face, proboscus jabbing at him. Oh hell, this was bad. He reached up to swat it, and found his limbs traveling slowly, as though through mud. Still, he had enough movement to grab the thing and tear it off, before crushing it between his fingers. It popped grey and blue fluid through the digits of his gauntlet. And as soon as it was destroyed, the thick, muddy sensation left. He stared at the dead bug, and only then knew what that sound was.

He looked up the street, to the landing pad.

There was a tumor, there; grey and blue flesh, writhing and teeming. Faintly visible arms and legs poked ever so small out of its bloated mass, so swelled up that it was utterly unrecognizable as something which was once human, before being turned into this unspeakable horror. It sat alone amongst the ruined hulks of the ships that had been blasted to slag when those oversized bug-things landed. Notably absent, though, was their frigate. Where had _that_ gone? All of the bugs, these Seeker Swarms, were circling that disgusting thing, diving in and coming out of floppy grey flesh. Without even giving it a reasonable amount of thought, Vega raised his shotgun and sent blasts into the great bloated abomination. So large was it, that the spread still all hit the thing, even with the distance involved. Another blast. Another. Every time, slimy, desaturated red blood, grey ichor, and blue goo. Not so much as a twitch from the overall organism. He'd might as well be poking it with a toothpick.

The thing shuddered, drawing inward. Then, with a sound like an evil belch, a huge swarm of the Seekers billowed up, before swirling in a hateful course toward him. He winced, and took off running, trying to take the back-streets to the clinic, to reach it and lock himself in before those things ate him. He'd only gotten a block before the swarm closed in on him, dozens of the beasts latching onto his armor, jabbing at his joints, his neck, trying to do... something... to him. His body slowed, every movement difficult, his gait now as though the air had turned to pudding; but still he walked, and still he moved. He waved idly, brushing off a few, before looking down at his body. They were doing their damndest, but they couldn't get past his armor.

Half-way across the galaxy, a salarian was coming to the same conclusion.

He slogged through the alley, his limbs leaden and his shoulders heavy, forcing his way past the garbage bins and utility boxes, crossing the next street to the clinic on the corner. He turned his head, with all the speed of a drunken rhino-turtle, and saw that the Bellows, that hideous antipersonnel landmine that it was, was shuddering and swelling, parts of its body now baggy and collapsed, but restoring quickly. Probably mass-producing more Seeker Swarms. He pressed on, through the force of the flies and the unknowable mass-effect field trickery that they were using to try to paralyze him, and finally dropped his hand onto the door-handle. It was locked. Vega groaned, and looked down at his shotgun. Probably only one shot left, and no heatsinks anywhere handy. He looked back up.

"Hell, ain't like there's anybody to arrest me," he said, then pointed the shotgun at the door handle. A final loud crack, and the door swung outward, rebounding from the force of the blast which knocked its lock and door-handle off completely. He then stomped into the building, took an immediate left, and entered the medical storage room. The bugs continued to cling to him, biting at metal, trying to sting him, but hermetically sealed armor had a way of discouraging that. He dropped a hand onto the field-surgery kit – the only one in the room, thus likely the only one on this planet – before his head tilted left. The refrigerator was dark and inactive, its contents likely spoiled. But he noticed a number of plastic bottles that read very clearly. "Well helloooo," Vega said.

He opened the glass-doored refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of medical alcohol. He rolled his eyes in his helmet, then pulled off the cap. With a hard, slow throw, he dosed himself in that fluid, before tapping his Omni once more. The Omniblade it produced wasn't the intended effect, rather, that when the weapon was flash-forged, it was red-hot. The instant that red-hot synthetic diamond touched alcohol, Vega's entire world vanished into a flash of flame.

There was a high-pitched screech, as the Seeker Swarms that had clung to Vega's body were burned and fell away, their legs no longer able to hold, and their wings no longer able to bear them. Vega looked down at them, and slowly swung his arms. Over the course of about a minute, he slowly regained normal usage; obviously, whatever these damned things did to the FNG, it only lasted because they left something in you. With an angry grunt, he stomped the biggest of the bugs, then hitched the backpack with the field-surgery kit onto his back. He took a step away, before turning back to the fridge. He blinked a few times, a thought forming in his mind.

"Well, somebody's gotta do it," Vega said, and returned, throwing open the door once again.

* * *

"You done bleeding yet?" Garrus asked, as he turned his scope from one approaching mech and to another. Another crack-crack-crack, and another Pantu was rendered headless.

"Not funny, Garrus," Shepard shouted, leaning against the quickly deflating tote of hops. The analgesic effect of the Medigel had started to wear off, and that meant that every _breath_ on her damned-near-bisected hand sang with agony. She clutched at the naked wrist, squeezing there because while she had a notion to do the same thing higher, she knew that it'd hurt a lot more. Whatever malevolent creator of mankind instilled an instinct to prod at one's wounds, should probably be dragged into the street and shot.

"I will not be able to withstand their fire for much longer," Samara said, out in front of the bags. The mechs that approached her, both of spindly Pantu and mammoth Tu-Wei-Liu, could only send rounds at the barrier that she held, and couldn't get through it. That was lucky. There wasn't a lot of outgoing fire, comparable to what was coming in.

Balak popped out, sending out a blast of spikes that cleared a Pantu away, and tore the gun-arm off of the one standing next to it as well. He was about to say something, when there was a crack, and the barrier ahead of him dropped. Samara ducked under the small pile of destroyed mecha and fallen grunts that reached a killing-line, and advanced no further. If she found it macabre to hide behind the dead, she didn't say anything about it.

"Incoming!" the batarian roared, as a number of grenades began to rain in on them. Most of them landed short, cutting away at the supports of the stacks, and causing the totes to collapse outward. It made for a better wall, sure, but it meant there was that much less cover for the turian sniper. One of them landed with a clunk next to Lawson's boot. She let out a yelp and dove back and out of sight, fractions of a second before it went off, driving shrapnel into a bag which now spilled out a flow of grain onto the floor.

"I'm feeling a bit naked up here," Garrus said, his words book-ended by gunshots. They'd stopped sending their techs and their biotics, and had decided that wave-upon-wave of mecha would suffice. Another shot, this one crashing against the blue barriers of a Tu-Wei-Liu, finally bringing them down. Shepard reached up, and with her left, she fired powerful rounds into that faceplate. They cracked and chiseled at it, but the machine turned, putting its shoulder into the oncoming fire, and then started to walk away. Bastard! Sensible, but still bastard! It wasn't like they could chase it down and verify the kill, and they knew it.

"Running dry," Shepard said, as she gingerly pulled the last heat-sink from her pocket. Gingerly, because the only hand she could do it with was her bandaged and aching right. Even so, she managed to fumble and drop it. A hiss of pain came through her teeth, before she gently lifted it between her finger and thumb, the only way that she could still feel, let alone use, and carefully dropped it into place. Then, she had to slam the weapon against the floor to shove the sink in. "How many?"

"Too many!" Garrus answered. Balak took another shot, but this time, while he was up, the hail of gunfire that peppered their cover and the walls around them tore through his barriers in a heartbeat. There was a growl, and a spray of red that came out of his back, and he fell back, clutching at his chest. "Balak? You still alive down there?"

"I'll be fine," the batarian said, but the look on his face – inasmuch as Shepard had any idea about batarian expressions – didn't agree with his statement.

"Lawson!" Shepard shouted.

"Still here!" she answered. She leaned around, her helmet having a sliver of red dribbling out of it as well; it didn't help that of the white suit and armor, half of her face and one shoulder were now utterly stained black from an incendiary grenade going off too close.

"Samara, get in here!" Shepard leaned out.

"I will hold them back," she said, cricking her neck slowly. "It has been an honor."

"No it hasn't, and you're not going anywhere," Shepard snapped. "You aren't sacrificing yourself for no goddamned reason, is that clear?"

"If it will permit the escape of the Av–" the Justicar began, but Shepard was interrupted by a sensation coming through by her feet. A tremor in the stone. She kicked at the spot closest to it, causing the concrete to explode away, the metal to snap and coil in, and revealing the sapper in his bee-like armor trying to undercut them with high explosives. Shepard favored him with the last bullets she was going to be able to use, and painted the tunnel he'd formed with his own blood.

"You were saying?" Shepard asked.

"Yes!" Lawson shouted. "I've got a ping!"

"That's good?" Shepard asked.

"Mayday mayday mayday; Council Spectre under fire at ten eight niner, one five four two, distillery warehouse," the waterbender shouted. "Need immediate reinforcement!"

"What are the chances that they'll hear that and respond in time?" Shepard asked.

She was answered about ten seconds later, when the roof buckled down sharply, as something punched clean through it. The drop-pod, for that was what it was, landed squarely onto a Tu-Wei-Liu, and tore it in half. After a second, the panels popped open, and ten asari in jet-black armor bounded out. The Eclipse, now attacked from within, turned their weapons to the commandos who'd dropped into their midst. Bullets deflected off of the barriers built into the best armor that military money could buy, and the commandos fired back with the best guns available on any market.

"_Spectre Status_!" a voice entered Shepard's ear.

"Spectre Ac...Low," Shepard said. She certainly wasn't 'active' with only one working hand and busted armor.

"_Location confirmed. Drop the rest of the squad_," the woman ordered. A matter of twenty seconds later, more and more of the roof gave way, as eight more pods plunged down into the warehouse and the distillery beyond it, and even the grounds immediately outside. The Eclipse, who'd been firing so recently only at Shepard and her squad, stopped firing at them entirely, trying to defend themselves from the Nos Astra Marines. Samara rose, looking with an expression of invulnerability belied by the bruising on her face and the dribble of blood from her scalp that followed a path around her amp. It was only a minute, before yellow and black was swamped by just-black. Firing went from a storm to a drizzle, and then, to silence. One woman in black backed toward Shepard's squad, staring through one of those turian rifles which launched explosive rounds as she came. The marine halted at the side of the Justicar, and glanced back to where Shepard was only now starting to force her way up. She reached up, and tapped the side of her helmet, which let out a clack, and retracted a portion of its faceplate. "Agent Shepard? Do you require medical evacuation?"

Shepard shook her head, and held up her bandaged hand. "No, I'll be fine," she said, her own tones tight. There was one final gunshot, which caused the captain to turn for a moment, before silence reigned once more. "Situation is under control, I take it?"

"More or less," the captain said.

"May I assume that other squads have stormed the mercenary frigate in Nos Astra airspace?" Samara asked. Garrus landed on the ground with a thud, he the least injured of all of them, and handed Shepard her Mattock back. Much as she loved the gun, she also knew that you couldn't fire that from one hand, no matter what the vids showed. When Lawson's helmet retracted, the skin on one side of her face looked very red and painful.

"You assume correctly, Justicar," the captain said. "Why?"

"I must speak to your superior officer at once," Samara said. Her tones were placid, but at the same time, it was silk over steel. Calm, but absolutely unstoppable. The asari leaned back, then tapped her helm once more. "Colonel Yudowski? A Justicar wishes a direct line... Very well," she turned to Samara. "Line is open."

"Colonel Yudowski? I must speak to the leader of this force immediately," Samara said.

"All respect due to the Justicar Order, you can have her when we're done with her," the gravely woman's voice came back.

"No. I will speak to her now, before any interrogation on your part," Samara said, the normal placidity of her tones starting to draw away, and expose the blade within its beatific scabbard.

"I'm afraid that won't be possible, Ju–" the Colonel began, but Samara cut her off.

"With your permission, this will take five minutes of your time. Without, it will take longer, and be bloodier. But it is _going to happen_, whether you wish it or not. Am I being sufficiently clear?"

There was a long silence on the other end of the line, as the Colonel no doubt mulled over exactly how much shit she'd be in if she said no, versus whatever military regulation there was doubtless in place to prevent this sort of jurisdictional clusterfuck.

"If it will assuage your fears, I will be escorted in my interrogation by a Council Spectre," Samara added.

Another silence, then a weary sigh. "Fine. She'll be held in her own brig, you have clearance to board, Justicar."

"Thank you, Colonel," Samara said. The captain shook her head with rolling eyes, and then moved off, no doubt to round up those Eclipse who weren't lying in a pool of their own blood. Samara then turned to Shepard. "I perhaps presumed too quickly in offering your accompaniment?"

"No, I want to see the bitch who tried to shoot me out of the sky," Shepard said. She looked to the others. "Garrus? Mind bringing everybody back to the Normandy?"

"Considering I'm probably the only one who's in good condition to drive, I guess I'll have to," Garrus said, head shaking lightly. Balak, still rubbing the red-dribbling hole in his chest, dropped the expended cigar onto the floor and crushed it out. That left Shepard in the company of the Justicar, and they, in the custody of the army.

* * *

"For what it's worth, buddy, you've got my sympathy," Vega said, standing amidst the buzzing swarm that tried desperately to get through his armor. He was remarkably close to the Bellows, now that he knew that they couldn't... what, scoop him up and fly away with him? He'd had to be, to surround the thing with flimsy glass bottles full of alcohol. The last one was in Vega's hand, a twist of gauze plunged into its neck. It was arduous, but he finally managed to light the cloth with his Omni – coincidentally in exactly the wrong setting to start fires – and held the flaming cocktail in a hand. "Whoever you were, you deserved better than this."

He heaved with all his might, hurling that bottle from two meters away; because of the 'slowing' of his movements, that was about as far as the incendiary bomb would fly. It smashed into the ground, breaking another bottle, and the two of them splattered up the grey and disgusting flesh of the Bellows. The flames spread quickly, igniting insects as they spun and buzzed, and as they flew, they in turn ignited more flesh, and other insects. He backed away, slowly, while the tumor that was once a person, four meters across of baggy skin and roiling insects, burned down to ashes. The great black mass of them tried to rise away, but too many of them were aflame when they did so, so the thing blossomed into a flower of flame in the sky, before drifting back to the ground as semi-organic ashes. As the flames began to eat their way into the heart of the Bellows, the bugs stopped heedlessly glomming him, and took wing.

Vega watched, as the little bastards took wing, and began to fly toward the north, ignoring the Bellows which was now just a smoking chunk, consumed by its own flammability. Soon, there was nothing but a black stain, some flickering holdouts of flame where the alcohol had pooled and some metal wires on the tarmac. He stared at the wires, confused. He tapped his wrist, and his helmet folded away, giving him both eyes again. What were those _for_? He prodded them with his foot, heedless of what flames still flickered, waves of barely bearable heat pressing against his face. He didn't get it.

He tried thinking about it.

Something touched him.

He spun back and away, faster than he thought he would, because the 'slowing' sensation had ended completely. Thus, his shotgun came to hand very, very quickly. And he immediately pointed it away, because he'd leveled it in the face of probably the only asari left on Fehl Prime. Well, the only one alive, at any rate. "_Hanuman's hairy balls_, woman, don't sneak up on me like that!" he snapped.

"Sneak up? I've been shouting at you for a couple of minutes, now," she said, confused.

"What?" Vega asked.

"You were gone for hours, and I thought that those things had gotten our best chance at helping mister Fung," Anette said. "Can you put that down?"

"What?" he asked, noting that his shotgun was, indeed, still pointed vaguely at her. Man, what was with him today? "Right. Wait a minute? Hours? It couldn't 'a been more than thirty minutes."

"You were standing still as a statue, dead to the world," Anette pressed. "I thought those bugs had gotten you."

"Well, they did, but it wasn't as bad it was for the FNG," Vega said. "Turns out, they can't get inside heavy armor. Who knew?"

"So you're not going to say why you were starting at the ground for four hours?" Anette asked.

"I wasn't staring at the ground for four hours. If I was, then the..." he stopped, and looked down. There wasn't so much as a flicker, an ember of flame left on the tarmac. He stared for a moment. "...okay. That's weird."

"Get inside," she said, grabbing him by the forearm and pulling him toward the clinic. "The last thing we need is for somebody to see you standing out in the open."

As Vega walked, his feet were oddly leaden, and this time, he couldn't blame it on the Seeker Swarms.

* * *

Black armored blue women lined the walls of the mercenary frigate as Shepard and Samara strode through its halls. Say what you would about the Asari Republics, their army moved fast. No staying power, and the strategic elegance of a red-sand addicted lemur, but speed they had in droves. At the end of the long hallway, lined with eight cells, and a final one at the end, was an asari whose armor differed from those around her. Her armor was red and black, and had badges of commission on her shoulder and breast. She noted Shepard, and gave a salute.

"Lieutenant Colonel Vlad Pavlyuchenko; I'm in command at this site," she said

"Commander Shepard," a salute returned. "Special Tactics and Reconnaissance."

"I have to wonder what was so important that you had to bend Colonel Yudowski's nose out of shape, but I know enough not to stand between a Justicar and who she's running after. That would be a good way to leave my kids orphans," the LC said, waving her Omni toward the door. "I assume that this is, in fact, Order business?"

"It is Council business. She tried to kill me. I don't appreciate that," Shepard said. Pavlyuchenko gave a chuckle at that.

"At least that'll be easier to explain in the paperwork," she said. The door opened with a whoosh, and when it did, Samara was striding through. Shepard gave the LC a look, but the woman just waved Shepard in first. The cell was small, obviously intended as an interrogation chamber. They'd picked well. The captain of this vessel sat in her underwear, likely because she'd been stripped out of her armor, on a bench that sat at the far end of the room, opposite the transparent plate that separated her from the door. From time to time, she wiped at her nose with the back of a hand, and occasionally spat blue onto the floor. Samara stood before the reinforced glass, and stared, her head tilting aside somewhat. "There she is. I don't know what you want out of her that you can't wait an hour for, but..."

"An hour in your care would see her dead," Samara said. Pavlyuchenko looked insulted at that.

"What do you think we are? Batarian? We follow the Jalnoray Convention, just like everybody else."

Samara turned eyes as pale as ice back to the lieutenant colonel. "You misunderstand me. It is not impugning your methods, but rather, that you don't understand what you are dealing with," Samara said. She waved toward the woman in the cell, who was staring hatefully at the Justicar, and steam was starting to rise from her shoulders. "Captain Wasea is under the effects of _Geasa_; it is a technique that is found only amongst those which I hunt, which can instill a... self-destruct mechanism, into the psyche of the victim. If you attempted to question her regarding her motives, her intentions, or her methods, the _Geasa_ would activate, and her body would immediately shut itself down in every way possible."

"_Geasa_ are real?" Pavlyuchenko asked.

"Frighteningly so," Samara said. She turned toward Wasea, sitting on that bench looking like she was about to breathe fire. Probably literally. "Ardat Yakshi command by twisting minds to suit them. To believe what she wants them to believe. And the one who did this to Wasea is very adept at this practice. There are doubtless layers upon layers of protective measures, to prevent anybody using her to find the Ardat Yakshi herself. But there is always a _ban_. Something the _Geasa_ cannot erase or alter. I have only one question for this woman."

"Which would be?" Pavlyuchenko said with an 'explain before I lose my patience' look on her face.

Samara turned to Wasea, sitting on her bench. She leaned toward the glass. Wasea leapt off of her seat, a flaming punch slamming into the glass. The flames were harmlessly deflected away. Wasea punched again, slamming fists into the glass. Again. Again, spreading the blood that was smeared from her nose and whatever it was they called their ear-holes across in spatters and slicks. She did so until there was a heavy crunch, of one of her hands breaking. Then, she stopped, chest heaving, flames curling from her nostrils as she breathed.

"What was her name?" Samara finally asked.

"Morinth," Wasea said, still furious in visage and stance. Samara nodded.

"That is all that I require from her," the Justicar said. "At this point, what you do with her is of no consequence to me."

"Wait, what about all that '_Geasa_' stuff?" Shepard asked.

"It is all true, and it is all moot," Samara said. "I have what I needed. A name. It is precious little, but it is something," she turned away from the prisoner, and walked out of the room. Wasea started screaming threats and dire promises at her as they all left, but even they were cut off when the outer door slammed shut.

"What's going to happen to her?" Shepard cast a thumb over her shoulder. Samara flicked a glance back to her.

"When it is verified that she was placed under _Geasa_, she will face no trial. Instead, she will be taken to a monastery, where she will have to live until she enters the next stage of her life. _Geasa_ in aliens are very temporary things. They fade within weeks, days, or mere hours. For an asari, the only escape from it, is the purification of chrysalis. But she is of no further concern. Instead, the task at hand..." Samara gave a glance to the soldiers in the brig hallway, and they all nervously stepped away, clearing a small area for Shepard, their commander, and the Justicar. Then, the Justicar lowered herself to one knee, her body glowing with blue light. When her words came, they sounded... different. Deeper. Stronger. More resolute, even than her unshakable tones. "_I offer the Third Oath of Subsumation. By the Code, I will serve you. Your choices are my choices. Your morals are my morals, and your wishes are my Code. I shall follow, where you lead, against what enemies come_."

A fresh pulse of light, and Samara rose, her skin glowing as though it were coated in a luminescent fluid. Most tellingly, though, her eyes glowed white, as would any Avatar's. Not as powerfully, not streaming out from within, but white and strong nonetheless. Pavlyuchenko stared with mouth agape.

"I... I've never _heard_ of a Justicar doing that before, and..." she said.

"I am sworn to your service, and I am prepared to leave," Samara said. "My equipment and personal effects – few they may be – will be transferred to your vessel."

"I'm... honored, I guess," Shepard said, rubbing the back of her neck. Samara gave a minute nod, and began to stride away, all heads turning to follow her when she did so. Shepard gave a glance to Pavlyuchenko. "I'm guessing this isn't something that happens every day?"

"A Justicar can swear service to somebody, and it's happened once every millennia or so, but it's _never_ been to an _alien_. Ever," she answered.

"I'm not your typical alien," Shepard said. A last look around, a breath. And a hiss, as a fresh spike of pain went through her bandaged hand. "I should go," she said, to the LC's distant, baffled nod.

Weird day, for all involved. And she had to do something about this hand.

* * *

It was a clamoring unreality that pressed against Kai Leng's skin, as he walked the baked clay path, into the Crossroads. It rose out of oblivion, a beacon of light and sound from out darkness and silence. Turian shamans and their spirit counterparts moved through the streets, each giving each other a respectful berth. And the turians and spirits weren't the only ones here. He could see the odd asari living in this unnatural place. Of course, to him, it was simply a waypoint, on the way to somewhere more important.

"Whoa there, human," a turian said, stepping in front of him from a checkpoint. A checkpoint that the assassin didn't even notice until it was right in front of him. Dark eyes winced, his face pulling in with disgust. The last thing he needed right now was to be distracted. "Can't have aliens just wandering around Plutonian without the right papers."

"Everything is in order," Kai Leng said, gesturing toward the credentials of a – now two weeks dead – shaman from Republic City. The turian way-guard shook his head, and beckoned into the building which was the first on the expanse of dirt upon which this town was built. Leng growled under his breath. He was getting careless, and getting careless was going to get him killed. Again.

He stepped into the guard post, a structure of only two rooms. The outer was all business, the place to watch the roads and make reports. The one further in was akin to a break-room. Dark eyes slowly scanned the room, as the turian began to clumsily peck at his haptic keyboard. Only one camera, in the corner. Computer terminals were very, very outdated. Likely that was the only way that they would operate here. It needed to be old enough to have a personality to work in the Spirit World. And old, meant slow. It also meant vulnerable.

"I'm going to need to verify your identity; nobody matching your description was expected in Plutonian."

"I wasn't aware that Trebia was under lockdown," Leng said, his baritone trying for conversational, but he didn't quite hit the mark. The turian flicked an eye back at him, but returned to his slow typing.

"It isn't, but we can't let any part of our immigration process be the weaker link," the guard said. A picture on the wall – printed paper, as that would pass the veil into this place where digital likely wouldn't – that showed the people working here. Leng flicked his eyes between the portrait and the guard with him. Yes, those were the workers. Amongst them, an asari. Potentially useful.

"Everything is above board. I am in something of a hurry," Leng said. Behind his back, he activated his Omni, and sent malicious code into the obsolete computer, one part to loop the video, and the next, in an hour, to erase every whisper of Leng's presence here, down to scrubbing, junk-writing, and rescrubbing the junk-data left over from it.

"Whoever you're going to see, they can wait. Everything in its time, human."

"Right," Leng said. He turned, to the table on the other side of the room. Near where the turian had been watching as Leng obliviously sauntered into his gaze. A mug, steaming hot. He drifted toward it, reaching out and dunking a finger into it. The turian turned toward him, and he snapped back to his initial posture in a flash.

"Alright, your papers seem to be in order. What is the purpose of your visit to Palaven?" he asked.

"Business," Leng said.

"And the duration of your stay?" he continued.

"Undefined," Leng said. The turian shot him a look. "Not more than three months."

"I see," he said, turning back to the console. Leng popped the finger into his mouth. Bitter and sweet. What the turians had in lieu of coffee, with sweetener. He spit into his sleeve, then pulled a packet from his belt. "And... who is fronting this?"

"Kerberos Security," Leng said, an easy lie. He palmed the packet and offered a shrug to the turian turning toward him. "There's need of an external consultant."

"Kerberos. Untrustworthy bastards the lot of them," the turian muttered. He hunched down over the screen, which gave Leng the time to pour the packet into the cup, and leave the packet in the garbage can next to the brewing machine. Several others, he set into the cup with the other packets. Human artificial sweetener was distasteful to humans, but caused progressive organ failure in turians. Nobody could know Leng was here. And nobody would be able to tie it to him.

Just an accident, the guard grabbing the wrong sweetener for his drink.

"Alright. Everything checks out," the guard said. He turned, handing back Leng's counterfeit credentials. "Cause no trouble, human."

Not so much as a 'have a nice day'. How very turian. Leng never felt regret taking a life, but in this case above others, he knew that he should feel a particular schadenfreude at how exquisitely painful this one's death would be. But instead... he was numb.

He left the post, and headed through the town. Most of the spirits had a vaguely anthropomorphic style to them; they emulated their turian masters. Talk about taking an evolutionary step in the wrong direction. The spirits looked at Leng as he passed them. He wasn't any judge of the expressions of such unusual 'lifeforms', so he didn't know that they were startled, that they felt in him passing the shadow of something horrible and great, something powerful enough to crush them into atoms. Something dangerous to them. It drove their eyes away from them, drove their feet in other directions than toward him. In that, it served him.

He would never discover why, though. That was a lesson for another woman, at another time.

He passed through the streets as tracelessly as a ghost, while behind him, a turian began to accidentally poison himself. The cracked road leading away from Plutonian didn't travel far, before the cracked clay opened up to nearly black plantlife, a reflection of Palaven beyond. A glance back. There was nothing here that would stop him. Not now.

With a half-smirk on his face, and an unrelenting ache in his lower back, he walked into the Spirit World of Palaven. He direly wished that he could feel enjoyment at the fate of that cat-bird-man, but the sensation just wasn't there.

So he started to list the names of the aliens who had to die.

* * *

Shepard had no idea how things escalated as quickly as they had. One moment, she was walking toward Liara's office in Nos Astra. The next thing she knew, she'd been pulled into a limousine by the most polite krogan that she'd ever met in her life, whisked away to another district of the city, and dumped as courteously as was possible to be dumped at the front door of an apartment suite at the top of a building that stood as an ominous nail in the Nos Astra Skyline.

"...I'd ask what just happened, but..." she shrugged to herself and reached to knock on the door. She'd almost actually done it, before she realized which hand she was using, and wisely changed to her left. It never occurred to her to use the doorbell. The thump at the door was followed by silence for a long time, as she seriously wondered if she'd just gotten kidnapped in the most polite way possible.

Lawson was going to have a field day.

She was about to back away from the door, to try to flag down either a taxi or a cop-car and get out of here, when the door opened, and a familiar freckled blue face poked out through the crack. She grinned at Shepard, and ducked back inside. "You can come right in, you know!" she called as she vanished from sight.

Shepard stared at the door. Yup. That did in fact seem like something that Liara would do, given the proper amount of money and preparation. She was just that odd.

The Avatar sighed, pushing open the door, and stepping into the foyer of Liara's apartment. It was very open, and most of the lines were curved, making the whole thing seem stereotypically asari. The master of the house was humming happily as she zipped through her kitchen and into a lower living area. Shepard looked around. The whole place was a very particular shade of green. One that Shepard knew very well.

She'd dubbed that shade 'Prothean Green'.

"I'm guessing that living in somebody's back-room no longer appeals to you, huh?" Shepard asked.

"Oh, this is just keeping a few things I cherish close-by," the asari said. She then paused, and leaned. "What happened to your hand?"

"Nothing," Shepard said. Liara gave her a look. "Heat knife," she admitted.

Liara winced. "That must have been terribly painful. Shouldn't you visit a doctor?"

"I'll be fine," Shepard said.

"You don't seem fine," she countered. She moved to Shepard, taking her other hand and pulling her down and squaring her before the couch, before giving her a gentle shove onto the furniture. "Sit."

"Liara, I don't really think there's a lot of time to..." Shepard began.

"Shepard..." Liara said, staring down at her. "You don't need to say anything. I know how difficult this must have been for you. But I want you to know that I'm here for you, if you want me to be."

"Liara..." Shepard said. "Things... I don't know."

"You seemed more distressed than I'd ever known you when you came to my office. Something is weighing on your mind. What is it?" the asari said, sitting down quite close beside her.

"I..." Shepard thought about deflecting, but... Liara was pretty much the closest person to her brain these days besides her. "...remember that message I got from the Eden Prime and Virmire Beacons?"

"The warning," she said.

"Those weren't the only things in there," she said. Liara's bright eyes grew wide. "There's... well... a Prothean VI inside my head."

"Really?" Liara asked, brightening with her hands flying to her mouth. "Can I talk to him? Does he look like a Prothean? What secrets does he hold? Does he know how to fight the Reapers or have a weapon that could destroy them? Does he know the truth about some of the more unusual things I've discerned about pre-historical..."

"Hey!" Shepard barked, cutting the asari off mid-sentence. She quite often had to, in the old days. "Calm down. The VI was made by an Avatar called Javik, one who came after Sajuuk. And he's an _asshole_."

"Can you show me?" she asked.

"I don't know if that's a good..." Shepard began, but Liara had already grabbed her face with her hands, and pulled her close. Her pupils dilated until they dominated her eyes, and a faint blue glow began to play off of her.

"Please?" she asked, so sweetly, eyes like a kitten.

"...fine," Shepard muttered. It was so hard to say 'no' to that woman.

Liara's lips drew closer to her own. "Then you know what to do; Embrace Eternity!"

There was an odd lurch in Shepard's perception, not like when the asari had dove into her mind before. Now, it was very... disconnected. Distant. She saw a scene before her, but there wasn't a 'being' portion for it. A glance down didn't show her own body. But the scene was clearly something from the mind of another.

"It is as I told you," Javik said, his lips pulled into that perpetual scowl, as four golden eyes scanned along the wilderness. It had encroached on the decapitated ruins of the buildings in what used to be a tropical city. "Why you didn't believe me, I could not say."

Shepard mentally scowled. That didn't sound like the arrogant ass who kept punting her away from the Avatar State. This one sounded... tired. Weary and used up. He turned a glance toward her, and it was not one of scorn or annoyance. Resignation, perhaps. But trying to keep a brave face.

"I don't understand. What is this place to you?" the awkward words came from somewhere to Shepard's left. The head that she viewed this world through panned aside for a moment, and took in a... a _green asari_? She was clothed in a flight-suit obviously tailored for an oravore, only with two of its arms stitched shut, and she looked around as would a prey species in hostile territory.

"Vaalé," Javik said. "Once home to the vaal. Now... only to ghosts."

There was a hiss, and a greenish, four-fingered hand pointed away from the host of Shepard's perspective, to one of the buildings nearby. In a flash, Javik had a rifle to his shoulder, staring down his weapon at... it looked like a bird-monkey, its head covered in a fluffy down and otherwise naked. It recoiled, sending out a chatter of whistles and chimes, its fairly oversized eyes wide. Then, it sprinted away through the ruins. Javik turned back to whomever Shepard was inhabiting.

"No," he said, to a question unasked. "The vaal were betrayed by the Prothean Empire. They are gone. Whatever that was, it was not one of them."

"Stop doing that. It is frightening," the green asari said, her words still stilted. Like she barely knew how to speak them. The perspective of Shepard moved toward a ruin, green hands raising up past the creeping vines and the rusted metal, to a light-switch built into a building which looked like it hadn't been lived in for centuries. The fingers recoiled a bit. Nervousness. Then, they touched the switch.

Exploding through Shepard's mind came images. Vaal, living their lives. Families, cloned from forefathers as the women had ceased to be viable so long ago. Arguments. Loves, and losses. Then, terror, confused vaal huddling in the darkness as the roof shook and grit rained down. A sound in the distance, a horn of unimaginable volume and rage.

The perspective was pulled away, and this time, Javik was right in front of her, a look of surprising concern on his usually sour face. "You should be more careful. Sometimes the past can be more painful than you could believe."

He then rose, and Shepard wondered who exactly this was, because he was a _lot_ taller than whoever this was. "What about the... the _ardat_?" the asari asked, her back hunched.

"Long gone," Javik said. "As should we be."

A snap, like somebody flicking a rubber-band the size of the Normandy into her face, and Shepard stumbled back. Liara appeared beside her, likewise stumbling. The scene had vanished entirely, replaced by a black, featureless plain. That, and a very irate looking Javik. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" the VI demanded.

"You're a Prothean?" Liara asked, so excited that she was hopping in place.

"LEAVE!" Javik roared, then slashed a hand through her. She cracked and fell away like breaking glass. Javik then rounded on Shepard. "What were you _thinking_? Letting one of those _things_ into your mind?"

"Hey!" Shepard shouted back, not backing down in the slightest. "That 'thing' is the only reason that I managed to get into contact with you in the first place. So shut your goddamned mouth and stop being such an asshole."

"You don't understand the first inkling of how much you risk allowing one of those creatures remain near you," Javik stated, an arm slashing aside, this time not cutting anything but wrath.

"It didn't seem to stop you," Shepard pointed out. Javik's brows dipped a bit.

"What are you talking about?" he demanded.

"I just saw... it looked like a memory of somebody close to you."

"There are no such memories implanted in this Virtual Intelligence," Javik said.

"Or maybe you're just not aware of them," Shepard said haughtily, arms crossed before her. Javik seethed, but didn't answer. "Why do you distrust asari so much?"

"I cannot recognize that term. A moment," Javik said. Then, after being frozen in place for several seconds, he turned to her once more, and with a look of absolute fury, answered, "...I have been programmed not to answer that question. That way lies dangerous knowledge."

"You keep saying that; why?"

"I have been programmed not to answer that question!" Javik shouted. "That way lies dangerous knowledge!"

"So you can't even explain _why_ you can't explain?" Shepard said. "What use are you?"

Javik grabbed Shepard's right hand and squeezed. She let out a hiss, and then stopped, realizing it didn't hurt. "You must be ready. When the Reapers come, you are the only chance that your cycle will have. And trusting those puppets will only serve to doom you. Go. Learn the lessons you must."

There was a fresh lurch, and this time, she was sitting alone on a couch. She blinked a few times. "...Liara?" she asked.

"Hrm?" the asari asked, with a mouthful of noodles. She was sitting at a table nearby. "Arhm! Uur awayg!"

"I'm assuming that you got kicked out first?" she asked. Liara swallowed and immediately abandoned her dinner to come to Shepard's side.

"Yes! It was extremely disorientating!" the asari said brightly. Puppet? Asari? Unlikely. Liara sat down, and accidentally turned on the vid-screen when she sat on its remote. "I didn't know that a melding could be ended unilaterally, by the species not undertaking it! Who was that Prothean?"

"The asshole in my brain," Shepard answered.

"He didn't seem as unpleasant in the memory. Why was there a green asari? Oh! By the Goddess! This proves my 'ancient interference' theory of asari social development! The asari didn't simply observe our species, but took us away from the homeworld! But why didn't we find any asari splinter-colonies after we discovered mass-effect drive and..."

"Liara, you're doing that thing again," Shepard said.

"Oh. Right. So... how was your day?" she asked.

"Bizarre," Shepard said, idly rubbing at her bandaged hand... and realizing it didn't hurt at all. She looked at it for a moment. Huh. "And you should know that."

"Right. I'm sorry. It's just that I don't have many opportunities to converse with people these days when I am not attempting to intimidate, threaten, extort, or browbeat them. I fear my social skills may have somewhat diminished in other areas."

"I don't think it's possible to go below zero in that," Shepard said, patting Liara on the cheek before she realized what she was doing. She went a bit rigid, then pulled the hand away. Yup, that just happened. Distraction. Need a distraction.

"_And in colonial news, a catastrophic refinery fire on planet Zorya had a surprisingly happy ending, with none of the workers losing their lives. Reporter Khalisah bint Sinan al'Jalani was on the scene._"

"_The landscape is one of devastation, but due to the actions of one remarkable individual, the only lives lost were those of a mercenary organization which had been using the workers as slave-labor_," the annoying reporter said, as a very familiar and very irate person was fuming in the background behind her, between her back and the facility which was still in the process of burning. "_Mister ibn-Assani, what went through your mind when you saved these workers?_"

"_Saved the workers? Are you out of your guddamned head, woman?_" Zaeed demanded, his face one of barely restrained rage. "_Th'only reason those mewlin' bastards are alive is 'cause I turned left instead 'a right!_"

"_There you have it. Reluctant heroism, but to great effect,_" the reporter said, but Zaeed barged in on her.

"_Weren't no heroism you stupid bitch_," Zaeed shouted. He then turned to the camera. "_I know y'out there Vido, and I'm still comin' for ya!_"

"_Sir, please, this is a family broadcast._"

"_Get outta my guddamned face!_" he shouted, then punched the reporter in the jaw. An instant later it cut away back to the studio based somewhere on Illium.

"_Human behavior in a nutshell,_" the anchor said. "_We're sure to find more on the situation as it develops..._"

"Good gods, I'm glad I didn't hire that guy," Shepard said with a laugh.

"He does seem like he has something of an anger management problem," Liara agreed.

"Liara... about what happened..."

"Oh!" she brightened up. "I just remembered! When I told mister Adeks about your resurrection, he asked me to give you this!"

She handed him a small card with a string of numbers on the front of it. "Okay. What is it?"

"A safety deposit box on the Citadel, at the First Bank of Irune," she said. "He was adamant that you get it. Something about 'fifty-thousand years in the making'.

"_What_?" Shepard said, her eyes going wide.

"I couldn't understand it, myself, but..."

Shepard cut her off by grabbing the sides of her face and kissing the hell out of her. "HE MADE THE GUN! THE CAIN WORKS!" Shepard said, her excitement boiling over. She looked down at the card. "Yeah. I _really_ should go."

"Yes. Right. And... What was I saying?" the flummoxed asari said, as Shepard made a beeline out of the apartment.

* * *

Anette watched as that impossible human joked and laughed with the kid with the half-burned-off face, and every whit of her being fought the urge to shudder. He should be dead. There was no doubt in her mind about that fact. The man, he _should_ be dead. Nothing survived after what she... after something like that happened to them. She held in her discomfort, though. Because there was something that needed to be said.

"Sergeant Vega?" Anette asked. He looked up from Fung, a half-smirk on his face under empty, empty eyes. "I think I know where the aliens went."

"Really?" he asked. He turned to his subordinate. "See? Told you Jimo was a smart cookie."

"A... what?" she asked. Then, she shook her head, running her hand along her scalp to steady herself. It'd been two centuries and more. Get over it.

Heh.

Get over murdering the love of your life, in the worst way possible. By accident.

"Look," she cut off that train of thought before it really started to eat at her – perhaps too late – and she cast a finger aside, to the refueling station which had been blown to pieces. But notably, that it lacked a lot of scrap that ought be there. "Treela brought in a lot of digging equipment in her hare-brained Prothean Dig at that site about five hundred kilometers from here. If those things took it – and they have – then they must need it for what they're looking for. You said they had Thunderw... earthbenders, right?" Vega nodded.

"Yeah, and just about every damned thing else. Man, it was like fighting the damned _Avatar_ up in there!" he said, as he started to wind a bandage up and over the now useless eye on the private.

"And can you 'earthbend' Prothean ruins?" she asked, knowing the answer.

Vega stared at her for a long moment. Utterly still. Like a statue.

"Vega?"

"What?" he asked, shaking it off. "Right. Naw, you can't, so..."

"So we know where they're going, what they're going to do, and who they need alive."

"Who's this Treela chick, anyway?"

"Archeologist," she shook her head. Mostly so she wouldn't have to look him in the eye. "Trying to breach into some mythical trove of information. I've seen that site. Nothing but Prothean Concrete and standing water."

"That's probably a lot drier than here," Vega muttered to himself. "They could land that frigate just about anywhere on that terrain," he then looked up. Ordinarily, there would have been a spark in his eye as he realized something. Instead... "Oh hell, they've got the colony with 'em!"

"There's no way," Fung said. "Why would they – ow! Careful! – bring everybody with them?"

"I couldn't tell ya, only that they look like they did," he said. He finished the winding, now not pulling it tight across raw flesh, and glued the end in place. There was a resolute look on his face, as he got to his feet, fists clenching and flaring as though he was trying to make the earth listen to him by sheer willpower, and annoyed that it wouldn't. "The only way we're gonna get Captain Toni and the others back is if we go out there and take 'em."

"That's suicide!" Anette said. "Every time anybody has faced them since they landed on Fehl Prime, you either ran, or you died."

"That's why they won't expect to be attacked," Vega said, once more smirking.

"Because they would never expect their enemy to do something that stupid," Anette pointed out.

"It's only stupid if it don't work," Vega pointed out.

Anette facepalmed.

"Hey, if we stick around and wait for help, it _ain't gonna come_," Vega continued. "The only chance we've got is to knock those sons-of-bitches down long enough to FTLC for some help or rescue or somethin'. Risky as shit? Probably. The best of all possible options? You bet your blue ass."

She sighed, then nodded. He had a point. "Fine. We'll need a vehicle. And I don't see any that aren't piles of twisted metal..."

"What about that one?" Vega pointed past her. She turned, and couldn't see what he was talking about. "The Tomkah."

Anette blinked a few times, then finally realized that he was pointing out the crane. "Really?"

"Yeah, drop all that lifting shit and it'll run for days. That's krogan workmanship, baby."

"Don't call me baby," Anette said testily. Vega laughed outright at that. It was disorienting, seeing something so... alive, come from somebody who should be so dead. "Fine. I'll unhook the crane. That isn't going to be a short ride; that thing can't go much faster than ninety km/h."

"Doesn't matter much when you can drive straight there, hills, mountains and forests be damned," he said, and he began to pull Fung, who was now bandaged such that it looked like he only had half a head, toward the oversized piece of industrial equipment. Anette shook her head. As she did so, she spotted something else that had been on her mind, of late. Zek dropped some more packaged food in a pile outside the barracks that he'd been living in. Probably because that was some of the only Dextro-food available. Her jaw set, and she moved toward him, crossing the vacant space of the dead spaceport.

She reached him just as he leaned out the door again, dropping floppy packs of pressed proteins onto several dozen other of their brothers. She immediately grabbed his arm just under the shoulder and hauled him back inside. He gave a 'gack' of surprise, but didn't say anything when she spun him loose, and planted herself before the door. Her eyes locked onto the luminescent orbs that were almost plainly visible through a golden faceplate. "I know what you are," she said.

"...confused?" he asked.

"You took your faceplate off. You had a rupture in your suit that got dirt ground into it, and you fixed it with duct-tape. And you haven't shown so much as a sniffle in all the time since."

"...I'm just a bit more resilient than most, I guess," he said, his shoulders drawing in.

"That's a lie, and you know it."

"Well... I'm not the only one hiding something!" Zek pointed out, thrusting a finger toward her. "You know more about what happened to mister Vega than you're letting on!"

Anette stared at the quarian, who finally had a bit of backbone to him.

"Fine," she said. "There'll be plenty of time to explain – for both of us – on the drive to the dig-site."

"...yeah," he said, tone descending. Then, a few more flickers, as though he were talking to somebody else. "I..."

"And you're going to tell me who you're talking to, all the time, as well," she added.

"I'm not..." she stared at him. "...fine."

Well, _this_ was going to be an uncomfortable drive.

* * *

"Is there anything else that you'll need on the Normandy?" Lawson asked, a pad in hand. The Justicar, who was kneeling lotus on a bench on the stretch of walkway leading toward the docks, gave a look that was half-way between imperious and thoughtful.

"Only a room that gives me a view of the everlasting void. I find it most conducive to my meditations."

"The Starboard Observation deck should be sufficient," Lawson said. It was difficult not to probe at her raw and angry skin. The others had already returned to the ship, but not her. Until Shepard got back, she was manning the docks; if nothing else, somebody had to make sure that she didn't fall back in drunk off of her seat.

That was an everlasting concern for her.

"Ladies?" Shepard's voice cut into Lawson's mulling, as she damned near ran toward them. She had a grin on her face. That made Lawson more than a little concerned. "Come on, we've gotta go!"

"Shepard? What is it?"

"Delivery on the Citadel," she said, waving a card. "Come on. No reason to sit around."

"As the Avatar demands," the Justicar said coolly. She rose, and fell in beside Shepard, as she moved into the docks area.

"What happened to you?" Lawson asked. "You went off the DRADIS for more than an hour..."

"Liara wanted to catch up. Also, Javik might not be as much of a jackass as I thought. It's very confusing," Shepard said. No kidding.

"Well, whatever has you so excited, you have to remember that we still have to pick up Okeer, and then we..." Miranda began, but she trailed off, when a blue glowing volus stumbled out in front of them. The numbus of biotic might wreathed him, and as his stumpy limbs moved, the machinery of the docks gave ominous creaks and squeals, as though they were being torn in their moorings.

"I am a biotic god!" the volus declared. "I think things, and they _happen_!"

Shepard and Lawson shared a look. The Justicar simply watched, impassive, as all the dock workers backed away very carefully.

"Fear me, lesser creatures, for I am biotics made flesh!" the volus continued. To his credit, a shipping container that had to weigh a few dozen tonnes was now starting to drift in a lazy orbit around him. "You stand before the mightiest biotic EVER!" his fist, raised in pride. "Yes, the asari injecting all the drugs into me was terrifying, but then, I began to _smell_ my greatness!"

Shepard almost started laughing. Which was absurd, because a drunken volus with this much biotic strength was not something to be trifled with.

"They may laugh, when I fall over, but they don't know what I know in my head – that I know that I am amazingly powerful! FEAR ME!" he declared. "I will wreak a just revenge upon my mistress' enemy! The hated woman in red armor! I will cast her around as a rag-doll! I will tear her apart! I am unstoppable!"

Despite her expression not altering in the slightest, the Justicar now pulsed with biotic energy on her own. Lawson was mildly surprised when Shepard stretched a warding hand across the Justicar, preventing her obvious preemptive strike.

"Feasting on her biotic rich blood will be my last step into godhood!" the volus said, trundling close enough that it could almost touch Shepard's pants. "I will be a great wind that will howl across the galaxy as a... a great wind! A great biotic wind!"

Shepard ever so gently reached out, placing two fingertips against his face. Then, the tiniest of shoves, and he flopped onto his back.

"But... biotic god! Great wind..." the volus said. "I'm... what was I saying?"

"Sleep it off, buddy, you'll feel better," Shepard said, still chuckling under her breath.

"You may be right. Yes. Tired. Destroy universe later..." the volus said, falling asleep where he lay. Only then did the glowing around the Justicar cease; she was no longer under attack, even as hopeless a one as this had been.

At that, Lawson finally allowed herself a chuckle. "So much for godhood."

* * *

Codex Entry (Technology): JUMPDRIVE FTL

_While Mass-Effect FTL remains ubiquitous across known space, other, less successful forms of faster-than-light travel have appeared throughout galactic history. Most efforts were offshoots from other technologies left behind by the vanished Prothean Race, but the quarians of Rannoch lacked that stepping stone. No Prothean ruins exist anywhere in the Tikkun system, and the nearest Mass Relay was at the other side of the star-cluster; by all indicators, the quarian people ought have never entered the galactic community. They did so, by using a technology unlike common FTL engines: The 'Jumpdrive'._

_Jumpdrive operates on a principle of folding space by conducting a massive electrical charge between two points and using the forces as a bridge to drag a mass through the aperture which exists only on the femptosecond scale. The ships required are both massive, and fragile; any damage to the superconducting rod, which in all cases was a minimum of two kilometers long, would result in the ship's destruction when it attempted a 'jump'. As well, while the amount of space traversed was traversed instantaneously, the drive-core was prone to strain and any attempt to recharge it quickly were catastrophic._

_The Quarian Nation had twenty 'Jumpships' in service before discovering the Mass Relay in Outer Valhalla. In that time, they suffered nine accidents with all hands lost; upon discovery of the Mass Relays, entrance into the galactic community, and access to Mass Effect based FTL, all development on Jumpdrive technology went to an absolute halt._

_While the Jumpdrive remains as a technological novelty, it is in every practical way inferior to ME drives. It is vastly more prone to accidents, and any accident tended to be a fatal one. While it could traverse as much as forty light-years to a 'jump', due to the design of the core, it could only make one such jump every six to ten days. Any more frequently, and the craft would 'misjump'. The amount of materials was also prohibitive. Were the quarians able to immediately use ME drives, they would likely have had a fleet rivalling the Salarian Unions by the time they entered the galactic stage. Tied to this difficulty was the monumental cost of creation. The last Jumpcraft created cost more than the construction and first year of operation of the Destiny Ascension._

_The absolute death-knell of the Jumpdrive FTL device was that it was incredibly difficult to pilot. Any attempt to pilot within the gravity well of a star ended in misjump, so the jumps had to be plotted at the zenith or nadir of the target star; even then, the Jumpship would be at least a dozen AU from the habitable planet ring. With so many drawbacks, and no advantages over Mass Effect FTL other than never having to dispel electrical charge buildup, the Jumpdrive was never popular, even amongst the species which developed it._

_Several of the remaining craft found their way into private hands, and are preserved as a curiosity of technological development. The work of Toma'Kaern and Taka'Fusida barely outlasted their lifetimes. Attempts to continue development and research into the use of this technology have never gained traction, with potential backers refusing to sink funds and time refining a technology which already has a cheaper, faster, safer alternative._


End file.
